Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Mike Munger, Chairman of Political Science and Professor

of Economics at Duke University and longtime Econ Talk guest and Econ Live contributor. Mike,

welcome back. It's a pleasure to be here. Our topic today is middleman, although that term, of course,

I suppose is out of fashion. I guess it's middle people, but I think for technical reasons, we

should probably refer to them as middlemen, regardless of sex. Is that your preference as well?

Let's just let's adopt the convention that it is for these brief purposes, gender neutral. Tell us

about middlemen. They don't have a very good historical reputation. I think most people see

middlemen as making money and providing nothing. Yeah, I wanted to try to define it first, and I think

middleman is someone who buys cheap and self-deer without improving the product.

Which sounds socially reprehensible. Just nothing of value there, and all this person does is

skim off a bit for him or herself. In fact, eliminate the middleman has become

watchward of that that's that their trade coffee, all sorts of social movements are based on,

let's eliminate the middleman. With the idea being that if they're making some money, if we can

get rid of that person, obviously it'll be cheaper and will all be better off. It's entirely empty

what they do after all, because they buy cheap and self-deer without improving the product. Now most

people would also say that middlemen transport maybe repackage. There's some things that they do,

so possibly there's some kind of profit that they've earned, but it's always far less than what

they actually get, and so we hate them. We hate them all. And yet.

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