Hello and welcome to Brokonomics and in this episode we're going to be looking at the economics of the empire and I'm very lucky to be joined by a scholar

Nema Parvini. Hello Dan, thank you very much for having me.

No, thank you for coming in.

Should we start with a little bit about your journey?

How did you come to be where you are today and you're thinking out on economics how has that evolved over time?

Right so well I should say I've just written this this book The Profits of Doom but buy it now and the the book I wrote before that which is at then of which this

is equal to it's called the populist delusion. The populist delusion.

But the book I wrote before that was called The Defenders of Liberty,

which was essentially a defense of classical liberalism

from a free market point of view.

And for that book I had all sorts of funding from

FA High-X scholarship and the Meezes Institute and I had quite a lot of help from the kind of libertarian world.

You would have described yourself as a libertarian or Austrian economist.

Yeah, but I mean back this was I mean I wrote that book came out in 2020 but I wrote it back in 2018 and at that time I was you know quite

free market in my thinking the thing not really and in that book if you see there's a there's a chapter on the Machiavellians and James Burnham, there's a chapter on Machiavelli as the start of liberalism, which is not where most people start

liberalism with John Locke and Thomas Hobbs.

Yes, those guys normally get pulled more into the elite theory and the rule of power.

Exactly, but I was trying to make an argument in that book that actually Macievelli was thinking in quite a modern way, but he was thinking in

he would he'd already made a break with the way that kind of a medieval scholastic would be thinking or something like that.

He was much more realist and he was thinking on the level of individual incentives.

But if you think like Machiavelli would say, well, you know, the first, if you're a king,

the foot and you've got the two guards on the door, you to think about well have you paid them enough

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