YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Tabarrok

lines on the record: 61
first: 2020-10-19
most recent: 2020-10-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Company. That's complementary to technology, right? So you want to take technology and find a way of putting it in human hands, which creates a delightful, satisfying experience, right? That's very airy fairy. And yet that's an incredibly valuable skill. So it's not just hard science, but if you have an artistic impulse, then I would say that's fine. That's also going to be valuable if you could combine it with a technological field, right? So in artistic impulse in design. That is going to take you much, much further than in just poetry, let's say. So you want to combine these things.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is going to be an incredibly beneficial skill because we're getting a lot more of it, right? And extracting meaning from data is very difficult. And making it accessible to human beings. So if you have some skills which come out of economics, causal inference, but also out of data science, machine learning, and so forth, if you have some skills to extract information from data, that's going to be very valuable in the world going forward. So these are the areas where I have some sort of expertise in. It's not all that. Marketing is going to continue to be important, oddly enough, right? You would think that that's going to go, no, that's marketing, things like that is going to be important. Design, right? So what is Apple? Apple is just a great design company, right? Just an absolutely fabulous design.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, the return of the skill is going up, so education continues to be extremely important. Get an education in a sector which is complementary to technology. So you don't want to be competing against technology. You want to be racing with the machine to use Eric Brindoffelson's and McAfee's term. You'll be racing with the machine. So if you can get educated in a sector like electrical engineering, computer science or economics as well, but in a”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I have a generic 20 year old. I got two of them. So Look, the world is changing faster. So probably my advice is becoming, you know, the advice of older people is becoming less useful over time. Don't play those video games and now like video games, you know, you can be, you know, you can earn a lot of money playing video games. So I guess I got that one wrong. I should have told my kids, you know, learn how to play this video game and be a sports star, be an esports star.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little bit about earlier that it does seem there were a bunch of low-hanging fruit and we are having to devote more and more resources to get the same output. Now whether that's a fundamental technological factor, whether it's a regulatory factor, whether that's a temporary factor in response to these quantum leaps and technology, like we got electricity, we got the internal combustion engine and it takes 50 years to kind of grind everything out we can out of them. Now we've got computers that'll take some time to do that. Maybe biology is the next one or as I said quantum computers. I don't know what it's going to be but there may be a next technology where again that gives us kind of a leap Who knows what I can say is that the globalization has been good for research and development we would be much worse off if we didn't have that”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Yeah. So all of these trends should be very, very positive, right? Because the way I like to put it is that as China becomes richer, they're all going to be looking for a cure for cancer too, right? Okay. This is a problem which affects everybody. And so you have a much larger market, a much bigger R&D market. And you already see in China leading technologies at 10 cent and so forth, Baidu and things like that. So they're already investing a lot in these technologies, which are public goods, artificial intelligence is another one. So I think we have a lot to gain by this increased budget devoted to R&D. What I didn't realize, I suppose, is that there is this countervailing wind, which we now know from the bloom and Van Rien work.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“igniting the passions of a nation towards innovation and away from complacency, competition in the sense of the Olympics, good kind of competition if we can keep it, if we can keep it to that kind of competition and not to blowing each other up, that kind of competition, I think, would do a lot of good in reigniting America to become kind of the leading nation of the world, not just in terms of innovation, but also in terms of freedom and liberty and racial and sexual equality, all of these things which in many respects, not all by any means, but in many respects we have led in the past and to kind of reignite that, you know, to say like, bring all people from Hong Kong, let's bring them to the United States, let's bring the Uyghurs to the United States, okay? Let us be that shiny.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, start marching out of their factories. Hopefully that will kick us into gear and we'll say, okay, we've got to respond. So, you know, I'm not one, I'm much more about cooperation than I am about international competition. I don't think we're at war literally with other countries. I think our interests actually align. But in terms of”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Welfare state, okay? We do two things. We invest a lot in the military and we invest a lot in various forms of welfare by which I'm including Medicare and Medicaid and redistribution and whatever. And I'm not even going to say it's bad or whatever. But what I would like to see us be is an innovation state. And as the warfare and the welfare state have grown as a share of the budget, the innovation state has shrunk. So we're investing much less in research and development, federal dollars, in research and development than we used to. And I would like to see it's a shift us away from warfare and welfare and towards innovation. And when we see China start to kick our butts where China's developing new pharmaceuticals, China's developing more artificial intelligence, China's developing genetic engineering, like what are we going to do when the first Chinese with super IQs of 160 plus”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't have a solution, but one thing which I think is going to be helpful is actually competition with other countries, such as China and India. What really made us, why did we go to the moon? We went to the moon because we were competing with the Soviet Union, because they kicked our butts by putting somebody into space and made us look like fools, made us look like technological laggards. So we got our act together and we devoted a huge amount of money to innovation, right, to NASA, a huge amount of the budget, like 12% at the height, 12% of the US budget was going to NASA, which you can complain about whatever, okay, but it was going to innovation. So one of the things that I've said, you know, in my book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance, is what we have today is a warfare well.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obama came into power and that all went away, and the war kept going, right? So, you know, we're still in Afghanistan. We're still in Iraq, still bombing countries around the world. So the Obama did not solve the problem, but”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By far the largest economy, highest per capita incomes and so forth, to think that we might lose a war. It just never would never have occurred to me. But now I just think things are so dysfunctional that anything is possible. And it's, well, I am worried. Yeah, I'm worried. And it's not just about the pandemic, but I think that is just the canary in the coal mine, which tells us that this government is not working and it's not all going to be the danger is that with a Biden administration, you know, the liberals will be so happy that all thought of fundamental change will end, which is what happened, for example, under Obama. Under Bush, there was a big anti-war effort, right? Okay, big anti-war protests and movement.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a complacent attitude, which given that some of them are getting the virus, I completely fail to understand. Like Boris Johnson, he actually got the damn thing. You think he would want to solve this problem? And so it seems that not only are we not getting the government that we paid for, right, we're getting less. I at least want to get something for what I pay for it, a pandemic assistance or pandemic responding to a pandemic, responding to a war, they're high on my list. Like I'm worried now, like the way I would never was before that, you know, we would lose a war with China or something like that, okay? You know, that never even occurred to me that the United States, you know, the greatest military superpower in the history of the entire world, right?”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The government might have been smaller, but it was able to do things, sometimes bad things for sure, but the way we ramped up for World War II is a remark, was a remarkable achievement. And it just seems that, and it's not all Trump's fault, okay? Trump is terrible, whatever, you know, you blame him as much as you want, okay, but you cannot blame the failures of the CDC and the FDA all at Trump's doorstep. You know, Congress is completely failed as well, right? Congress is the one supposed to be passing the law. Where's Congress's testing plan? Where is Congress's vaccine plan? Why is it that the only good thing that has come out of the administration on the pandemic is Operation Warp Speed? Why didn't Congress do that? That's actually Congress's job. So Congress has completely failed as well. And there's a lackadaisical attitude.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well Look, this is part of what Tyler called state capacity libertarianism. And what is that? This is something that I've written about, I didn't use that term, but I've talked a lot about, is look, I want a small government, but I want a government to be able to do what it's supposed to do at the time it's supposed to do it. And even I was shocked, like the CDC, their entire reason to Ethra, right? Their entire reason for existing is to stop a pandemic. And yet, they completely failed. They botched the first test, okay? And then the FDA came in and said, oh, private companies, you cannot use your testing. You have to apply to us to do, you know, to get approval from us to do your test. And that slowed everything down at the beginning of the pandemic until the virus got ahead of us, right? And it just seems like, you know, in the past.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, absolutely. I mean, and, you know, Romer has been pounding on testing right from the beginning, and he's been absolutely right. Yeah, I've been incredibly frustrated talking with people in Congress and they're just, and they're always like, well, nothing's going to happen in this bill, but maybe in the next bill, I don't understand it. It does seem that... It does seem something is wrong, to be frank. It seems that something is wrong. And we haven't solved that problem, but I hate to end on a negative note. But there's something wrong.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The skills which we are taught as a profession are widely applicable to a large range of fields. They're very general and widely applicable to a large range of fields. And we do have credibility in policy and with the administration. So while I don't feel that I'm super listened to or whatever, but I found myself talking with people at the White House and the Council Economic Advisors, me and Michael Kramer. So I don't know Operation Warf speed. I don't know how much they listened, but maybe it's in part being in Washington, I feel I'm certainly not, you know, at the heart of things, but you do feel in Washington that you're sort of close to the Pedestals of power in some ways. You know, Coast said that. That an economist could earn his entire lifetime wages just by stopping one bad idea.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's frustrating at times for sure. Like I just said, the world does not cut up with Adam Smith, let alone with dominant insurance contracts. I do think that in economics, we are very fortunate that”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wealth of nations has been around for a while. It was pretty bestseller in its time. So I think we have a while to catch up with Adam Smith. Indeed, the world would do itself a favor by learning it's Adam Smith, which it still hasn't done. So Adam Smith still has some lessons to teach. So we're catching up, but we're not there yet.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adam Smith okay we're behind we're behind Marshall okay we're behind mill and we're catching up to Manku okay so I think we might overtake Manku which would make me very very happy So, and that's like possible. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but that's like a conceivable dream that Tyler and I could teach more people economics than anybody else in the history of the entire world. That is actually possible. I don't know what's going to, I'm not saying it's going to happen, but we're climbing the ranks.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's pretty amazing when I get emails from students like around the world, from India and Pakistan and South Korea and so forth. And they say, you know, thank you, Professor. I was able to pass my class because of you. And of course, I don't know who these people are, right? But so it's amazing that I have students that I've never met. I never probably never will meet. Sometimes when I do travel, I get to meet some of these students, which is great, right? So this idea that a teacher can teach thousands and hundreds of thousands of students, millions of students is pretty remarkable. And I'll tell you kind of a secret. Tyler, that, you know, between Tyler and I, our goal is to teach more people economics than anyone has ever taught in the entire history of the world. So we are right now, we're behind.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. I wouldn't quite put it up there with monarchy or democracy. But it's a mechanism. It's a mechanism. I'm not sure I can run the whole government with dominant insurance contracts. So I'm going to give Robin his kudos for creating the fifth governance system. It's pretty amazing.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a huge promoter of Futarky to run experiments with it. I would love to see many more experiments with Futarchy, with dominant assurance contracts, with kind of some of Glenn Wild's radical exchange ideas. I want to see a lot more experimentation in these big ideas than we've had in the past. And online world's maybe one way of doing that.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. So, you know, Robin's ideas are remarkable. I often tell my students, look, in the whole history of the world, okay, you can kind of say there's really only been like maybe four types of government. There's the monarch, the dictator, there's rule by the aristocrats, oligarchy, right? And democracy. So there was Aristotle understood all three of those. Then you had like maybe kind of some Rothbardian anarchism, okay, Rothbardian and David Friedman style anarchism. So that maybe made four kind of governance systems. And then Robin has a new one, which is incredibly rare, right? So that makes five, which is Futarky. It's an entirely original idea for governance by futurist markets. And he's created a lot of... Powerful arguments in favor of it. So I am hugely”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, after World War II. World War II, I think there was like eight democracies in the world at the end of the end of the war. And now we have hundreds. So we've got many experiments in democracy. Some of them have worked well. Some of them haven't. But now with online worlds, we can have thousands of experiments with new types of governance mechanisms.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ethereum has got its mechanism. And so we're doing much more experimentation in how to organize collectively. This is Glenn Wallen, his radical exchange project. So the collective organization is an unsolved problem, right? How do we act collectively to solve public good problems without becoming dictatorial, without becoming without falling under rent-seeking, you know, without falling under all of the problems of collective action, right? If we can crack that nut, that's a huge thing. And the plethora of online worlds and experiments is, I think, one way which we're going to do this. And it hasn't been done. The last time we did this was transitioning to democracy.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's different ways of shaping different mechanisms. And particularly as we go online and as we live online much more, I think many more of these mechanisms are going to become viable. And the nice thing about online is that it satisfies the taboo conditions. Taboo conditions are local public goods. You can move from world to world to world to world very easily at low cost online. So it's much less costly to set up a new type of government. You know, every new blockchain project has got its own governance system. Most of them are terrible. Most of them are going to fail. But when before in human history have we had as many experiments with governance mechanisms as we are today, it's really quite extraordinary, like Tezos has got its mechanism, you know.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess we'll see. Try to get the paper. You never know until the paper gets out into the world, right? So hopefully, I do think that you know democracy itself is a is a mechanism it is a it's a it's a mechanism to both collect and aggregate preferences and to kind of exclude dictatorial to improve governments it's a governance mechanism right and we've now had 200 250 years of experience and we know it works well in some cases and less well in other cases it's not a great preference aggregation mechanism it is actually a pretty good way of limiting government there are things which democratic governments don't do democratic governments do not starve their own citizens that's a very low bar but it's a low bar which many governments fail to meet right so democracy has a lot of benefits but it's not the end of the story either there are different types of democracy”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sounds contradictory, but designing a market to produce public goods could change everything. And I think that would be a very kind of a progressive way of thinking about things. Instead of saying the government's doing it wrong all the time, let's create an alternative institution which can do things better.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, I think that's a very progressive way of thinking about it, right? Is that I've actually said that it could very well be the case that we need many more public goods, especially local public goods, and a dominant insurance contract is a way of bringing this out, of showing that this is true. So if we can allow, if we can create a regime under which not just dominant insurance contracts, but Glenn Weil and Vitalik Butterin and a co-author, Zoe, I believe, you know, they have other schemes as well, right? So there are these mechanisms, some of which use the blockchains and which work online, some of which don't work online to produce public goods. And creating a market mechanism”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One problem at a time, my friend. So, yeah, I mean, that's going to happen whether it's a public good or not, right? So, you know, you're absolutely right that there is a tendency for these big dig projects to inflate in scale. And there's a problem, especially in the United States with why subways and construction and tunnels, why they're so expensive here compared to the rest of the world, right? And part of that problem is unions. But there's a variety of reasons for that. Unions of legalism. And we've historical committees and we've, you know, we've just put on so many requirements to build that has just become really, really difficult and expensive. So dominant insurance contract does not solve all problems.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. Correct. So most projects on Kickstarter fail. We think some of them should fail. Some of them are just bad projects. But we think some of them fail because the assurance contract doesn't solve all of these problems. But the dominant insurance contract, it would allow more good projects to succeed. That is, you have some project where the benefits are bigger than the costs. A dominant assurance contract will help you to get those good projects, will help those projects be successful.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is able to double the number of projects which are successful. So if you could put this on Kickstarter, you could probably double the number of successful projects. So it does actually work.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you benefit either way, right? And so this means it just doesn't solve all public good problems because it solves it for kind of a public good where you know the right size. So if you want to build a bridge, it's usually not too hard to figure out should be a two-lane bridge or a four-lane bridge. Or a lighthouse. You just have to figure out how much is it going to cost for the right size lighthouse. It solves the contribution problem. There are other public goods where you're not quite sure how much of it should you actually produce like defense, like should it be $100 billion, $200 billion, $500 billion? How much do people actually want? This does not solve that, but it does solve the contribution problem. And what some colleagues and I, Tim Kaysen and Robert Zubricus, what we've actually shown is this works in the lab. So we've run experiments and the dominant insurance contract”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“contribute towards the public good okay that's an assurance contract here's the dominant insurance contract it adds just one simple twist it says If you don't reach the threshold, Then everybody who agreed to pay gets a refund bonus. So therefore, think about it, you're thinking about whether should I contribute to this project or not? Well, there's really only two cases you need to consider. One is if the project is successful, then I get the benefit of the public good. There's some benefit there. So that's a positive good to me. If the project is not successful, if not enough other people contribute, okay, then I want to contribute because I'll get the refund bonus and I won't have to do anything. So either way, you're actually better off contributing the non-contributing. So what this means is that it turns an assurance contract into a dominant insurance contract, which means that it's now a dominant strategy in some circumstances to contribute to the public good.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a Good Witch benefits everybody, non rival, non-excludable. And it looked like this was impossible to solve. Now, I solved part of it with this dominant insurance contract, which is easier to explain today than when I wrote the paper because before I wrote the paper before Kickstarter. So Kickstarter is now something almost quite similar, not quite the same, but similar. So in Kickstarter, you contribute towards the public good and you only pay if enough other people contribute that you reach the threshold, right? You get over the line and then you have to pay. So Kickstarter solves one problem in that you're not worried that the other people, you know, just won't show up and then you're funds will be wasted. Your funds are never wasted. Your funds only are taken from you if enough people show up.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So So dominance, it's kind of interesting. This maybe is my most important paper, but it's kind of overlooked, except recently it's grown a little bit, but this solves the public good problem. That's a little bit of an exaggeration. But Paul Samuelson said this problem was impossible to solve, and for a long time it looked like you couldn't solve this public good problem. And the public good problem, right, is that”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And it's disturbing because, right, because you would have predicted. That with many more researchers, research is a public good, you know, ideas are free, they flow everywhere, that you would have had much, much more advance. And it just seems that we've only barely been able to keep pace, if that. I am optimistic sort of, you know, that with China and India becoming richer, that you get a lot more scientists and engineers in the world as a whole. And that'll give us a boost. But so far, you know, it's not. It's not the huge game that one would have hoped for”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. It's very worrying. So kind of one hopes that maybe we will see kind of some quantum leap in some technology. You know, you kind of get a quantum leap right and then you get diminishing returns and then you get another quantum leap. So I'm hopeful that maybe it's quantum computers. I don't know, quantum leap. But hopefully we'll see some sector will explode. Otherwise, those facts, which you just mentioned, are kind of really disturbing.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to focus on the FDA and the FDA kind of slows things down. But even putting aside that, the amount of research and development budget which goes into creating a new pharmaceutical is much higher today than in the past. And it's not just a regulation effect. You also have just many more scientists, it seems, to get the same life expectancy increase from a pharmaceutical than you did in the past. It was more low hanging fruit in the past.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is very worrying is that we seem to be needing a lot more input per unit of output even in the progressive sectors. Like I mentioned, computers are becoming much more faster and so forth. But if you look at the number of researchers in the computer sector, like, yeah, yeah, kind of guys figuring out, I'm not talking about computer scientists, the guys who are working on the chips, right? The electrical engineers, I suppose. You need many more electrical engineers to get the same growth rate today than you did in the past. And the same thing, you know, I work a lot on pharmaceuticals.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you're absolutely right. And if you were dealing with kind of a fixed set of students, I think that would happen. But we are, as I mentioned, many, many more people are going to college than ever did before. And that just means that the standards are going down and the students, I mean, frankly, the students just need a lot more hand holding today than they did in the past because in the past, I mean, you just had the elite, which was going to college, right? And these people could kind of take care of themselves. They came from wealthy families and could kind of take care of themselves. And now we're just having many a much wider variety of students are coming to college. And they do need a lot more input. Now, There is another factor, which is tied with great stagnation.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so then why would you be consuming more when the price is going up? You need like two theories to explain this. One theory to explain why the price is going up and then you need like another theory, well, we're becoming more credentialed or whatever to explain why people are consuming more of this good. In Baumel, You're pushing out the production possibility frontier as it is becoming a more curved at the same time. So the price is going up, but you're also becoming richer. So Bommel explains both of these things very, very nicely. It's not contradictory at all in Baumel's theory that you would spend more in a good even as the price is going up. Because the reason the price is going up is in part because we're becoming more generally richer over time.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're never going to. So there are two effects going on at the same time, which Baumel nicely has both of them. And that is, you know, why is the stagnant sector becoming a higher price? Well, it's becoming a higher price because the progressive sector is growing more productive. But that means you're also getting richer. So there's a substitution effect and there's an income effect. So that's an interesting thing about education and healthcare. is that even as the price has gone up, we're spending more on these goods, right? And that's really bizarre from just about the perspective of just about any other theory. Because if you think that the problem is a lack of negative productivity or regulation or something like that, right, well, then if education is becoming more expensive because of costs are going up, well, then you want to consume less.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oops, the model will be kind of you teach online, right? And then you show up at different places around the world for guest appearances. So I've been to India a couple of times. I go and I teach there. And the old students all know me, right? It's just kind of weird. Oh, Professor Tavrak, you know, they're already familiar with me. They know how he teaches and so forth. And then I just show up in the class so I can kind of see a model like Paul Erdos, you know, the famous mathematician who would just go around the world and co-author with different mathematicians. Never had a fixed address. I can see some teachers doing that, just kind of going around the world. And they teach a few days in South Korea and a few days in India. And kind of it builds up this community. Most of the teaching is”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's kind of how A little bit already, yeah, but even more so, right? Like you're absolutely, we have it already where Michael Sandell teaches 400 students or whatever in his philosophy class and has a bunch of TAs, but you multiply that by a factor of 10 or a factor by 100. And so I think the model will, which have already started, Tyler and I have already kind of started this, but”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possibly the tutoring will be spread out because it'll be much more hierarchical actually. So one guy at the top will have this kind of hierarchy of TAs and things like that.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that is a large part of education, I think, is going to be more like sports people, people in sports, they all have coaches. So why shouldn't you and I have coaches? So I think there will be a industry for life coaches, somebody to encourage you, somebody to try and map out your skills kind of like what the high school advisors are supposed to do. You're this sort of person. You should go to this. There'd be a lot more of that. So education will be debundled, right? The kind of traditional lecture part of it, Sage on the stage or all that, that transmission of information, that part will go online and a much smaller number of teachers will teach many more people. But the coaching part of it, the”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Some of that will happen. So I think, you know, what is the real not to crack? A lot of it, right, is I'm going to sound contradictory because I'm going to say psychology. Not that you need a degree in psychology, but people are going to need coaches, right? So life coaches, which people laugh at because only the rich and famous have a life coach or whatever, right?”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a trailblazer or a warning sign, depending on your point of view, but Georgia Tech has taken a master's degree in computer science and successively brought it online to the entire world. And that is a mark for the future.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source