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Benjamin Friedman

lines on the record: 76
first: 2021-01-27
most recent: 2021-01-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A laborer economist any more than in this new book I've reinvented myself as a theologian. I didn't, or in the previous one, I didn't reinvent myself as a social historian. I'm going to learn a lot about things like that. But I think I would like to see if I can say something about how we can handle the challenges to our society, to our politics, to our way of moral thinking that I think are going to come from automation and AI. It's a tough challenge. I've started, but I haven't made much progress.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my next project, I think, is going to be one on which I recently read one of your papers. I recently read an interesting paper of yours in a National Bureau of Economic Research conference volume on artificial intelligence. Thought you had a lot of interesting things to say about AI and distribution and how AI changes the constraints on our society. I have persuaded myself that the greatest economic challenge, or to put it the other way, the greatest societal challenge we will be facing over the next generation that stems from the economic sphere is going to come from our increasing reliance on robots and AI. And I'm not pretending to reinvent myself as a”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Home to me is that he just had very different ideas about how to live life than I do. And surely that's got to be the most important thing people take away from it.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're asking now not about the most important implication of religion for our economic thinking, which is what I've written about, but the most important implication for religion more generally, I would say it's in how we lead our lives. I once had a conversation with an older man and we went on for some time. He just thought about life in a very different way than I did. And the more we went at it, the more it turned out that this was somebody who didn't himself have any kind of religious background, religious affiliation, religious commitment, religious training. And that didn't make him right, didn't make him wrong, didn't make me right, didn't make me wrong. But that conversation drove.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Issues of labor markets and education and health and how industries organize themselves. But I try to encourage our graduate students to look at the world, look at what's interesting out there and so much to know, so much we don't understand, so much we'd like to explain, get their questions from there and then turn to the literature to see if you can figure out how to come up with some answers.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to look for people who get their questions from looking at the world rather than from looking at the literature. I understand that there are certainly plenty of very successful economists who got their start and even continued their trajectory by reading the professional economic literature and saying, well, here's this important paper and I think I can improve on what so-and-so did in his or her analysis. That's just never been very tempting to me. To me, economics is interesting because it's about the world and the world is throwing up all sorts of interesting questions, whether it's about why economies grow. You've asked in this conversation about price inflation, about how we conduct monetary policy, about fiscal policy. Many of my colleagues are interested in more microeconomic.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think my lawyer friends do, and so I'm going to stick with it. But it wasn't that anybody particularly steered me into economics.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I came into economics. I wouldn't say by accident as of the time when I graduated from college, I had no intention whatsoever of being an economist. I assumed that I was going to go to law school. When I was a senior in college, the only two graduate schools that I applied to were I applied to two law schools, and that was the end of it. But it so happened that I won one of these fellowships to study abroad for a few years. And then once this was in Britain and once I got there, then I had to study something. And so since I had been doing economics as an undergraduate and I had found it interesting, I kept going with economics. And then by the time I'd then done economics at a graduate level for a couple of years in England, then I said, well, you know, this is really more interesting than what”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These things, in part because I enjoy learning about them, but in part because I think they're important for the questions that I want to answer. I didn't start this most recent project from the direction of saying, let's think about the influence of religion. I started from the other end. I started by saying, I want to know, I want to explore where our current modern Western economics came from. And that then led me to seeing the importance of these religious influences on our economic thinking. And then I realized that I had to go off and learn a lot of things that I didn't know about. Well, I did it.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I don't, as you're suggesting, my style of economic work is very different from other people. I tend to undertake these long-range projects that take me such a long time because I have to go off and learn a lot of things that I didn't know. In the book that I've just written, if I thought that every one of my readers had grown up in a rigorous Presbyterian Sunday school, the book would have been 100 pages shorter because I wouldn't have had to walk my readers through all sorts of things. And if I had myself grown up in a rigorous Presbyterian Sunday school, which I didn't, I could have written the book at least two years more rapidly because I wouldn't have had to go off and learn all that stuff. But I did. So I undertake these projects. Why do I learn?”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think anybody today would design the Federal Reserve in the way in which it was designed 100 years ago with a board of governors and these 12 regional reserve banks and these presidents of the regional reserve banks who are not confirmed by the Senate playing the key role in establishing monetary policy. That said I would leave it alone because my sense is that with the current politics of our country, I am sorry to say, I think if we open that box, we are much more likely to come out with something that's worse than what we have. So while I don't know anybody who would defend in the abstract the structure we've got, I wouldn't change it, at least not now.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creating inflation pressures, and by contrast in a fully employed economy, we do have to worry about price inflation. And I would prefer to keep those two items separate in the analysis. So I'm not a fan of nominal GDP targeting. It's not the worst idea ever, but I would prefer to do it in a more sophisticated way.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First place, I don't think targeting nominal GDP levels makes any sense. There is some argument for targeting the price level, but I don't think that carries over to targeting the nominal GDP level. Targeting the rate of growth of nominal GDP is not a bad idea. It's a simplified form of saying that we're targeting real growth and targeting inflation together. Just adding them together and treating them is the same thing. I would prefer to be somewhat more sophisticated about the analysis. I would prefer to think of real economic growth as separate from price inflation when real economic growth or when the level of economic activity is far below full employment, that's a time when real economic growth doesn't have the cost of potential”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between at least long run rates of growth of money and long-run price inflation. And my country, I still like to think it was a contribution at that time, was to point out that similar relationships just as empirically valid were there for at least some measures of credit, importantly not just bank credit, but broader credit, including the bond market. Now, just going to say that over time, these measures lost their close relationship with national income, prices, whatever, and therefore I wouldn't recommend either one today, neither money nor credit.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't. I think the empirical basis for the argument that I made, you're going back now 30-odd years ago, is no longer there. I would say it's very much in parallel with what happened to things like monetary targeting, famously at the end of his life, Milton Friedman acknowledged that monetary targeting had been a failure. That was his words in this famous interview that he gave. And the reason was the empirical breakdown of the relationship between various monetary aggregates, whether it's so-called M1, M2, whatever, and levels of economic activity back when Milton did his great work in the 1950s and 1960s. There had been for quite some years a very stable, reliable relationship.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer is the same, Todd. The interest at rate at which the Federal Reserve has been crediting reserve balances held by the commercial banks is super, super low. Now, the economics behind your question is that is correct. No bank is going to lend to Tyler Cowan to start a new business or to Ben Friedman to buy a new house at a rate lower than it can get by leaving the reserves on deposit at the local Federal Reserve Bank and drawing the credit. But those interest rates are just super, super low. And so if you had an idea for a business and had wanted to go in and get a loan, I don't think the fact that the Federal Reserve was crediting reserve balances would have made any difference. Whatsoever.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Magically, because the government has issued a lot of debt, businesses haven't been investing or homeowners haven't been building houses because credit has been pretty available. rate of interest on that credit has been low. Again, I was asking my graduate students about the hypothetical example of a zero interest rate, not a prohibitively high one. So I would say no. I don't see the story whereby there's been a lot of crowding out.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On balance, I would guess that there has been neither. And the reason is that interest rates have been super low, going back to that. The idea that when the government issues debt, this might crowd out private investment, subject that I wrote a lot about years ago when interest rates are higher, that's not just some arithmetic or mechanical relationship. There has to be a mechanism involved. And the mechanism is the availability and the cost of financing for business investment or for homeowners that want to build a house or buy one. With interest rates as low as they've been in the last few years, I think it's very difficult to point to crowding out story and say that somehow”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trillion dollar deficit, even at a time of a fully employed economy and, of course, before the pandemic hit, that was nearly 5% of our national income. And so even though our economy was growing nicely more rapidly than the rate of interest that the government was paying on the debt, we were on the other side of the equation adding new debt so rapidly that the debt-to-income ratio was going up instead of down. So simply pointing to the so-called R minus G factor, I think, is a very incomplete way to look at the question of sustainability.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are two parts of the sustainability question, and you hit one of them correctly. If you're growing, if your economy is growing in real terms faster than the debt, then you can grow your way out of any debt. But there's another side of it, and that's how rapidly are you taking on new debt. So let's take your question seriously and say we're going to put the pandemic aside. In the year before the pandemic, we're talking about the government's fiscal year 2019, so ended September 30, 2019. None of us had talked about pandemics yet. In that year, the U.S. government spent four and a half trillion dollars, and it only took in revenues $3.5 trillion. So that one”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great time for the United States Treasury to lengthen out the maturity of the US government's outstanding debt, the average maturity of the outstanding debt is around six years. And we happen to have super low interest rates. It would be lovely to think that they're going to be here forever. Some economists think they will be. I'm more cautious. I would use the current market environment as a way to lock in those interest rates because we know that we're going to have a high government debt level for a very long period of time and much better it not be a burden.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have lots of women graduate students, which is a good thing. So you and your wife or husband would like to buy a house. And some bank is willing to lend to you to buy that house at a zero interest rate. How big a house do you buy if somebody is willing to lend to you at a zero interest rate? Well, that's a version of it. It's an extreme version of what you're saying. So if interest rates remain super low, then government, business, households can all afford higher levels of debts without it becoming in any way unsustainable. Now, I kept emphasizing if interest rates remain low, and we don't know that they will, and now if I can put in a plug for a policy idea, this is why I have been recommending to anybody who will listen that”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't. It is certainly true that if long term interest rates remain, and by which I mean real interest rates, interest rates net of inflation remain at or near their current levels or even go down, then the fiscal burden associated with any given debt level that the government, or for that matter of business, or for that matter a homeowner has is much more sustainable. A question that I put to my students now that it would never have occurred to me to put to you and your classmates 30-odd years ago is the following. You are a young graduate student just getting married and you and your wife would like to buy a house or you and your husband would like to buy a house because nowadays, unlike when you are a state,”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never, you probably are referring to the fact that for many years I was a squash player. I wasn't good enough to play with Vic Niederhofer. I would love to have done that, but I wasn't good enough. I understand he was mighty good. So I would say, if anything, he was underrated.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enhanced form of life annuity. We already have a form of life annuity provided publicly in the United States. The word for that is Social Security. But suppose there was some big change in the social security system. The Lucas critique idea would be that people will understand the implications of this for their own and everybody else's behavior. And as a result of that understanding, we'll take actions that Once everybody has taken that action will undo the intended effect of whatever the policy reform is. I think that just places much too much burden on the knowledge and understanding of ordinary citizens, and therefore my answer is overrated.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think is way overrated for the benefit of your listeners who don't know what the Lucas critique is. It refers to Robert Lucas, University of Chicago economist who won and very much deserved the Nobel Prize in our field. And the idea is that people not just economists, not just financial wizards, but ordinary people know enough about how the economy works that they are going to undo in their private behavior the effect of any government policy intervention. And so take your most recent question as an example. Suppose the government provides some”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting around the adverse selection. But I think we are in a bad equilibrium and individuals are not attracted to individual life annuities. I think it's because of the adverse selection. And it's very unfortunate.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think this process in which I've described in which the special information people have about themselves leads to this adverse selection in the customer base, which leads to higher pricing, which leads to more adverse selection, has gone on to the point at which we are in a very bad equilibrium, very, very few individual Americans by individual life annuities. So what is the market for annuities? It's a market with groups, and why does that matter? Because if some annuity provider like TIAA, the big insurance company, provides annuities to the universe of all college professors in the United States, then they at least have some way of getting...”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a distinctly longer mortality experience than the general population. They know that they're going to live longer. Now, once that experience becomes clear, then the sellers of annuities have to price the annuities, not on the assumption that their customers will be ordinary Americans, but that their customers will be long-lived Americans. Well, that just makes the annuities even less attractive for ordinary people and makes the adverse selection even worse.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea of annuities is underrated. The idea that people should be able to buy themselves out of a very important risk, namely the financial risk of how long they're going to live. I mean, annuity is just the flip side of an insurance policy. And when we buy insurance, we're insuring against the risk of dying too early when we buy an annuity. buying insurance against the risk of living too long. Why doesn't the market for annuities work better? It's because of what economists call adverse selection. That is to say, people who sign up to buy annuities have knowledge about themselves that the sellers of annuities don't. And if you look at the data on who buys annuities in the United States, annuity buyers”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we all said, well, what is that about? And eventually we got to see the letter that came with it. And I can't remember whether it was from the same firm Lone Star Industries or not, but it was from some construction company. And basically the note said, Paul, because of you, I can no longer use this lumber. So here, you take it. You take it. Well, this was the kind of stuff that was going on. And so was Paul Volcker overrated, underrated as much praises he received, I think he's one of the most underrated people I've ever known.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to correct that, there was no deflation under Volcker. It was a disinflation. And during the period of the Volcker disinflation, this firm called Lone Star Industries in Texas used to take out full page ads in the Wall Street Journal about what a criminal Paul Volcker was. I happen to have been working in the Federal Reserve Board one summer. This was in an earlier era in which security and buildings like this was much less. So we would just come and go and walk in and out. And one day out in front of the building, this enormous flatbed truck pulled up, stacked high with lumber. And we all sort of went down and looked at it. And what was it? And the truck driver gets out and he says, I have a delivery for a Mr. Volker.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. There was a firm in Texas, a construction firm called Lone Star Industries that used to take out during the Volcker disinflation. You called it a deflation, I believe. I'd like to correct.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Paul Volcker is one of the greatest heroes of my lifetime and doing what he did under the pressure that he sustained in order to turn around our inflation, I think is one of the greatest acts of public service I have ever seen. And so even though I am aware that lots of people then and now have been cheering for Paul Volcker and what he did, I would cheer even louder and so I would say it's even underrated. I happen to have been working at the Federal Reserve. I don't know if you, yeah, you're old enough to remember.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be for a consumption tax, which is, I guess, a way of saying, since we don't have one, I guess that would be a way of saying that it's underrated. I would for it, but not as a substitute for our income tax. I would be for it as a supplement to our income tax. So I guess I'm saying it's underrated.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've listened to some of your podcasts before, and it's always struck me as one of the most, surely one of the most unusual aspects of conversation. But yes, absolutely. Go ahead.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are many aspects of the kind of liberal democratic tendencies that I spelled out in that book, and tolerance is one of them. I was very reluctant then, and I still am to point to these small city-states as examples. People often threw up to me Singapore as a counterexample to what I was talking about. Look, Singapore is, what, 5 million people, something like that. It's really a big city. Taiwan is somewhat larger, I know, but it's a very special situation because of its fear of the Chinese. I would be confident that in the Those societies which are able to mount serious, sustained, widely distributed economic growth will do better on these dimensions like tolerance and democracy and generosity and provision of opportunity than those that do not.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Germany, but I think it's a warning for us very much today in the United States when so many people's incomes are stagnating. And then at the same time, the second implication of the fact that it's a rate of growth argument is some optimism that countries around the world where income levels are far below ours don't have to wait till they reach our level of income before they can develop into liberal democracies. Now, as I was saying a minute ago, 20 years ago when I wrote that book, the data gave me much more reason to be optimistic than I am, at least for the short run now about low-income countries' democratic prospects. But I still believe in the hypothesis in the long run.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of forward progress in their material lives. And they don't see that turning around anytime soon and they don't have optimism either that their children will face a better economic future. That's the circumstance under which people turn away from these small, ill-liberal, small democratic values like tolerance and respect for diversity, generosity, openness of opportunity, even respect for democratic political institutions. So an important aspect of the rate of growth aspect of the argument as opposed to the level aspect is a warning about our potentially being complacent when we shouldn't. My former colleague Alexander Gershenkron had this marvelous phrase about a democracy without Democrats while he was referring to Weimar.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hypothesis that I offered in that book very importantly was about the rate of growth effect. It's about people realizing that they are living better than their parents lived. It's about people realizing that the opportunities for their children are better than the opportunities that they had. It's very much a rate of growth effect. And the reason I say that's important, now going back to the argument I made in that earlier book, the reason it's important is twofold. One, it was a warning against our being complacent. It's a warning that no matter how rich our society is, if we get into a situation in which large numbers of people feel that they no longer have a”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe that's true. You are certainly correct. I come from Kentucky. Incidentally, I have very fond memories of coming from Kentucky. My family had been there for a very long time. And I have fond memories of the area. I never thought of it as particularly different though. I never when I arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate or when I worked in investment banking in New York. thought of it that I have this great difference in outlook from my Harvard classmates in the, I mention Harvard because in those days Harvard undergraduates were much less geographically diversified than they are now. And when I work in investment banking in New York, that was a pretty New York-y, New England-y culture. I never thought of myself as having a background that was Was terribly different from anybody else”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Vienna. So I think Islam is certainly a very militaristic religion in its early days, Judaism as well. Again, I mentioned a few minutes ago the foundational myth in the Hebrew Bible of the Hebrew slaves fleeing Egypt and what did they do when they fled Egypt? They then conquered Canaan, the Holy Land. So there's certainly a militaristic strain there. So the answer is no, I would not particularly point to Christianity as uniquely militaristic among certainly not among Western religions.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, to my knowledge of the major Western religions, I would absolutely not say that. I think all, just about all religions have a kind of militancy to them in their initial phases, look at Islam, for example. In the early years of Islam, the Muslim forces conquered all of Africa, conquered large parts of southern Europe, conquered essentially all of Spain, Islamic armies went up as far as what was it, I'm now trying to remember my high school history was at the Battle of Poitiers when the French finally turned around the Muslim advance later on under Suleiman, the Muslim forces again conquered much of southern Europe going up as far as the battle.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, by and large, Steve treats this as an aberration. And once it would be an extreme characterization of what he does to say he throws it out as an outlier, that would be unfair. But if you remove World War I and World War II from the scatter plot, then the trend line sure points downward. Now he's interested in things more than just wartime deaths. He's interested in who gets murdered walking down the street so somebody can steal his wallet. He's interested in that sort of thing. But I think to me at least it's the wars that dominate.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never talked about my economic growth book with Steve. And so I honestly don't know what he thinks about it. I can say what I think about his book on better angels of our nature. I think it hinges heavily on how you think about the first half of the 20th century. To recall his argument is that violence in the world has been on a downward trend and he's optimistic that it will continue on a downward trend. And if you just drew the trend line and you looked at what happened in World War I, World War II and so forth, you would say, my goodness in the Western world, that's an extraordinary increase in the volume of killing within the lifetime of certainly my parents and I'm guessing yours as well. So what do you do with that?”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In which Americans have different ideas about lots of things than Chinese do, than Russians do. You were asking before about the fact that Eastern Europeans have been unsuccessful for the most part in mounting stable liberal democracies. Well, I think this is a matter of persistence of something. I was pointing to the Soviet experience you were suggesting it's a persistence of something from earlier on, and I'm sympathetic to that too. But I would distinguish the persistence of thinking from the persistence of behavior.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once again, I think there's a difference between asking about persistence in people's beliefs and persistence in people's behavior. When it comes to behavior, a principle that economists have been dedicated to for well over 100 years is that when the environment changes and the incentives and constraints that affect people's behavior change, then the behavior changes. And so is there persistence in rates of economic growth across countries? I don't think there is. There's persistence in who's rich and who's poor, but persistence in economic growth rates is harder to pin down. By contrast, is there persistence in the way people think in what they believe? Well, I think there certainly is. And just look around at the way.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That a catalyst is something that triggers a chemical reaction. And then after the catalyst is gone, the reaction is still there. And the result of the reaction is still there. I think the role of religious thinking in shaping our early economic thinking in modern Western economics is going to persist. And even if the current trend continues for another decade, another half century toward Americans becoming less religiously committed, I think it'll still be there.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sociologist Max Weber, and I'd be glad to explain why. But one element of Weber that I do take and retain is the idea that religious impulses, religious influences on how people think are very long-lasting and persist long after people no longer believe in the particular religious impulse to begin with. Now that I think is directly responsive to your question because even if it turns out that Americans over time become distinctly less religiously committed than they were, I think in this Vebarian way, the fact that the country came out of a certain era of Protestant thought will serve as a kind of catalyst, catalyst in the sense”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. To be clear, we've been talking for the last twenty minutes, half hour, however long we've been going, about the influence of religion on economic development. And maybe I should make clear, that is not the subject of the book that I've just written. What I've written is a book about the influence of religion on economic thinking. It's a book of intellectual history, not economic history. It's a book about where our ideas about modern economics come from. And the fact that different people with different religious orientations have participated in economics in a different way, I don't think matters. Now, importantly, although I characterize my hypothesis as weber upside down, referring to the Germans.”
2021-01-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source