YouSaid · the spoken record

Hal Varian

lines on the record: 84
first: 2019-06-19
most recent: 2019-06-19
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

“Yes, well I would say get the basic skills down, maybe that's obvious, get the coding down, get the design down, get the basic economics down. But then you really want to give your exercise, your creativity, that is, don't just take the first way of looking at something or the conventional way of looking at something, try to step back and see what the bigger picture is. Now, most of the time that'll be a big flop, but every now and then you'll hit something that's new and exciting and novel. And of course, that's a great feeling to be able to do that.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's going to get more and more difficult because there's now this big push for enlarging educational access. And so what does that mean? That means you have to have more capacity in the universities to hand over a greater number of students. And so you're going to see a situation where there'll be a variety of roles, not just professor tenured and professor non-tenured, but there might be people that are doing various kinds of intermediary activities as well, say tutors as an example.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like to see shorter review periods for journals. I'd like to see things get into print more quickly. I'd like to, I think the whole journal enterprise now has been really bogged down, particularly compared to what goes on in other fields like computer science.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was, I think, a fantastic guy to talk with and debate with. I would say it was somewhat speculative. I don't think it would necessarily work out as well as Nozick argued it would work out. There would still be a lot of problems with his theory, in my view.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a thing that surprises me that nobody seems to be able to crack that nut yet, but there's clearly a demand for local news in terms of just what happened at the high school basketball game or what special offers the supermarket has today, etc. And people are experimenting with all sorts of different services. And my guess is that something will catch on. It's a little surprising. It's taken so long for that to happen.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as you know, there are two very nice recent books on this. One is Joel Walpole, who wrote a book called The Digital Renaissance, which looks into exactly the question you were describing. The other book by Michael D. Smith is streaming sharing and something else, stealing. Streaming sharing and stealing. And I think what they found was that having a well-organized, high quality, readily available complete access to music was much more attractive than cobbling something together using some sort of backdoors and other things of that sort. So I think that it's very clear that people are willing to pay $10 a month to be able to get very smooth access to the content they want to listen to.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the existing legal infrastructure in antitrust in the US is pretty good. One of the things that's very useful here is at the DOJ and the FTC put out guidelines like the merger guidelines and intellectual property guidelines and so on. If you look at the situation in Europe, it's a less mature system. They don't provide you with those sorts of guidelines. And so you're flying in the dark to a larger degree.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we have actually done a little research into this question, but only on one aspect, namely looking at online shopping. And I will tell you, if you live in a farm in the Midwest, you love online shopping if you're living in Manhattan, you've got a lot of opportunities to go shopping in the physical world. So those rural residents really like the internet for just that reason, the shopping, access to content, all sorts of things.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's funny you mentioned that because I grew up on a farm, apple orchard, outside of Worcester, Ohio, which is a town of about twenty thousand people, and they have a nice college there, College of Worcester And it seems to be thriving. So what happens when you look at these towns in the upper Midwest, if they have a hospital, they'll probably survive, if they don't have a hospital, they're in big trouble”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I actually don't use Facebook, and I don't have any moral objection to it. I just don't have the time to do it. There are other things of this sort that could end up soaking up substantial amount of time. I think that one of the reasons, and this is, of course, quite speculative, I think that one of the reasons people are most worried about Facebook is they don't really understand the limits of what can be done at Facebook, whereas at Google, I think we're pretty clear that we're showing you ads. We're showing you ads that are targeted to one thing or another, but that's how the information is used. So we've got this specific application, and in our case, in Facebook's case, it's more amorphous, I think.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, we have seen it in the sense that you'll find some vector of attack that hadn't been thought of, and then there'll be a way to control that vector of attack. For example, a few years ago there was this question about whether government agencies were tapping into various data providers. It turns out they were tapping into the telecom infrastructure. And once that was discovered, all of the communication among data centers became encrypted. And that was the response to that particular attack. So there's going to continue to be things of that sort.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's certainly possible to offer choice. And if you, for example, don't like the default settings on Google for privacy, you can go in and change those default settings. So let's take your interests, for example. There's something called interest-based advertising. You can go look at your interest. You can edit them. You can delete them. You can add things. You can subtract things. You can opt out entirely. And that capability is completely under your control.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complaints for employees, yes, about there's a bit of paternalism that goes on. We'll only give you snacks that are good for you and food that's healthy. Well, that's great. It can be opposed with a light hand or a heavy hand. Some people have argued maybe it's heavier than necessary.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boy, that's a good question. Everybody knows about the mini kitchens. One thing that's happened in the cafeteriers, everybody knows about the free food, but one of the recent complaints was that there was too much kale being served.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the trouble is with accounting there are always these gray areas. So what's a good and what's a service or things like that where there could be a blending from one into another and there's considerable debate about how you should do this and then there'll be some kind of reconciliation where people agree yes that's a reasonable procedure. But I don't think there's ground truth out there anywhere. I think there are lots of choices that are made to resolve some particular situation that's come up.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at one point there was some discussion about building our own accounting system, and finally that was abandoned because one of the things that accounting systems do, the commercial accounting systems, is they keep being updated based on how the law, the accounting practices or regulations and so on evolve. So the system itself as a computer system is not really very complex. It's just keeping up with the regulatory environment that's provided by the accounting software provider.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Showed them that the algorithm is Well, back in those days when you looked at the results from the existing search engines plus the Google PageRank, it was immediately apparent that the Google The system was significantly better than the competition.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this story was excite. I've heard the story about Yahoo, but the most definitive story I've seen, I think, was excite. And the claim in this source was that Google, they wanted to sell their algorithm. They wanted to get back to graduate school and have the life of a graduate student, plus a million dollars. But the trouble is they couldn't really reach an agreement with Ecite, not so much on the price, but on what kind of technology would be used in the search engine.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Larry, well, Eric Schmidt came. He described his job as adult supervision, and there's some truth to that. But I will say that he just had a very creative group of people who were doing very interesting work and what was exciting about it was the intellectual environment there was so thrilling.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure if I've ever learned the managerial intelligence there, but because Google really started out as an academic spinoff itself. As you know, the Google search engine page rank came out of a National Science Foundation Digital Libraries grant. And in fact, when I was at Berkeley, I worked on that digital libraries initiative. It spawned three search engines, InkTomme, Lycos, and Google. There was a lot of interest in that topic. So Google, when I joined, when there were about 300 people, I don't know that there was a whole lot of management intelligence.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm But again, then there's somebody that's outside of that little duopoly, and there's a triopoly and a quadrupoly, and so on, it gets harder and harder to coordinate all of those activities, especially if you've got an agent on the consumer side who's looking for the lowest price all the time. So you've got to think of these markets where you may have active price setting on the viewpoint of the AIs, but you've also got active search and active choice on the part of the consumers. So I think it's an interesting area for research, for sure.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, where you have these examples like rapid response. Equilibrium. We have built in this assumption that the consumers move faster than the firms in our textbook models. So what happens is you see two gas stations competing with each other, one gas station cuts its price, all the consumers flow to the lower price station, and we get this great competition. But it could be a different model. It could be a situation where the gas stations move more rapidly than the consumers, and one cuts its price, the other immediately matches the price, so there's been no benefit from price cutting, and the consumers haven't had a chance to respond. So there we end up with an equilibrium model where you can sustain a super competitive price. I think there are situations where you can have algorithmic price discrimination. So you could think about”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the collapse And again, this idea of what would you do? How would you acquire resources? How could you put together a system that could prevent that collapse? And it's a clever story, I've thought about it many times, actually.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the American tourist is sent back to Rome around 400 AD and he takes his mission, the prevention of the Sack of Rome and the basically destruction of civilization for a thousand years. So what period would I like to see? I guess I would like to be interested in that period because we did a noble goal. Ancient Rome, the Republic, the”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, I have to tell you, that's a premise of another science fiction book that's a great. The one I like very much, great favor to mine, that's this Less Darkness Fall.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which describes this development of interchangeable parts and of course the explosion of innovation that took place in the 19th century was truly remarkable. So Tell you an expert, my grandfather, who was a farmer in Ohio, told me one time I was born when people got around on horse and buggies and I lived to watch men walk in the moon. And that was seventy years. I mean, it's amazing what happened during that period, now I grant you that's the twentieth century, but we also saw huge technological progress preceding that in the 19th century.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A nineteenth century, yes, well, I have to say I read a bit in that area. There's a wonderful book called From the American System of Manufacture to Mass Production. Yes, great book.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's this wonderful book favorite of mine called Midas World. I don't know if you've ever read it, but I would recommend it. Think it's out of print now. But it's about a world where basically robots have become so efficient, produce so much stuff that people are assigned consumption quotas. So you have to consume a certain amount of shoes per month. You have to consume a certain amount of food and a certain amount of this. And the poorer you are, the bigger your consumption quota is, which I think is a nice obviously satirical, but it's very entertaining book because they work through this premise. Of how this all goes, I was about to tell you how it all worked out, but I'm afraid it would be a spoiler, so I'll leave that for your discovery later on.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. And what's happened is, of course, it evolved in a very specific environment with a different regulatory structure and things like that. And so you were able to get this kind of interoperation in a way that would be very hard to do in our economy and our country.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, that's a good question. One of the interesting things is we used as one of the prime examples of indirect network effects was operating systems, right? And so there was a natural tendency to move towards a single operating system, we argued. And I think there is a tendency to do that. But nowadays, we use daily five different operating systems easily. There's iOS, there's Mac OS, there's Linux, there's Windows, there's Chrome OS, and there's Android. So here are all these operating systems. They all seem to work pretty well together, not as well as they would if it was designed from scratch, but people have made ways for these systems to relate to each other. The user interface has become standardized. So actually the importance of the operating system is retreated into the background compared to what it looked like. 20 years ago.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well I would say capital controls as what's going on. You have countries around the world where capital controls have been biting and there are several places where people are very anxious about getting their money out of the country because of political instability or other things. I think that is really what's driving the Bitcoin price changes recently.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm thinking about cryptography in general. Think about deepfakes. Well, how do you deal with deepfakes? You have to have cryptographically signed collections of bits so we can be assured that they really are created by Tyler Cohen or Halvarian. And so that is almost certainly going to evolve. And then there'll be other ways that you can do proof of identity, that kind of thing, that are more secure, more efficient than what we can do now.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I would like to separate the blockchain from just cryptographic protocols in general. There's a huge demand for various kinds of cryptography. Blockchain seems to be by its nature relatively inefficient as an economist. I don't like this proof of work business. I don't like the fact that there's one version of the blockchain that has to keep being updated. I don't like the fact that it's so slow. So there are lots of things that you could fix and I expect to see them fixed in the future. But I would say crypto in general, big deal, blockchain, not so much.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's going to be some, I think it's quite clear there's going to be some fragmentation of the internet in the next several years.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh well this is a very controversial issue of course one side says the US created the internet, we've overseen it, managed it in a way that's been valuable for the entire world but other countries say no no we should have more control than we have now and this goes back and forth over time and we've seen these examples of countries that really have cut off access to the outside world except under very specific conditions”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no morobo. Have you seen this? This was a contest at the FCC sponsored, RFTC, I believe, to come up with the best system for handling these RoboCalls. In fact, I put it on our phones. It seems to work pretty well, so it's worth a try.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I have my private account and I have my Google account. My Google account, basically there's no spam on it. My private account, my email address is here and there, and so I do tend to get more spam. And there are all those mailing lists that somehow you got on and now find they're not that useful. That shows up in my private inbox too. I don't know. A good answer to your question. I think as long as it's under control from the user's point of view, then we don't see a big uprising. By the way, we do see, of course, a lot of resistance to robocalls, which are much more annoying than spam, in my experience, and likely there'll be some regulation trying to control.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a nice article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives on the Economics of Spam. David Riley was one of the co-authors. There were a couple other authors as well. And they had something of an opposite impression. They said there was a huge amount of spam. It was quite costly, and it was a major externality that we've never really been able to control effectively. Now companies like Google and other email providers had developed algorithms that identify spam quite well, and normally it's not really a huge annoyance to people because we've been able to do these spam recognition technologies.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you look at technologies like autonomous vehicles and things like that, they're dealing with vast amounts of information. It's often stored manipulated locally, but sometimes it needs to be shared and doing that kind of sharing will be easier if you have high bandwidth, 5G sort of technology. Realistically speaking, for most of what you're going to be doing, it will just save you a small amount of time.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, you should think of 5G as Wi Fi everywhere so that you've got high speed communication without having to go through any sort of special operations.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, today I would say in the US it's pretty good because we've got quite a bit of fiber out there when we move to the spectrum, then I think there are issues where we're going to be encountering more and more congestion and 5G is hopefully going to come and come along and rescue us there.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a question if you look at what would make them good for Google, they should have better than average computer skills because they're going to have to deal with the infrastructure we have there, which is pretty powerful infrastructure, but also quite complex. And that would be a strong requirement, not only having the skills in, let's say, statistical analysis, but also the skills in terms of computer operation.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, well, when you're hiring faculty members, then what happens is they're all coming in as assistant professors. But when you're hiring at a business, you may have senior people, junior people, experienced people fresh out of school people, and so on. So there's a role that you've imagined for them. And part of the issue is to match up the applicant with that role. So you might have a really outstanding candidate, but they don't fit the particular position that you're recruiting for at that time.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you look at the literature you'll see this completely worked out problem and you'll be captured by that person's viewpoint, whereas if you flounder around a little bit yourself, who knows you might come across a completely different phenomenon. Now, you do have to look at the literature. I want to emphasize that, but it's a good idea to wrestle with a problem a little bit on your own before you adopt the standard viewpoint.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one area of theory that I've found very exciting is algorithmic mechanism designs. So with algorithmic mechanism design, it's a combination of computer science and economics. And the idea is you take the economic model and you bring in computational costs or show me an algorithm that actually solves that maximization problem. And then on the other side, the computer side, you build incentives into the algorithm. So if multiple people are using, let's say, some communications protocol, you want them all to have the right incentives to have the efficient use of that protocol. So that's a case where it really has a very strong real world applications to doing this. Everything from telecommunications to AdWords auctions.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, believe it or not, that very paper was the inspiration for the model I constructed of Google's ad auction because the equilibrium condition is basically a revealed preference condition that I would rather be in the position I am in and paying the price I'm paying than to be in some other position. So there's a little inequality there. You manipulate this inequalities very much like the paper you described and here you get this nice formula for what the price should look like.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, what's happened since the mid-90s is we've seen this great flourishing of empirical work with a lot of the credibility revolution in terms of coming up with better econometric models. And I will say a lot of the work that I've done at Google has been in the econometrics area. That was one of my fields as a graduate student. I published articles in Journal of Econometrics over time. And just getting that, being able to develop coherent statistical reporting within an organization is critically important.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you see a lot of things going on with consumers' behavior in terms of saving, in terms of self-control, in terms of just understanding a certain amount of complexity. It's the usual stuff shows up in behavior. And when you're doing something like pricing, you want to think about the textbook view and you want to think about a behavioral view and maybe what you're going to end up with is some blend of the”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What should I say? Exactitude than might be necessary in real life. There's this line that no battle plan has ever survived encounter with the enemy. And when you look at how decisions are made in organizations, they're often a lot messier than they are in the textbooks. So we might think of the textbooks as kind of an ideal case. And what we want to allow is that there can be departures from that ideal case. We want to look at robust issues. work on that. And also, by the way, I added a chapter to the undergraduate text on behavioral economics, which I think is quite important in this respect.”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say I have added some of the things that I learned at Google to my undergraduate textbook, which is more frequently revised, and so there's a whole section on auctions, the kinds of things we're talking about before, what the ad auctions look like, a lot of strategic considerations showing the student that, hey, this stuff is really relevant in practice. It's used to trade billions of dollars worth of assets on using these algorithms. So definitely, that work has gone into the textbooks. One thing I would say is that in the textbook, both the undergraduate and the graduate textbook, there's more”
2019-06-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source