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Michael Kremer

lines on the record: 52
first: 2020-10-21
most recent: 2020-10-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“They're coming out of the industrial organization of this. Like, it's very important to invest in supply chain capacity, not just in the production of the ultimate vaccine. We might want to consider ways to get some of the early information from the trials out so that we can use it even before the trial is finished. We can use it to invest optimally in manufacturing. So a lot of insights from studying the economics of this, and that's obviously a critically important problem. And policymakers seem, again, you can say it's a glass half full or half empty. I would say the glass is at least partially full. I'd like policymakers to be investing more in this, but they are starting to invest and they are starting to do these contracts well in advance of availability of the vaccine.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invest in a lot in trying to develop a COVID vaccine, even though there's a pretty high risk of failure. And it's also worth getting lots of shots on goal. Now, for a variety of reasons, which I could go into, the private returns from building out a very large factory for vaccine before we know whether the vaccine is going to work, before testing is complete, are much less than the social returns. I think in this particular case, you probably want to probably make sense for governments to offer to cover you probably want a mix of push incentives and pull incentives, some reward for success, but also just some upfront financing for building those factories ahead of time. And that's what we've been arguing for. And a bunch of countries are doing things like that. So the US, Operation Warp Speed, but many other countries are putting an orders for vaccine even ahead of the time the vaccine's been proven to work. So obviously risk involved, but it's very much a risk worth taking. There are other lessons.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm doing a lot of work problem of COVID. And some of this work is with people who are involved in the pneumococcus advanced market commitment. Chris Snyder, Jin Li, others. But we're also working with some other industrial organization economists, for example, Susan Athe. And when we think about this problem, I think the problem of getting a COVID vaccine is different in some important ways. And that's something, again, something that economics and being close to research and theory will tell you. So I think it's, you know, just to be clear, sometimes people have a stereotype of experimentation as opposed to theory. I think they're strongest when they're linked. There's a number of different things we've suggested, but one of them is that, and this is very much with your colleague Alex DeBar, a very simple one is the world economy is losing $500 billion every month due to COVID. And that means that it's worth”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, want to talk to the customers. So development economists will go typically go if it's an education program they're studying. They'll talk to kids, they'll talk to the teachers, they'll talk to the school principals. You get in the habit of doing that, and that's very useful for thinking about, I think, for innovation more broadly. Another thing is as a researcher, and this would be true for any type of researcher, but you're presenting your research and seminars and you're getting feedback on it. You're getting criticism on it, and you're going back and revising things. I think that's actually very useful for management. One of the problems that managers can have is you can convince yourself, and I think this might be particularly true in development, you can convince yourself that what you're doing is the right way to do things, the only way to do things, it's very useful to, and you may not get feedback otherwise, because in research you do.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that if you're working in modern development economics, particularly if you're using the experimental approach, some of the things that economists, the stereotype of economists is not paying attention to, you're forced to pay attention to. So let me give you a few examples. Part of the reason why I originally got into doing experiments was to isolate causal impact, to disentangle. Is it a particular program that's causing something or particular intervention? Is it something else? And I think experiments are very good for that. But when you're doing experiments, you're typically working on a concrete problem because that's what organizations, they're doing the experiment because they want to solve that problem. And you have to get to know the people who work in that institution. You also have to get to know the ultimate customer. One of the things that business books will tell you is know your customer. And that means, yes, you want to learn the statistics on the customers.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the early investments that development innovation ventures at USAID made. And we're getting a five to one lower bound and a super conservative lower bound. I think we'll have a much higher rate in our next iteration of this. And that's looking, just to be clear what a lower bound this is. We invested in, we had 41 innovations in our early portfolio. We couldn't quantify the benefits for all of them of the nine or ten that reached over a million users. We could quantify the benefits for four. If you take the benefits of those four and set them against the cost of our investments in all 41, the ratio is five to one. So I think, and that's already, and I think that that will grow over time. I just think there's a huge, huge reward to invest in innovation. There's also a scientific reward and the University of Chicago is making a big commitment in that area. And that's a big part of why I came here.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of economics to create practical innovations that can improve people's lives and to work closely with partners to develop and refine and iterate on those innovations so that they can be scaled up. And I think what I've been seeing in my own research, what's true with a lot of research of JPAL, the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, and what I've seen in the USAID's Development Innovation Ventures is when you're investing that type of technology, it's not that anytime you're investing in innovation, most innovations don't succeed. They don't take off. But you get a few, if you're a venture capitalist and you invest in a Google or Facebook, it's fine if a lot of your other investments don't work. And I think same thing in investing in development innovation. When we did an analysis of the rate of return, we tried to get a lower bound on the rate of return.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, no, we have to go through certain precautions, but I'm speaking to you from my new office at the University of Chicago. Chicago obviously is a wonderful tradition in economics. One of the things that I was very excited about was talk to President Zimmer here, President of the University of Chicago. And I was excited about, you talked about experience as a founder, and I've talked about technological change and the need for changes in technology, by which I don't, I mean gadgets, but I don't just mean gadgets. I mean institutional change, innovation and policies as well. And I think what we've seen is there's a lot of potential to generate that. And University of Chicago made a big commitment to development economics in general. And I hope we'll be hiring more people over time. And certainly the slots will be there for that. And to create a development innovation lab, which I think will use the tool.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother wrote about literature on the Holocaust and one thing that I think that brings out is that when there are issues that we can do something about, we need to do something about them. We shouldn't wait. And obviously there were people who did things at very great cost to themselves in that situation and are doing right now in COVID or doing things that are risking their lives to how people get through the COVID crisis. I work on international development. That's at least in part because I feel like this is something that actually fairly low cost to ourselves we can help address these problems. The case of deworming, this is something that costs 50 cents a year to address. And I think this is, I guess, those values did influence me.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work on economic history and on culture in particular has emphasized this just how long lasting things are. Whether societies use the plow thousands of years ago affects society today. That's the claim. And I'm very open to those ideas. But what we've also seen is low-income countries really catching up remarkably quickly to higher income countries. And that suggests that we shouldn't take looking into talking about culture as indicating that there's no possibility for development or for change. There's clearly that possibility. We've seen it country after country.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was, I think there's a lot to be said for that. But I think what we've realized with behavioral economics is that people in high-income countries are not completely rational either. And there are certain patterns in the way that they're not rational. Other things can play out differently in low-income countries and high-income countries just due to different institutions. But what you're suggesting is something much stronger than that, that there can be certain ways of thinking and embodied in culture. I think those are interesting ideas and people like Nathan Nunn or Alberto Alessina are doing very exciting work on culture and economics. We have a lot more to learn about how far we can take that. But I think there's exciting work going on in that area. We have to be careful and avoid some of the simplistic approaches of the past. And I also think, just come back to this point about convergence, one of the things a lot of the”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great point. You know, if you think about, so actually as an undergraduate, I didn't study economics. I did a program called Social Studies. We read Weber, among other people. Weber talked about the role of culture in influencing economics. There was a lot of modern development economics was a reaction to that and perhaps a warranted reaction because I think a lot of Weber himself obviously may be wrong, but very sophisticated not simplistic. But there was a lot of simplistic analysis of Confucian societies will never grow, Hindu societies will, their Hindu rate of growth is inherently low. So the people were making clearly statements that were just wrong, turned out to be wrong. Even before the Hanta economist said, look, the founding of modern development economics was either that people are poor but rational and we can use the same tools of economics to analyze people in low-income countries as high-income countries.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many rich archetypical stories in there. And it's hard for me to say why. I just, you know, when I've gone back to it, I really enjoy it.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. It's about a place that was a colony and trying to get out of that situation. And with people living very constricted lives. And I guess, look, I don't want to claim this is the most interesting thing about reading that. But it's, you know, I was talking about Nairobi being a happening place. Well, you know, I was in Ireland recently. That's a happening place as well. It's not the Dublin of Dubliners anymore. And I would say this is, if I think about, if I was talking about convergence recently, you know, the world is, things are really improving in a lot of the world. And it can be very easy to forget that in a time of COVID, a time of all the other problems that we're having right now. But people are freer and people are leading more exciting, more open, less constrained lives.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The great thing about I'm very happy to be a Turzo ambassador for Kenya, it's really a great country to visit. If you're into mountains, there's Mount Kenya, there's the coast, but I think you're totally right that obviously the top thing for Americans would be Safari because you can get mountains and you can get beaches, other places. The coast of Kenya, it's not just the beaches, it's the Swahili culture that's a very interesting blend of cultures there. But I think game parks have to be very high on the agenda for people. And Nairobi right now is a cosmopolitan exciting city. It's a happening place in a way that I didn't feel that way about it in the late 80s or early 90s. But now it's a very exciting place to be. And if you're talking about where you can get good food, you can get good food of a lot of different types in Nairobi.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's something about, you know, I don't know if this is the case, but I think trans populations that turn over a lot maybe associated with worse quality food, but I'm not sure.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not to my taste. There are Kenyan dishes that do. There's a mixture of corn and beans that I like. And then there's, you know, I have had Ugale that was delicious in fancy restaurants in Nairobi that Isaac and Biti took me to. But in general, it's a little bland.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We set up a system of incentives and rewards to try to address that is a really interesting question. So despite saying this isn't even a problem in Kenya, two students, Ronak Jane and Brandon Tan, who have some, I think, very preliminary. So I don't want to, more work needs to be done on this, but they have some very exciting results for Kenya suggesting that you were talking about paying kids to do well as individuals. So they've been trying something at the level of the classroom as a whole where they reward the classroom as a whole for doing well. And you can imagine that can create, possibly create a culture in the class as a whole where you want each other to do well. And there are initial results on this are actually extremely promising.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question, great question. And I don't want to claim that I don't know the answer to the question, but I think we should try and find out. Let me just, I believe there have been some results. I'm not super familiar with this, with the papers, but I believe there's been very positive results from peer mentoring programs. I believe that some results in Italy very recently from this. So if you can create incentives for students to help each other out, that can be very positive. Now that does require sort of changing. This does not seem to be a problem in most developing country education systems I know, but certainly US can have a system where it's not cool to do well in school and kind of a culture like that or not cool to do too well in school. I don't see that in Kenya or, and I don't hear about that in India, but thinking about how”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In response to this, and not just the kids at the top of the distribution, but throughout the distribution. It also looked like teachers were putting in more effort. So I think having some sort of merit scholarship program is something that I don't want, look, there are some flaws in our paper. I don't want to claim, I don't know whether we should scale it. Maybe we should because it doesn't seem that kids who do well in school can go on to the next level of education doesn't seem that controversial. So maybe we should scale it up. I don't want to claim the evidence is totally definitive on it. We could test this more, learn about how to make it work. But I think this is the type of program that also deserves should be part of it. Probably should be part of a system and certainly deserves more testing.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not an expert on that type of work. Let me give you two contrasting results. So I think some of Roland Fryer's work on that, if I remember right, was in the US wasn't so encouraging. But I'll tell you one thing that I think I am reasonably excited about. So I've done some work with Rebecca Thornton and Willow Friedman and Ted Miguel on scholarships. So in a lot of developing countries, you have to pay something to go, at least go to secondary school, if not primary school, even primary school. It's officially free, but there are often fees. So there was a program in Kenya that said if kids did well up at sixth grade, their fees would be covered for seventh and eighth grade. And these were in poor school. So you know this was going to poor kids. So what we saw was, obviously there's a direct benefit of allowing kids more kids to go on to higher grades of school. But we also saw that kids were putting in more effort.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adaptive that go to where the kid is. Seen huge gains from this in India, and we're starting to see adoption of this in Africa as well. And that can have a very big impact at quite low cost. Another thing is, I think it's called structured pedagogy, which is just providing very detailed lesson plans for teachers. And that can be done in a variety of ways. And we're seeing big effects from that as well. The good news here, as in a lot of development, is we If we try a variety of things and if we think about it using theory and using the tools of economics and tools of other disciplines, we can really make progress.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think we've, you know, think we've learned a lot in education research in recent years. So one thing that we saw in Kenya but was also seen in India and many other places is that it's very easy for kids to fall behind the curriculum. Curricula in developing countries tend to be set at a fairly high level similar to what you would see in developed countries. However, kids are facing all sorts of disadvantages and there are all sorts of problems in the way the system works. There's often high teacher absence. Kids are sick. Kids don't have the preparation at home often. So kids can fall behind the curriculum. But whereas we've had the slogan in the US of no child left behind, in developing country education systems focus on kids at the top of the distribution. So what's been found is if you can set up, and there are a whole variety of different ways to do this, either remedial education systems or some technology aided systems that are”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way we do, or should we be saying, Look, it's not a matter of writing a grant proposal once you're five years past the PhD, we're going to fund you based on what you've accomplished, not based on your grant proposal. That's one example. I have no idea what the question, what the answer is to that. Should the committees be different size than they are now? Should we say that we're going to fund something as long as somebody really likes it rather than take the average of the committee view when we're thinking about government grants? There's a bunch of questions about what the optimal way to do research funding is. And I think we should be experimenting with this, trying to learn more about how do we set up institutions. There's questions about research publication process. That's the thing that we can control. And I think that should be a priority for anybody who cares about economic growth.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first thing I would look at is the thing that we have the most control over, which is the institutions we use to try to advance technology. So if you believe Chad, and I do, there's just something fundamental about the technology, about the progress of technology, which means that it's getting harder over time to have a constant growth rate of technology. We invent more technology, but we don't increase the growth rate over time. And that's just something inherent about technology. Obviously, that could change. Could be that when we get AI working well enough, we actually get to an incredibly virtuous cycle, and we head off to a singularity where the AI gets smarter and smarter over time. So there's nothing, we don't know whether that's a fundamental constraint. But whether that's a constraint or not, there's not much we can do about it. But what we can do is we can think about the myriad institutions. We've talked about IP institutions, but there's also research funding questions. Should we be funding research?”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of teams needed to develop new innovations. The task ahead of us is getting harder. And that means that there's a race between the total resources that are going into innovation and the increasing difficulty of the task. So you have those two forces operating against each other. I have no doubt that the increasing size of the market and the fact that there are now many people who are contributing to technological change is helping us, but the issue is we've got a harder and harder task ahead of us.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The view that I took in my paper on the nine days on this was very much, I was near contemporary of Chad Jones, and I think Chad's fundamental insight, they put it technically first, what's the production function for new technologies? Clearly, having existing technologies helps you invent new technologies. So having calculus helps you invent spacecraft or aircraft. But on the other hand, it's not clear that an improvement in existing technologies helps you one for one in developing new technologies. In some sense, it's getting harder and harder to invent new technologies. And, you know, Chad's work at the time showed that. And more recent work that Chad has done. So we're facing in that world, it's the task of technological advance is getting harder and harder over time. We see that in the macro level. See that at the micro level. We see that in the increasing...”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not unconditional convergence. Some models predict poor countries would catch up to rich countries, and maybe they do if you condition on, if you take countries that have similar policies or similar human capital, but overall poor countries don't catch up. Well, I was teaching my class, my development economics class a few years ago, and thought, I better update my slides. And we looked at that again. And that's totally changed. Actually, since the this was something that was after the 90s, this pattern changed. Now poor countries are catching up to rich countries. And it's not just driven. This isn't just a matter of India and China. This is a broad-based phenomenon. So I think that's something that I think is very exciting and very encouraging in a world where within certain countries there's been increases in inequality. If you look at a global level, there's also”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one insight from the study of growth is a fundamental driver of growth in the long run is technological change. And so I think one thing that we economists should be thinking about more is what are the institutions to increase the rate of technological change and to try to direct it to human needs. And that's one of the reasons why I've been excited about advanced market commitments, patent buyouts. I think we've got a set of institutions, primarily intellectual property institutions, but also research funding institutions. And I think we should be experimenting and trying new approaches to this and trying to improve things over time. So I would say that would be one key message about economic growth. Another paper that I'm working on recently with Jack Willis and Yang Yu looks at something that, so when I was in graduate school in the 90s, I studied economic growth. Robert Barrow was my advisor. One of the things I learned is that there's”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to be necessarily a big fan of politicians, but in some ways politicians hear how much this costs. And I think they can affect that many people for that small amount of money. And they're like, hey, I want to get on that. This is something I can claim as an achievement. So we saw that in Kenya. We saw that in India.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behavioral issues, I would actually say that a huge, huge issue, this sounds very boring, but this falls between the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education. And each one of them has different priorities. The Ministry of Health is going to be, they're worried about delivering things through clinics, they're worried about HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, as they should be. Ministry of Education thinks they're worried about teacher strikes. So it's very easy for something that either to fall between the cracks or be the victim of turf wars. It sounds too small to be, how can that really get in the way? But I think anybody who spent time working in governments understands those things can very easily get in the way. In some ways, it's surprising how much progress has been made. Here's one way the political economy works in favor. You mentioned democracy. I think that's a factor. I think when you've got, I actually find”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people who have worms are pretty poor people. The richer people are less likely to have worms with any given society. Richer people are probably more politically influential. There's also something about if worms, they gradually build up in your body and one worm is not going to do that much damage. The problem is when you've got lots of worms in your body. And even there, it's going to take time. So I've had malaria. I don't think I've had worms. I hope I haven't. When you have malaria, you feel terrible and you go from feeling fine to feeling terrible. And then you take the medicine, you feel great afterwards. With worms, it's much more like a chronic thing. And when you expel the worms from your body, that's sort of gross. And I don't think even at the individual level, do you have quite the demand that would be commensurate with the scale the problem is or a behavioral economics explanation? So I think there are political issues. And then I think there are”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I've actually been very, you know, you could say the glass is half empty. You can say it's half full or you can say it's almost three quarters full. I think it's about three quarters fall. When I first got involved in deworming, it was testing a small NGO program. We found phenomenal effects of that. So the original work found health gains and education gains. Now we've found we've tracked people over 20 years and we're seeing people have better standard of living. They're earning more. Following the early results, we presented the results the government of Kenya to the World Bank. Kenya scaled this up nationally with assistance from the World Bank, primarily just in conveying some of that information. Indian states started doing it and then the national government of India took this on. So they're reaching a little bit hard to know the exact numbers, but probably 150 million people. Many other countries are doing this as well. So it's actually quite widely.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The value. It's a fairly small fraction. People have estimated the social rate of return to private investment in RD often estimate numbers like 70%. So I don't think it's limited to vaccines. That might be an extreme case. But I would actually be in favor of trying to boost R&D incentives in a wide variety of fields, not just some of the ones that we've mentioned so far.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It turns out there's a whole host of distortions here. So we do subsidize vaccines. Governments do a lot of the purchasing. But governments are, I think then there's a commitment problem, at least in some countries. Governments aren't necessarily going to pay the full social value of the vaccine. They may pay less than that. And if that's the case, then firms might not be adequately incentivized. They may be incentivized, but maybe not adequately incentivized to produce the good. If we think about something like malaria, for example, there are many different governments involved. For example, many small African countries. No one of those countries has an incentive to say, let's pay a price that would generate the socially appropriate incentives to develop a malaria vaccine. So there's a global public good problem there in addition to everything else. So there's quite a few distortions in vaccine markets. I think that in general, however, we don't think that monopolists or innovators capture that much of”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you also need to get customers willing to put up something. So we could say, look, if somebody produced a cleaner stove and if consumers were willing to pay $10 for it, or then there could be an additional $20 or $30 worth of subsidy. For example, I mean, details would have to be thought out, but that would be another example. But sure, just to, you know, we could have things to reduce recidivism rates. We could have programs to address educational challenges. There's a whole host of areas in high-income countries or in the United States where we could really, there are technological challenges that, for whatever reason or not attracting quite the level of effort that tech companies are putting into other fields. And if we want more innovation, we could promise to reward that.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, look, I would love to have, say, a malaria vaccine, I think would be a great example. Let me give you another example. And look, I'm going to give examples that are from the world of development economics, but I completely agree with you. These could be used in many other settings as well. So a lot of people in developing countries cook with a small fire in their house, and that creates incredible indoor air pollution. And that's estimated to kill millions of people a year. It also produces not just carbon emissions, but some things that are some chemicals are actually much worse for global warming than that per year of volume. And there have been efforts to develop cleaner stoves. Now, those haven't gone that far, in part because they haven't found something that consumers want to use. So I think that's actually a great case for an advanced market commitment because part of the idea of an advanced market commitment is you have to meet certain technological thresholds.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Distant product. I think some of the, I think there's some advantages of advanced market commitments for technologically distant products. So that's the political economy issue that I would say is, I don't want to claim it's the only one, but that's the one that's most prominent for me.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say one thing that I am concerned about with advanced market commitments, which is I think there's a tendency. So Rachel Glenister and I wrote a book on advanced market commitments proposing the idea we focused on malaria. I was involved in co-chairing a working group at the Center for Global Development. That working group recommended both a technologically distant target like malaria and a technologically closer target, pneumococcus. What the political system went with was that technologically closer target, pneumococcus. I think that partly is due to political economy reasons. The politicians want a quick win. The bureaucrats want a quick win and their firms or other entities that are going to be pushing the things that they think they've got a technological advantage on that are technologically close. So I think that is an issue. And I think personally, I think it would be in terms of the economics, I think it would make sense to really try a technologically”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so I would say, okay, so let me break that into pieces. So I think one question that you raised is, oh, she drew this over time, maybe people learned to game the system. I think that could be true, but I also think that the system designers will learn over time how to do it. And I think that's one big insight from the experimental method that it's not just the experimental method, but we've sort of rediscovered it there, which is something that every founder, every innovator knows, which is it's not a one-time event. You need a continual cycle of testing, adapting, coming up with a new version, et cetera. So I think there are a lot of details in how you implement an advanced market commitment. I don't want to claim that everything that the Numa Caucus advanced market commitment got everything right. I think it probably could be improved over time. So hopefully they'll be learning on both sides of the table. On this issue of the political economy, without going to the military example, let me...”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think it's very hard to use advanced market commitments for innovations that you don't even know that you need ahead of time. So in the case of, let's say, malaria vaccine, we can say, look, we know we need a malaria vaccine. And you could potentially say we have a process FDA trials or the European equivalence or others for deciding when something is past that goal. So then you can use an advanced market commitment. If you think about the opposite case, let's say the post-it note. We didn't know we needed the post-it note until it was developed. So it's very hard to have an advanced market commitment or a prize or something like that to incentivize the development of innovations that we never knew we needed until they were invented. I personally think it would be worth seeing if we could explore patent buyouts as well. I think that there's a different tool for encouraging innovation that's worth considering.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other issues as well, and the policy took off. Or I don't want to say the policy took off or the policy was adopted in the case of pneumococcus, and then there's been additional work to try to use this in other settings as well, and a few other examples.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vaccine against disease called pneumococcus, but in particular there was already a vaccine for the strains of pneumococcus that were common in the developed world. But no firm had yet developed a vaccine against the strains of pneumococcus that were common in the developing world. They pledged that firms did develop that. They would purchase it or they would help finance the purchase. And that led to three different pneumococcus vaccines have now been developed against the strains that common in the developing world and hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated and 700,000 lives are estimated to have been saved by those pneumococcus vaccines. So I think that's a tremendous example of a success. Often when we think about founding, we think about founding organizations. That wasn't a case of founding an organization, but it was a case where a lot of issues had to be thought through, the economics issues, you know, many.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much the entire birth cohort, obviously. In practice, you can't reach quite everybody. That idea did turn out to be politically acceptable, and a number of countries, together with the Gates Foundation, pledged $1.5 billion to finance the”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were used to. Whereas the idea of selling their products wasn't so much. And so you can avoid some of the distortions of monopoly. One of the key distortions of monopoly is that when the price is high, when there's monopoly pricing, less of this gets sold. And when less of this gets sold, that's harmful for many products. But in the case of pharmaceuticals, that can be very harmful to human health. The approach was commit in advance to buy the efficient quantity for some products, in particular vaccines, fairly easy to know roughly what the efficient quantity is in advance. So commit to buy that in advance, and then that can get to both create an incentive for vaccine development and the efficient quantity to be purchased. In the case of many childhood vaccines, the efficient quantity is enough to vaccinate in pretty”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's useful for me to give a little bit of background on this. I'd written an academic article many years ago proposing a particular way that the public sector could or the government could buy out patents and then put the intellectual property in the public domain. And the idea is this would provide a way of rewarding innovators without some of the distortions accompany monopolies. I think I like the idea academically, but it didn't really go anywhere politically. And the idea was, I was thinking very much about pharmaceuticals. I think this is speculation, but I think the pharmaceutical firms are very, they're obviously very attached to the current system of intellectual property. And I think they felt that they may have felt that if they sold their patents and put them in the public domain, that would weaken the legitimacy of that system, or it was just very different than...”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Innovation Ventures does is it helps invest in innovations for development. Sometimes those are nonprofit organizations, sometimes they're for-profit, sometimes they're started by development economics researchers, sometimes they're started by others. And one of the reasons why I think why we're saying that I don't think this is something unique to me is that when we look at our track record, we see quite a few, I think a really strong record of success. And a lot of that is development economics researchers.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First organization was an organization called World Teach, which placed volunteers. I spent a year teaching secondary school in Kenya. And after teaching in Kenya, when I was living in Kenya, I'd be asked to teach in schools frequently that particular time, I think the situation's really changed. There was a lot of demand for teachers, and there were lots of people in the US who were interested in volunteering. So it seemed there was a role for something to match them together. That was one organization, but more recently, I guess a lot of people who found NGOs often go on or found organizations, sometimes going to be funders or go from being founders of for-profit tech firms to being VCs. And one organization I've been involved in for 10 years now is development innovation ventures, which is part of U.S. Agency for International Development. And development in”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think that I'll just give an example. I guess the most recent thing that I've been involved in, co-founding was an organization called Precision Agriculture for Development. And what that organization does is it works on mobile phone-based agricultural extension, at least that's where it started. It's now broadening out. That's something that requires use tools from experimental economics, A-B tests. We use ideas from behavioral economics. So it's using a lot of tools from economics, but it also takes a bunch of many other skills to found things and to operate an organization. So I don't think it's a matter of those other people being less skilled. I think it's a matter of people being skilled in different areas.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unique in this. I think many economics researchers, researchers in development economics in particular have gone on to found organizations and those have had real impact. I could explain a little bit more about, I don't think this is exclusively tied to development economics into the experimental method, but I could explain a little bit more about why I think the experimental method and contemporary development economics research does have a natural affinity for that.”
2020-10-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source