YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Frank

lines on the record: 89
first: 2016-05-13
most recent: 2016-05-13
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

“I have been for more than a decade a contributor to the economic view column in the New York Times. I'm doing it less frequently now, but occasionally I still write one. Mainly, I'm writing books these days. So I'd go to the Amazon page and search out what's available on Twitter. I'm at Econ Naturalist.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They get a very high salary if they don't perform. They're out. They land whole because they get the nice parachute. But think about it. If you're right about the CEO and the CEO really is, let's say, 3%, 5%, if you're a $10 billion company annual earnings, that's $300 million difference on your bottom line. So having somebody who's just a little bit better in this kind of market really does translate into a huge difference in the bottom line.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all competition. What have you done for me lately if you're not performing up to the highest standard? If there's somebody we could replace you with who would be even epsilon better, you're out the door. And I think that's, you know, you don't know who's going to be a good CEO up front. You take your chances, but the data are pretty clear. If you hire a CEO and the performance doesn't follow, then they're on a very short leash now compared to the old days.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You didn't, and I think there are clear examples of waste fraud and abuse still, but the world really is a lot more like the NBA now than it was when I was a kid. It's all”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business Week has tracked the CEO paid average worker ratio since then, and it's up depending on how large the corporation, it's up around 400 and has gone higher than that. It's a huge increase. The ratio itself has exploded by a factor of 10. And there's a lot of argument about why people talk about crony boards that are voting favors for their pals who installed them on the board. You know, that happened when I was a boy. We used to hear about interlocking directorates and one.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That ratio, as you know, has exploded. It used to be something like 20 times as much as the average worker pay in the CEO in 1980. The CEO ratio to that research.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a very interesting question, and John Hytte, my friend John Hait, the psychologist, has done some interesting work. There are temperamental differences between liberals and conservatives. Actually, the split between the two groups on the role of luck is maybe a little more nuanced than our popular impressions make it seem. But conservatives are Less likely to believe in the challenges to the concept of free will than liberals are. And so there are some similarities in belief patterns across the groups. But I think if you probe a little more deeply, people from all along the political aisle, if they really think about the examples that they know about, are quick to concede that, yeah, it helps to be lucky being good and working hard by themselves aren't usually enough.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“CUSAC turned it down. All right, Matthew Broderick. Matthew Broderick turned it down. Even more wrong. Only then did they go to Cranston. Now, of course, Cranston is a superstar. Everybody wants him in their picture. And he was in his mid-50s. He was not going to become a superstar if either CUSAC or Broderick had taken that role. That was going to be...”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The studio bosses said, No way, this is a guy who's never had a leading dramatic role. He's a middle-aged sitcom guy. He was the”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brian Cranston I had never heard of. I've watched Breaking Bad. He was unbelievably good in it. When Vince Gilligan proposed casting him in the Walter White role, which was the heart of that series.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But make no mistake, Gates is really smart. He's very talented, very hardworking. But that combination of things isn't sufficient.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he'll say there probably wasn't a group of a dozen worldwide who had opportunities like he had. But then, even so, you would never know who he was probably if IBM hadn't sort of in a short-sighted move given him the license to sell the operating system to its personal computer that was about to launch. They didn't have high hopes for sales of that machine. And so he ended up being the richest man on the planet as he's quick to concede because he got a few really well-timed breaks.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“O Bill Gates to his everlasting credit is really quick to acknowledge how lucky he was. He had one of the few schools that had a computer lab in it. He was born in 1955. Didn't exist where if he'd been born 10 years earlier, that wouldn't have existed if he'd been 10 years later being born. People would have been all over that already. He was there at the right time. He got access to the computer labs at the University of Washington.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't hear anything controversial in those remarks, but people were very angered by them. And so if you tell a rich person who's beginning with the posture, I did it all myself, that, hey, you were lucky also, which is almost always true, they tend to hear you saying that, oh, you don't belong where you were. You're not skillful. That's not the message. No, the people who win in these markets are almost invariably really skillful, and they work really hard. So it's in a way natural that when they try to explain to themselves why do they succeed, that they focus on their hard work and talent. That's a big factor in what did bring them to the top. But they were also very lucky.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A video that went viral had had millions of angry comments directed at her. What did she say? She said, you built a business, it succeeded. That's great. But just remember, you shipped your goods to market on roads. The rest of us helped build. You hired workers, the community paid to educate, police and firemen that we hired helped protect you. Part of the social contract is to pay forward so the next group that comes along will enjoy those same opportunities to succeed that you did.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a great thing when you see it happen and you do see it happen. I've no successful people who are very quick to acknowledge that they had breaks and wouldn't be where they are now except for them. But still, there are many whose position seems to be, I did it all on my own. Think back to 2012 when Elizabeth Warren gave her You Didn't Build that Speech. It was.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a theme in Thomas Piquetti's book that the period of post-war relative equality was the aberration, not the norm. I think the assumption all along had been, well, that's normal and we're moving away from it. I don't think that issue is completely settled, but the technological forces that are causing incomes to concentrate at the top, those haven't even begun to finish playing out. You know, Amazon is going to continue displacing retailers until there almost aren't any more retailers. And we're a long way from that happening.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The real trick is to find the performer who's better, at least in the public's eye, by a small margin. People want that performer and no other.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the same technological changes that Phil Cook and I talked about and that indeed Alfred Marshall had talked about in the 1890s as technology lets the most able performers in each domain extend their reach. There's just going to be a bigger slice of the market that they can effectively serve, and then the bidding for their services heats up. We don't need more than two or three sopranos at this point. A hundred years ago, the only way to listen to music was live in concert. But now we listen to music mostly in recorded form. Once the master discs have been stamped out, they can make copies, mp3s, other media are essentially zero cost to copy.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a really interesting question. In the 50s, we had one earner families. Now it's much more common to have two earners. So families should be doing much better. Well, they don't seem to be doing much better. And one reason is that a lot of the extra money has gone into a bidding war for houses in the better school districts. So we've got more money now. What's the first thing we want to do? Send our kids to better schools. Well, other families want to do that too. And it's as if everybody stands up to see better. Nobody sees any better than before. We just bid up the prices of the houses in the better school districts. Half of all kids go to bottom half schools the same as before.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You would want to send your kids to a school of at least average quality, and to do that, you have to buy the median price house because as is true in every country, school quality tracks, house prices in the neighborhoods very closely. So every parent wants to do that. Houses have gotten bigger during that time. That's partly why families have to work more hours to be able to afford access to the median house. And it's just that others like them are spending a higher percentage of their income too. So you've got to match what they do or else you fall behind and it's your kids who go to schools with a metal detectors out front.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was the monthly number of hours you had to work in order to earn enough money to gain access to the median price house. And that's an interesting number because if you're in the middle, you think you would earn.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's got good aspects to it and also some ones that ought to concern us. So if you think of piano manufacture, in the last century it was a local industry. Why? Because it cost so much. Some producers who are better than others now they could extend their reach, so you'd be buying a better piano than you would have had access to before. The downside of that is that it tends to lead to an enormous increase in the concentration of income. The people who were thriving in local markets before now they compete to see who's going to be the one who dominates the broader market that's now serviceable by these firms since transportation costs are low. And the losers in that contest, they've got to go find something else to do, basically.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was leaked that the author really was JK Rowley. That's air quotes around leaks. It shot to the top of the bestseller list. So, yeah, having been successful is the biggest thing that can assure your success in the next round.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she just on a LARK published a detective novel or a whodunit under a pseudonym after she'd quit the Harry Potter series. And the book got good reviews but sold tepidly.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the surest way to publish a bestseller is to have already published one. If you've published two, then you're even more likely to have a bestseller. And then once you've got a string of them, the movie people start bidding against one another for the rights. Yeah, the rewards really do explode once you're on a successful track. But if you would go back early in a person's career, it wouldn't be so clear that that would be the person who would emerge and become the big winner. Even in Michael Jordan's case, he was cut from the basketball team. Right.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Secretariat, he won by 30 lengths. But typically, it's not that far ahead of the field when we see a winner emerge. It could have been any one of a number of people who emerged that way.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could do that. Well, height's not all you need. You watch the highlight reel of Michael Jordan and you think you're seeing something in slow motion because it really does seem that he's hanging in mid-air for 35 seconds.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there would be plenty of people who would do his job for a tiny fraction of what he gets. You would, I'm guessing, I would have been willing”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when the winter emerges, there's a huge difference between the reward that person gets and the rewards received by others who were really so close to being as good that no one could really tell. It was almost an arbitrary choice to anoint the winner. And so you get a situation where most people feel comfortable if somebody works 1% harder than others or is 1% more talented will find let them be paid 1% more. But here you have somebody emerge who's 1% mortality and that person might earn 10,000 times as much as the others who are almost as equal.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if there are thousands of people trying to be anointed the person who gets to do that, then the competition's pretty bitter and there's a lot of bunching of talent and effort. All the people who are finalists in that contest are going to be really, really good. But typically one will emerge and it will be someone who's maybe a little bit better than most of the others, but rarely the best contestant. He's also had a lucky break or two along the way.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a kind of market we've seen this market structure going back a long, long time. Actually, it was written about in the 19th century in similar terms to the ones we use to describe it. But it's a market where If you have a task that can be done market-wide by a single person, then essentially you've got the conditions for a big tournament. It's a valuable task typically if somebody can serve the whole market.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I don't have a compelling answer for it. If you take the early onset of the date range, the late 60s as the time when income inequality started growing rapidly, then 1995 is plenty of time for a lot of people to have noticed it, and many people did notice it. It's just that... The subject hadn't really caught on as one of general interest.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it's not always who gets there first, who wins the prize. Yeah, Picketty's gotten a lot of very well justified attention on these issues. And he's done the rest of us who are in the trenches writing about this subject. Write a piece on the issue, and people will pay attention to it, whereas it would have gone lost in the shuffle 20 years ago.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we were just starting to see clear evidence of those trends that were beginning. They began sometime in the late 60s or early 70s. There's still some quarreling about when the exact moment was. There probably wasn't an exact moment. But as it's gone on longer and as the multiples have gotten bigger, more and more people have taken interest. And there's been a lot of very serious work in recent decades on it.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Society has done an enormous amount to try to tame the competition. We have all sorts of regulations that prevent arms races that get out of control in nature. But I think the income inequality problem is maybe one of the early signs that our attempts to keep things in balance have been falling short.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand, to really succeed in today's world, it's essential to be a trusted member of an effective team. You have to be able to be seen by others as trustworthy and cooperative. Really effective teams, teams with talented people have their pick. They don't need to hire any jerks for their team. If you're not a person, they feel they can rely on. When you're out of view and you have a chance to serve your own interests at the expense of the teams, then why should they have you on their team? They've got better choices. So it's a kind of a complex balancing act. You have to be somebody who's attractive to others and trustworthy in situations where you could cheat them, but they have to feel confident you won't. But you have to also care about getting ahead”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. That's the most powerful predictor of that animal's ability to project its stuff into the next round. So if there's a famine, it's not the high-ranking animals that starve. The high-ranking animals typically have much better mating opportunities. There's a whole variety of reasons for that. But if you don't care about where you rank, you're probably... Not coming into the world very well equipped to deal with the competitive fray that we're in”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's become quite fashionable now. When I first started writing about it, it was very difficult to find anybody who cared. I think my own interest in it was kindled by my interest in biology, where if you know an animal's rank in whatever group it's alpha.”
2016-05-13 · Masters in Business · Interview With Robert Frank: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source