Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…That would seem to me to be, given our earlier conversation about the risk of a permanent disruption of social life because of the recurring challenges that we might be facing, that might be the one thing you’d want us to really kind of focus on, is to get a lot of really smart people trying a lot of different ways to mitigate the medical impact of this. You agree? Yes. I do think you have to be a little careful in how you structure the prize. A poorly-specified prize will encourage people to work in small groups and not share information, right? “I want all the money for myself.” Some amount of discretion is required, and you want to favor, when you hand out the prize, institutions that have been cooperating and sharing information. If you simply set up a very credible board of a half-dozen people with real expertise to decide how to hand out, say, $50 billion, and you make sure there are people willing to write a check, like to a big, unpopular corporation, if that’s who’s done the good work, I think that’s what we should do. But simply saying, “Well, there’s going to be a prize for the company that solves this,” you might get a hoarding of information when sharing is appropriate. Yeah. I’m thinking about Jonas Salk, the man who cured polio and, I think, created the polio vaccine. I have read, I don’t know if it’s true, that he gave it away when he discovered it. People pointed out that, “Yeah, that was at a time when there wasn’t FDA testing that costs…” People debate what it costs to get a drug approved, whether it’s a mere 500 million, or is it more like 2 billion? But obviously, we live in a world where it’s very expensive to get a drug approved. Is there other things you would do to make a prize more effective? I guess I was trying to say two things. One is that these other pieces of the regulatory puzzle might be part of the challenge. The other is that in the old days, the non-monetary aspects are also pretty important. Jonas Salk is immortal. Maybe we should just say, “Whoever comes up with it, we’re going to have a set of baseball playing cards that we give away to every American child to worship this person who was saved their grandparent’s life.” I don’t know.…

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