Daron Acemoglu: preference

Transcript context

…Then why believe in what you believe? Okay. I think what I believe is, first of all, not as an external standard—I don’t know whether external standard or internal standard is the right word—but that we have to defend some degree of individual freedom because everything starts from that, both in terms of our meaningful lives, but also any kind of improvement in the human condition requires individual initiative, and that individual initiative is impossible without some amount of freedom, a meaningful freedom, not just saying, “Okay, you have the freedom to pray, but you cannot express that idea with others or you cannot turn it into action. ” Some meaningful freedom. That is the only starting point that we need to have. Around that, we need to build things with some sort of consensus within society. That’s what I think liberalism has to recognize, that you have to enshrine those rights, but then give enough elbow room to people to form their own community-level agreements. You present some different values in the book. One is nondomination. Another is noninterference. There’s others. When they clash, what’s the metric you introduce to decide how to resolve that clash?…

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