Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, yeah. I think they’ve done the same with mine. I don’t blame you at all for that, right? If something bad happens with a charter city, I don’t say, “Oh, Paul Romer gave them cover. ” I say, “No, it’s the fault of the people who did it.” So I would say economists were pretty much not to blame for the opioid crisis. There’s a speech Greenspan gave, where he doesn’t cite me, but he could. It’s all about “We can’t have regulation because we’ve got to have growth. Growth comes from innovation. Regulation slows innovation. It’ll stop creative destruction. We just have to live with greater destruction.” So, I feel like, yeah, some of my ideas could have been used to support bad policy, but instead of asking whether I’m personally to blame or personally a bad person, what I’m stepping back and asking is, did we create a system that let someone like Greenspan make recommendations under the cover of science? Like, “I’m a scientist, I’m telling you how it should go.” But those recommendations were really based on a worldview he got from a novel by Ayn Rand. There was no technical scientific basis for them. And they turned out to be really incredibly harmful, so we need to make sure that the system that we’re building isn’t misused in that way.…

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