Nicholas Bloom: belief

Transcript context

…Does Scotland have a different cultural notion of hooliganism? If you know about the famous Old Firm rivalry, Celtic and Rangers, you probably think, “No.” The two Glaswegian teams. Again, in Scotland, I really spent the vast amount of my time in Glasgow. I wasn’t expecting, Tyler, to be asked about Scottish football hooliganism. [laughter] But as far as I’m aware, no. The interesting thing, by the way, on technology — one of the issues that afflicted the UK was hooliganism. There’s various elements of it. One was just fighting and violence, but another one is racism, and in both of them, technology has been fantastic at combating. On both of them — cameras in the grounds, ID cards, online. There was an incident just over the weekend — I was looking just this morning — about the racial comments made against a Crystal Palace football player that the police checked through online, and turned out to be a 12-year-old boy in the West Midlands making this stuff. Just in terms of the ground, technology’s improved attendance at sports games. Because of this, we can stamp it out. That’s something that doesn’t show up in productivity figures. Another concern you could have — and is being a big debate in terms of productivity — is the case of the quality of life has risen in ways that we’re not measuring. I could get into that, but I think the answer is, primarily, no. You could make that claim, and hooliganism has been pushed back a lot by technology. If policy uncertainty is so important for the macroeconomy pre-COVID, why was the reign of Donald Trump just fine for the American economy? Because there was high uncertainty. I woke up every morning not knowing what would happen or what would be said. I’m not sure, ex post, that uncertainty was realized until COVID, but in fact, it was realized on a massive scale. Yet ex ante, the uncertainty didn’t seem to have much of a negative drag.…

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