Vitalik Buterin: preference

Transcript context

…Hello. I’m here today with Vitalik Buterin, who is founder and chief scientist at Ethereum. I’d like to start with what I call the Vitalik Buterin production function — that is, how you get things done. I went back and I reread all of the papers on your home page. I found it quite striking that there were two very important economics results, one based on menu costs associated with the name of Greg Mankiw. Another is a paper on the indeterminacy of monetary equilibrium associated with Fischer Black. These are famous papers. On your own, you appear to rediscover these results without knowing about the papers at all. So how would you describe how you teach yourself economics? I guess it involves a combination of things. Some of it is reading what various economists on the internet say. Some of it is reading papers. Sometimes, if I want to dig into some topic more deeply, I end up reading books, like I read one on urban transportation economics a while back. I also go to conferences. I was just at the Economics and Computation conference with Glen Weyl and other people in Ithaca last week, which I thought was very interesting. It’s always kind of an indispensable opportunity to physically go to places and actually talk to people, because that way you learn things about both what people are thinking about and how people are thinking in the space that you can’t easily find from the internet. If you think about economics — what you’ve taught yourself — what do you think of as the central ideas relevant for cryptoeconomics, which is a term I think you coined?…

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