Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…[laughs] Well, I do think, as you know, that the so-called topple rate of the S&P 500 is increasing, by which the number of companies that were previously in the S&P 500 in the last decade are now dropped out of it altogether. Part of the acceleration of the modern age, of the networked age, is that there is much more revolution in what the top firms are, and I think that’s a good thing. I think it’s both good to have enduring institutions, and it’s good to have new blood and new innovation because that suggests that there’s a point of competing and building new things and having new technological platforms. I do think that one of the things that the untold goodness about the renovation of the Microsoft story, which Satya is doing such a great job of, is the fact that you can build to greatness, can be challenged, and can rebuild. It’s as important as the entrepreneurial story because persistent institutions at scale that do the inventions, innovations that only scale can do, like building massive new platforms, like cloud computing, tends to come from the big companies, not tends to come from start-ups. Those kinds of things are, I think, super important. If I talk to political scientists, most of them will tell me that money and campaign finance don’t matter that much for elections. We see Donald Trump having been elected. He didn’t raise a lot of money early on, or indeed at any point. So what’s your underlying theory of how money can influence or improve politics, given that you have a role in this process yourself? Well, I would prefer democracies where money has a more muted influence. I actually disagree with the view that money doesn’t have an influence. That view is like saying marketing doesn’t work, and it’s clear that marketing can work. Now, there’s the old adage —…

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