Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Obviously, Trump is in the throes of making all sorts of, at least by traditional standards, unconventional appointments. If he created the new role of Czar of Great Stagnation–Ending and asked you to take the job, what would your policies be? My policy would be, tell him to give that job to Peter Thiel. [laughter] And he’s done it. I think a lot of the Trump appointments actually are excellent or might turn out to be excellent: at the FCC, possibly at the FDA. Education has possible upsides, though I don’t think it will really change much. I think there’s a good chance Rex Tillerson turns out to be quite good. Now, what it’s like to be a good appointee without proper support from the executive branch? We’re going to run that experiment. It could all go badly. [laughter] But I also think [Stephen] Bannon is very smart and it’s quite possible the strategy is, “We’re going to appoint a bunch of people who are really just different and talented but not political, and give them all free rein, and we know 80 percent of them will fail, but a bunch might do good things.” We saw the Obama model be a unifier, hope and change, appoint academic, smart people who love Obama and Obama loves them. And they’re loyal to him, and there’s a semi-well-functioning White House. That didn’t actually change many things, whether you agree with all the programs or not. So that’s their immediate experience, and they’re going to try to do everything different. As a social scientist, I find this fascinating. But the notion that two or three of the agencies could come out of this much better, and a few, much worse — I worry the most about the Fed and the EPA. But I think a lot of them are very smart, talented, able people, and we’ll see what they’re able to do. The case is often made that the EPA doesn’t matter a great deal because it’s economics that determines what happens on the climate front. Coal plants are becoming uneconomic, and China is canceling plans to the build them, and solar is crashing in price, and so forth. Given all of that, why do you think the EPA really matters?…

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