Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…They work a lot more poorly than a lot of economists think. And they work poorly in different ways than economists think. There’s sort of a standard list that economists have of ways that labor markets are messed up. The more times people talk efficiency wages, that’s the real problem. How about the problem of employers don’t want to fire people who are incompetent? How about that problem? It’s not one that sounds very good, but it’s one that I think is very serious. Or again, for all the talk that people have about discouraged workers and how unemployment rates understate the severity of the unemployment problems, they’re ignoring discouraged workers. I always remember, “Sure, but what about the megalomaniacal workers?” The workers that think they’re too good for any job for which they’re actually qualified for, and they keep searching around and staying in the numbers, even though it would be like me claiming to be an unemployed brain surgeon. I’m not an unemployed brain surgeon; I’m not a brain surgeon at all. In general, the world’s more complicated. Especially, the problem here is that the behavioral economics revolution, or like psychology in economics, does not really enter labor economics nearly as much as it should. Especially like economists, when they do psychology, they only read a few parts of psychology, and there’s a bunch of other areas they just don’t pay much attention to that I think also are leading to some tough results. Again, of course, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have government policies that are amplifying a problem. Sure, any time you have human beings dealing with each other face to face, there’s going to be things that are badly screwed up. Let me ask a very general question, trying to put together your thought as a whole. You’re saying, across a lot of margins in terms of learning, formal education doesn’t matter that much, right? It matters for signaling. Also, in your book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, you’re saying, at least within certain margins of acceptable behavior, parenting doesn’t matter that much. You believe in both of these two views. Schooling doesn’t matter that much. Parenting doesn’t matter that much. Sure.…

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