Alex Tabarrok: belief

Transcript context

…It’s very hard to know, but two things I would say. One is my post on state capacity libertarianism, which is still a good statement of where I am philosophically. I think that’s held up well. When I coined the term, that’s a case where I was sitting there, giggling, “Oh, this term is so absurd. No one will ever use it, so it’s just right.” People still use it. I wrote a post about Emergent Ventures where, at the Emergent Ventures winners’ meetup, and I outlined the philosophy behind Emergent Ventures. I don’t think it’s our most read post. I don’t think it’s our most cited post, but a lot of donors read that post and were persuaded. Without that post, I don’t think we would have Emergent Ventures as a large thing. Given how much talent we now have — over 400 winners have come through Emergent Ventures — that’s a super influential post, even though, at the surface level, it may not look that way. We try and either increase the Overton window or try and stop the Overton window from shutting down. I think some of the COVID posts, like on First Doses First and things like that — even though in the United States, we didn’t do First Doses First, Britain and Canada did. Hopefully, I may have had some influence there. But what I think is interesting is that when we did Monkeypox, CDC went along with First Doses First for Monkeypox. That’s what I mean by keeping that Overton window. Even though no one’s going to cite, “Oh, Tabarrok said this on first doses for COVID,” it made it possible for people to think that this is an idea we should be thinking about. The next time a virus came around, you had a bigger pot of ideas from which to pull. This idea, which once seemed totally radical, now seems, ‘‘Hey, maybe we could try this.’’ I think that has been — On First Doses First, there was a major decision-maker from an actual country who just sent me a message, ‘‘Hey, do you guys really mean this?’’ I said, “Yes.” The next day it happened. No, I’m not saying it happened because of that only thing, but people are really listening, to an extent that it’s scary sometimes.…

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