Glen Weyl: evaluation

Transcript context

…Say just a little more. Milton Friedman — if you read Capitalism and Freedom, it’s beautiful. It’s one of my favorite books. I actually think it’s very similar to Rawls. It’s funny because a lot of people on the left love Rawls, but they hate Milton Friedman. I actually think their visions are very similar. I think both of them dramatically underestimated the importance of increasing returns phenomenon. Friedman says, “Well, there may occasionally be a temporary monopoly, but it’ll go away because of competition anyway, and we need to try to just avoid it becoming too permanent by the government getting involved in it,” and so forth. I don’t think he perceived that increasing returns phenomena that tend to create monopolies are really the foundation of what creates the possibility of civilization. He had in the back of his mind this sort of decreasing returns model that’s dominant in economics, and I think that that colors his whole worldview in a way that leads him to miss a lot of the key questions, even though he was right on a lot of the things that he spoke about, actually. I’m actually largely sympathetic to a lot of Milton Friedman’s ideas on the things he focused on. But the problem is, the things he focused on weren’t the key problems, I don’t think. Speaking of increasing returns, what’s your favorite movie?…

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