Bryan Caplan: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don't know if I could have made it to IIT. Imagine if your family was out in some rural village, and it's the Indira Gandhi era, right? You don't hear about dot com billionaires or anything. In terms of inspiring a generation, I think the billionaires are inspiring a generation of movers and shakers. If they are, and if their earnings were greatly taxed, I think this would really put a dent in it. I think anytime people speak ill of them, that's putting a dent in it. If you want billionaires to make less money, praise them to the skies so that more people enter, and it drives down the rewards for doing what they do. So this tournament theory does make a lot of sense. This is a story about, “Why do you pay the CEO so much more than all the next level down? Is he really that much better than the second-best guy?” Look, this isn't just incentivizing the CEO; it's incentivizing everyone who's there. Who could plausibly tell themselves, “Maybe one day me.” So there's that. The other thing is actually going back to the historical contingency. I think business history is less historically contingent, but we actually do have a lot of evidence that the quality of entrepreneurship and management varies a lot from country to country, which I think does actually mean that for the really big businesses. It's not totally clear that it would have happened anyway. Now, if you broaden it and just ask, “Well, would eCommerce have happened?” Yes, eCommerce would have happened. Would there be one store that was bigger than the others? Yeah, but is it possible that the second-best thing to Amazon would have been 1/10th as good? That actually is not crazy. I don't know. But to go and just say, “We know that that's not true,” seems pretty dogmatic to me. Again, what’s also striking is what is the second best thing to Amazon. You can say it's a natural monopoly, not true in any other retail that I know of. So people talk about Alibaba, and I tried looking at that one. Isn’t this Chinese? Shouldn't they be catering to their market? It's the English language version of the site. Shouldn't they be trying to make me happy? So that is a case where it doesn't seem like it makes any economic sense; it's a natural monopoly based upon past experience. Think about cars. We got the big three (Germany, Japan, US). Why aren't there three things like Amazon? Maybe it really is the case that no one but Jeff Bezos knew how to do it, especially when you realize part of knowing how to do something is knowing how to assemble a team. It's so easy to say, “You didn't do it, and it was your team that did it.” I made my team. That's what a leader does! They take people that are good in themselves, and they fuse them together, and they make them great, and maybe it’s self-serving, but it's plausible. That makes a lot of sense. Well, Bryan, I want to thank you for giving me so much of your time. I especially want to thank you for being the first guest on my podcast. We've gone full circle with the third episode, but it would not have been possible at all without you. Bryan Caplan Totally awesome. And yes, so the books that we've been talking about are both available on Amazon. So there is How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery. Then there is Don't Be a Feminist, Essays on Genuine Justice. By the time you get the podcast, both books will be available. They're really cheap, only 12 bucks, and I have not raised the price despite inflation! I've been thinking about why not and the economic theory behind that. The eBook is just $9.99. These books are both collections of my very best essays from 2005 to 2022, but Don't Be a Feminist has a totally all-new lead essay, one that, for years, I was too nervous to write. Then as I watched my daughter growing up, I felt something along the lines of “No, I've got to write this essay. I'm going to do it for her.” The actual first essay is called Don't Be a Feminist, A Letter to My Daughter. That is how I frame it. This is not an angry essay. As I said, I'm not an angry person. I'm not mad at feminists. Rather, I want to especially help my daughter, but anyone who's in the same boat as her, I would be thrilled to go and help them as well.…

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