Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think they demand more evidence. I think there’s also more poor-quality evidence out there. The supply has met the demand. We started this whole line of work about what we called scientific integrity, academic integrity on how do you improve the process and the incentive system of academic research because there was this realization we had that everybody in the chain was incentivized to find the positive result, whether it was the funder, the academic, the university, the journal, or the popular press. Everybody wanted to find and publicize the positive result, and so there were a lot of positive results that were coming out that were either done with low bars of integrity and quality, or at the extreme end — and this is relatively rare — but bordering on absolute fraud in the industry. Let’s say I’m a person of great means, and I come to you. I say, “John, I think prison is immoral, but I don’t want to just release Charles Manson. Where should I put my philanthropic efforts?” What do you tell them? What have you learned? I think there’s this fundamental question, if somebody’s going to get released from prison — which, 95 percent of the people who are in the prison system today are going to get released back into society — do we want that person to have spent the past 10 years in a gang fighting for their life, doing nothing productively? Or do we want that person to have been working on education, working on skills, have been working on their addiction, et cetera? I think 100 out of 100 people will choose the latter. We have a system where the political economy of putting money into the prison system for most jurisdictions is very low. So, much of our prison system actually looks like the former, where it’s become the largest mental health institution, the largest place for people with addiction, the largest place with people who have a lot of time on their hands and are under-skilled and undereducated and don’t get any improvement in those things. I think the real value is, how do you improve conditions within prisons?…

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