Tim Harford: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Exactly. Yeah, perhaps on its way. Well, maybe that’s the equilibrium in the long run. It’s interesting that “Baby Shark,” for example, which is this viral thing — the latest viral version has been created by Pinkfong, a Korean company. They have an educational company in principal. They’re supposed to be teaching Korean kids to speak English. It just so happens that the videos that they’re producing to teach Korean kids to speak English are also being watched by English and American kids, for whom it is probably far less educational. But yes, there’s a possibility. Alexis Madrigal had a great piece about this a few months ago in the Atlantic. He pointed out that there’s a service called YouTube Kids. It’s very high quality, it’s curated. YouTube also seems to spend no effort whatsoever in calling anybody’s attention to it. He said, “I’m a parent of toddlers. It wasn’t until researching this piece of journalism that I found out YouTube Kids even existed. ” I don’t know why YouTube doesn’t push that more, but one suspects it’s about the advertising dollars. Why haven’t you ever owned a television?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.