Mark Zuckerberg: belief

Transcript context

…Sure. Absolutely. So do you think that those things are all related? I think you used the phrase “cost disease”when referring to the cost explosion of things like healthcare and education, student debt, and rent. Do you think that’s a different type of problem, or do you think that is fundamentally related to the rate of progress in biomedicine, as an example? I think there are common features to these problems, though each one is different. Restrictions on entry is one, highly bureaucratized institutions. Sometimes a lot of third party payment — which may be required in the case of catastrophic healthcare, but it nonetheless has distorting effects. Areas where people have very strong moral feelings I think we often make worse decisions about. We’re not analytical enough. And you put all of those together. But I would stress, say healthcare — if you go to Singapore, healthcare there, I think it’s about 4% of GDP. They have slightly higher life expectancy than we do. Their system is by no means perfect. But we can see, though comparative analysis, there are ways of doing this better. The NIMBY problem, cost of living, getting an apartment. In Japan, it is mostly solved because building in Japan tends to be regulated at higher levels than the city or the county, so more gets built. Living in Japan is cheaper, the cost of renting an apartment. So often we know the answers. We shy away from really focusing on a concerted effort to get to doing them in this country.…

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