Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, I think the innovators are doing it well, but you would think that we would recognize some things are like, “Wow, we’ve been maybe keeping things a little too tied down.” We’re a little too risk-averse in terms of a societal or policy response. I’m still confused that we’ve seen this miraculous development of the vaccines, and still there’s this hesitancy. I would suspect that these new vaccines, like a malaria vaccine, will come more quickly. But still, it will take far too long. I think there’s some change in the news cycle, where people just don’t care about so many things. They may care for a short while, and then it passes, and the new thing is here. Attention switching is much different than it used to be. If it’s something where you need a lot of people behind you to get something done, like to get 90 percent vaccinated, that seems much harder than ever before. But if the mass of people — you simply need them to tolerate what you’re doing, and if the law is not hindering you, that may, in some ways, be easier than it used to be because the attention switching is so rapid, it’s harder for them to prove an obstacle. Now we have a bunch of problems — vaccinating people, testing, climate change — where you need active participation from a lot of people, and there, we’re having problems. The other class of innovations — I think we’re kicking butt, so it’s a weird world. Higher variance, I think, is the key. All right, you’re three for three on production function. Can we keep the trend? Fourth one: “People who stayed with me in my house have told me that I have a habit of which I was completely unaware — that I sit upstairs, where I’m sitting now, in my study, and I work on my computer. Then, about every half an hour, there’s an enormous bang, and I stamp around the room swearing. The people in the house are terribly worried that something has gone awfully wrong. Then I get back to work, and everything resumes as usual for the next half an hour, and then it all happens again. I was completely unaware that I did that until several people have told me that I do, but it seems to work.”…

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