Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…First of all, when we started that paper, the goal was largely to estimate the economic effects of the 2017 tax law, and we had a number of conversations. We agreed on the general modeling approach. And we said, “You know what we’re going to do? We may reach two different sets of point estimates. And if we have two sets of point estimates, we’re going to put them together in a table. And there’s going to be a crosswalk so you can see what assumptions I used, what assumptions Robert used.” In the course of writing that paper, we converged, and we ended up having quite similar views on the causal question of what the impact of this law would be. We then evaluated the law quite differently. So the body of the paper — we intended to actually have different voices, but we ended up having a pretty unified voice. When it came to the conclusion and what inferences we drew from all of this, we had very different voices. But I would love to see more people paired up. Take inequality — force people who have two different sets of numbers to write a paper together, so we can have something that we can reliably understand is the truth on the issue. Or alternatively, understand what those differences are. Yeah, I’d love to see more of that. I will close with a few questions about what I call the Jason Furman production function. Who was your first mentor, ever? Can’t remember that far past high school. But we had a geometry teacher at my high school named Mr. Sturm — just the level of rigor he brought to proofs and thinking was something that I learned a huge amount from.…

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