Tyler Cowen: disagreement

Transcript context

…Oh, my goodness, I made so many mistakes. Now I’m wondering what I should reveal, given this is going to be a podcast, because the list is quite long. [laughs] Let me try to find a useful example that I can share. I don’t know what I would call a mistake, but I have learned a lot more over the years about that line where you know enough about something to try to reason what you should be thinking about. It’s gotten better. I’m not saying I’m all done there, but I have the same academic disease that any academic will understand, that I get focused on the interesting because that’s appealing to me. Most of the time, most answers are boring. “It’s a respiratory disease. Wear a mask.” That’s a boring example. Trying to be too clever, too smart, almost too contrarian sometimes — I would say that is something that I fight in myself because, like a lot of academics and a lot of intellectual people, I like the answers that surprise me. I like an example that’s a pure counterintuitive, but in reality, they’re almost never true. There are very few things in the world that I think are big and important, where they’re counterintuitive, and the surprising thing’s actually revealing. That’s my reasoning — not error as much as attraction — that I believe I have gotten a better handle on. In fact, what I’ve done throughout the pandemic — and what some of the people you’ve named — is just say a lot of basic stuff. Respiratory disease — you need masks. Vaccination — you need wider coverage as soon as possible. Outdoors is safer. Those very simple things. If you’re having super-spreading events at a distance, it’s probably airborne. Every time I do that, I do better. Let me try an example where I disagree with you and see if we can work that out. You’ve been very critical of stock buybacks. From my point of view, they’re just like stock dividends. They don’t matter. They don’t harm the economy any more than paying interest on bonds harms the economy. It just recycles funds. There’s not a real resource cost. They hardly increase the value of stocks. The academic literature, essentially, would agree they’re not a big deal. So, why be upset about stock buybacks? Have I said something about stock buybacks? [laughter]…

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