Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s online. Moving back to Twitter questions. I want you to answer this rapid-fire because it’s . . . Just answer this as quickly as you can. [laughs] It’s kind of a grab-bag question. Vikash Palit: There are three questions. “What are the pluses and minuses of ending the Fed? What are the top three ways you would change the US healthcare system? What’s the ideal tax system look like, according to you?” In reverse order, the ideal tax system is a progressive consumption tax with a relatively light rate of taxation on capital income, though it can’t be zero because otherwise, people will reclassify their labor income into capital income. Best ways to change the healthcare system. A lot of that is frozen into place. I’m more focused in my current roles on improving the rate of progress in science and getting more innovation and reforming the NIH and NSF and making them more dynamic and quicker to respond to change. People don’t usually call that the healthcare system, but that would be my emphasis. If you look at, say, the mRNA vaccines or what seems to be coming against malaria, against dengue, possibly against cancer — that’s yielding huge dividends. Fighting over the scraps of Medicaid expansion or something ultimately seems to me like a misallocation of talent. Ending the Fed. Well, what do you replace it with? You can’t answer that question in the abstract, but I suspect what you replace it with will not do better. The price of gold is much too volatile to have a gold standard now, even if you liked the classical gold standard. I’m not sure it was better than the Fed, but it wouldn’t be workable now. And what, Bitcoin? That’s a non-starter. So, replace the Fed with what? Just a frozen stock of dollars? Again, seems to me worse than what we have now. All right, Vikash, you got your answer.…

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