Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. I’m thinking about Jonas Salk, the man who cured polio and, I think, created the polio vaccine. I have read, I don’t know if it’s true, that he gave it away when he discovered it. People pointed out that, “Yeah, that was at a time when there wasn’t FDA testing that costs…” People debate what it costs to get a drug approved, whether it’s a mere 500 million, or is it more like 2 billion? But obviously, we live in a world where it’s very expensive to get a drug approved. Is there other things you would do to make a prize more effective? I guess I was trying to say two things. One is that these other pieces of the regulatory puzzle might be part of the challenge. The other is that in the old days, the non-monetary aspects are also pretty important. Jonas Salk is immortal. Maybe we should just say, “Whoever comes up with it, we’re going to have a set of baseball playing cards that we give away to every American child to worship this person who was saved their grandparent’s life.” I don’t know. No, absolutely. I’ve written in the past, “We don’t respect scientists enough,” and that may be hurting us now. One possible silver lining of this cloud is we will respect scientists a lot more if they come through with some pretty big and significant development. I think that’s likely at some point, but just to pre-commit as a culture to honoring those people is something we all can do. Respect your scientists and prizes. What else should we do? Well, I was going to ask you if you were, quote, in charge, if you were the coronavirus czar today or President of the United States, besides creating potential a very large prize, the other ideas that are being bandied about are bailouts of various kinds for certain industries that are particularly hard hit by this. Do you think there’s a moral industries that are particularly hard hit by this. Do you think there’s a moral hazard issue there in some of those cases? Obviously in a lot of those cases there’s not much of a moral hazard issue. Somebody pointed out, I don’t think you expect the Thai restaurant on the corner to prepare for a pandemic and act accordingly in advance so that, worrying about the impact of a bailout there is probably not the biggest worry. What are your thoughts on these moral hazard issues? Do you think the airline should get a bailout? I think that’s a good thing?…

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