Hal Varian: belief

Transcript context

…Say you were deregulated or regulated more flexibly. Would there be a lot of mechanism design in accounting systems? Or do you think it would look more or less like how accounting is done today? Well, the trouble is, with accounting, there’re always these gray areas. What’s a good and what’s a service? Or things like that, where there could be a blending from one into another. There is considerable debate about how you should do this, and then there’ll be some kind of reconciliation where people agree, “Yes. That’s a reasonable procedure.” But I don’t think there is ground truth out there anywhere. I think there are lots of choices that are made to resolve some particular situation that’s come up. Let’s say I’ve read all the usual magazine articles about Alphabet/Google. What’s the thing I’m least likely to know about its culture that matters or is interesting?…

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