Steve Teles: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the biggest intellectual hole in conservative law and economics? The biggest intellectual hole. Probably the biggest intellectual hole is comparative. That is, when I think about what economic ideas mattered a lot to me. One of them was reading Robert Wade’s, Governing the Market, years and years ago, back in graduate school and thinking really systematically about how different political systems can generate different, often desirable economic equilibria, right? That is, South Korea has a set of… As you were talking about governing rules and laws that have some substantial rent for insiders but that also turned out in that particular setting to produce lots of economic returns, I wouldn’t recommend that for Argentina. And so the idea that there’s a universal set of laws or rules that are the market optimal ones, I think is a problematic one. I think thinking more systematically about why different economic laws, regulations and customs appear to work and produce economic surplus in different places would probably be the one I’d volunteer on that answer. Are you ready for a quick bout of overrated versus underrated?…

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