Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
29 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“One thing that I think David Laibson and I, I hope, did very well and certainly tried very hard to do and seemed to be something that the students appreciated was convey our enthusiasm and excitement for economics.”
02 / belief
“Sturm — just the level of rigor he brought to proofs and thinking was something that I learned a huge amount from.”
03 / belief
“I think that’s a great place where more competition and more choices. I’m fine with the big tech companies entering it.”
04 / belief
“The regional development — “We’re going to go into this area, create this new cluster, create this new industry” — I think that’s littered with a history of failures.”
05 / belief
“We’ve learned about weaknesses and deficiencies in the structure of our labor markets — the ability to connect people with jobs, the ability of people to move after a shock happens, to get themselves retrained, to have some form of insurance that could help them in the event that their next job has a lower pay. So yes, that literature, together with other observations about what’s been going on with, for example, prime-age men in the workforce, has affected the way I think about the dynamism and efficient allocation of labor in the American workforce, much more than it’s affected the way I think about trade.”
06 / belief
“I would much rather have competition. I think what benefits consumers is choices, lower prices, more innovation.”
07 / belief
“Certainly, if you look at differences in mortality, differences in health outcomes — behavior, genetics, social environment — I think all matter a lot more than healthcare.”
08 / belief
“I think you do have a tradeoff between “are you getting more innovation” on the one hand and higher prices on the other hand.”
09 / belief
“When I’ve looked at that, there’s enough of a diversified world supply, enough of an ability to scale up if necessary in the United States, that I don’t think on semiconductors — there, it was protectionism under the guise of national security. So I think we should accept the possibility of national security, take it seriously, but be really, really wary that a lot of protectionist arguments use that trappings.”
10 / belief
“Economists who have been chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and read everything that Charles Dickens has ever written. But yeah, I think you’re kinder about me than I would be, frankly.”
11 / belief
“In part that’s more innovation. So in retail, the national numbers, I think, are really misleading.”
12 / belief
“There’s a set of costs and benefits. And I think the right way to get that mix of cost and benefits is, with the large companies, the lack of portability creates a barrier to entry.”
13 / belief
“I think market power is a problem in some sectors. I actually think the health sector is an example of where it is.”
14 / belief
“In fact, if anything, I think the error in policy is probably a little bit too much emphasis on manufacturing and a little bit less on services.”
15 / belief
“The inflation rate gets harder and harder to measure over time. So I think the one that probably has deteriorated in meaningfulness is the measure of inflation.”
16 / belief
“The tax proposals are coming from politicians, and yes, absolutely, your public choice models, I think, apply a lot more to those politicians.”
17 / belief
“I think so much damage was done to economic forecasting by the experience of the 1980s.”
18 / belief
“Not only do they patent, but Jennifer Hunt found that the Americans end up patenting more when they’re in the presence of those immigrants. This is something where I think we have a good enough set of micro data.”
19 / belief
“I think the truth is, when you go and quantify that type of public investment, it’s a couple tenths of a percent of the answer.”
20 / evaluation
“Some of the proposals that I made in the context of the report in the United Kingdom, I don’t think would constrain an awful lot of what’s good about Amazon’s business model.”
21 / preference
“Bleak House, for sure. I love that you have a woman’s voice in it, Esther Summerson.”
22 / evaluation
“GDPR also, though, is cumbersome and in some ways has been an impediment to competition because the big companies can navigate it much more easily than small ones can.”
23 / prediction
“If that happened, you’d end up with an awful lot of people moving to Idaho without having to tell them to move to Idaho because prices in New York and San Francisco would go up even more than they have already.”
24 / evaluation
“We’ll need to repay those foreigners in the future. And with a current account deficit of around 3 percent of GDP, I think we’re on the edge of where we need to be worried, but not really that far past the edge of where we need to worry.”
25 / evaluation
“I think what we did was good, but that there’s some other thing we could have done in terms of changing how we do the lectures, how we do the assignments, that would be even better, that it’s right next to us, and that I don’t realize it because the evidence is there.”
26 / preference
“I would say, if the only way for me to get more immigrants is they have to be in one part of the country, I would probably settle for that and compromise with you on this plan.”
27 / evaluation
“You look around the advanced economies today, and in most all of the advanced economies, real interest rates are lower than they are in the United States, so I think there’s a certain amount of symmetry.”
28 / evaluation
“Some of it isn’t a problem. It’s that you don’t need as much investment from businesses in the type of intangible economy that we have today relative to the type of heavy industry we used to have.”
29 / evaluation
“The places where people can most productively add to the economy — places like the Bay Area, the Boston area, the Washington area — are ridiculously and unnecessarily expensive to live in because of artificial constraints on building that drive people out and keep people from coming in.”