Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
21 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I’m going to guess social media, genetic medicine. I think of what’s going on at Stanford.”
02 / belief
“I think in the long run, working from home will be fine because we’ll be in the office three days a week and two days a week at home.”
03 / belief
“A good example: Paul David mentions about electricity that when electricity came in — which I believe is in the 1910s, 1920s — factories were slow to adopt it.”
04 / belief
“I realized if you have high adjustment costs — as in, it’s expensive to hire someone and fire, invest and disinvest — uncertainty is really costly because you can’t change your mind.”
05 / belief
“I suspect at this point now, Chinese manufacturing management is pretty good, actually.”
06 / belief
“I don’t see that as being related — transfer pricing and offshore tax manipulation. That is a factor, but I think American firms are primarily driven, actually, by better innovation and better management.”
07 / belief
“One is actually come back to Ben Jones, who had an important paper, which is called, I believe, “[Death of the] Renaissance Man.”
08 / belief
“I don’t think they’re very different. I think, in fact, in reverse — they’re really pretty similar.”
09 / observation
“I also have to say I’m very lucky because the IFS in that era was big into what they called micro econometrics, which is basically using panel data, which turned out to be exactly the way to go.”
10 / evaluation
“We kind of got excited about a research idea. That was the critical meeting point.”
11 / belief
“Another concern you could have — and is being a big debate in terms of productivity — is the case of the quality of life has risen in ways that we’re not measuring. I could get into that, but I think the answer is, primarily, no.”
12 / evaluation
“Italy is almost a laundry list of what’s gone wrong and what not to do, but I think a lot of it comes down to poor government that then feeds through into all these policies that make it hard for firms to innovate.”
13 / evaluation
“Sure, it’s tricky because Europe has become slightly less of a powerhouse, but obviously Asia has completely taken off in the amount of R&D being spent in, say, India, and China has exploded.”
14 / evaluation
“Some of the lowest countries in the world, in terms of trust, are some of the African countries whereby the legal system’s in chaos because they’re undergoing civil war, and the highest countries are like Norway, Sweden, North America.”
15 / evaluation
“When he talked to firms, it’s very hard to predict which way a policy was going to go, because a lot of decisions didn’t seem entirely thought out, rational, predictable — I don’t know what words you’d use.”
16 / evaluation
“Most of the books that I read that are popular — Good to Great and Built to Last and things like these — are generally based on individual anecdotes and case studies, and I think that’s great for teaching.”
17 / evaluation
“Toyota and the Japanese car manufacturing sector at that time in the 1950s — because they were obviously so devastated by the war — didn’t have access to capital and had to produce things on a small scale.”
18 / prediction
“Recently, batteries have gotten to the stage where electric cars are feasible because you need to, obviously, store enough energy.”
19 / preference
“I was against Brexit because Britain leaving the European Union, I think, is bad economically for the UK.”
20 / evaluation
“I think that — as with so many things in life, unfortunately — we just don’t know what we don’t know, and so we’re skeptical on advice.”
21 / preference
“I’m personally also suffering in the sense of productivity — as I mentioned, I think the US economy is — from working at home full time because those one-on-one meetings have stopped.”