Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
22 published records
01 / belief
“I would say a significant chunk of high-end inequality, that is, the percentage of total income that’s accounted for by the top 1% of earners, is due to bad policy.”
02 / belief
“I think when universities were extracting rent and putting it into research, there was an argument that that was generally a socially productive equilibrium, but now that they’re putting it into administration, which has a lot but very complicated explanation from that, I think that rent extraction has certainly not been producing these spillover effects for society.”
03 / belief
“I think there’s probably some evidence that you could actually… You could keep going in this direction for quite some time if you’re willing to accept gradual economic and political mediocrity.”
04 / belief
“I think insider influence and shenanigans flourish in the shadows, flourish in obscurity and regulatory policy making, relative to fiscal policy making, I think is much less transparent, much more obscure, much more arcane, much more difficult for anybody to know what’s going on.”
05 / belief
“What is the biggest thing that the… Again, I think the focus on rent-seeking I think people on the left tend to focus a lot on what government can do to solve problems, not enough on where government actually produces it.”
06 / belief
“I think with a different set of parole and probation institutions, you could probably get it down below 50%.”
07 / belief
“I think the implicit theory of governance is it seems to be there’s a gargantuan surplus in Hollywood, [chuckle] so no matter how dissolute everybody is, the animals and the humans are, they still seem to be producing a net gain.”
08 / belief
“I think the main thing you can say, is we have evidence in the book that it’s substantial.”
09 / belief
“I think Brink understands that, but this is my wheelhouse so I think probably if you were gonna push me, I’d say I understood it better that he did.”
10 / belief
“I think a general concern with hygiene of the liberal state, and a sense that things are not all well, and that things get rotten very quickly, and unless you try very hard to push back, things get rotten very badly.”
11 / belief
“The fundamental fear that undergirds IP that unless we give people strong ownership and ideas, they’re not gonna come up with anything, I think is fundamentally belied by the Nordhaus estimate.”
12 / observation
“I don’t think anyone has completely, satisfactorily solved it. But I don’t think that’s the only way to answer the question that is, yes, you could infer from that, that there shouldn’t be much rent-seeking if the amount of money spent on it is so relatively trivial.”
13 / evaluation
“I don’t see any evidence that American corporations are more poorly run than other corporations because they pay their executives too much.”
14 / commitment
“I think there is something we can do about, ’cause there’s plenty of things we can do to make them better and we are physically able to do them.”
15 / evaluation
“Because they were so poor and backward, they had a lot of catch-up growth that they could grow faster than rich countries that must slug along expanding the technological frontier rather than borrowing good ideas from abroad and implementing them home.”
16 / prediction
“I think on the whole, kind of neolistic economic disruption of pulling out of NAFTA would be worse on people at the bottom because that’s what bad times usually do.”
17 / evaluation
“Under one kind, the incentives are for the cronies to invest in infrastructure and human capital and then it does just fine. And then there’s other kinds of crony capitalism that stifle investment in education and infrastructure, but maybe the key is education and infrastructure and we just need a better crony capitalism of the sort, that say, South Korea and to some extent China have had.”
18 / recommendation
“For one thing, so the book is all about the regulatory system. And I know that by saying that one argument we make, and this relates to an article I wrote called “Kludgeocracy,” which is that it’s really these other parts, other ways the government influences the economy other than directly through taxing and spending that are most likely to have these anti-growth, incumbent-protecting kind of qualities.”
19 / preference
“My media diet is from conservatives because I feel like I can write all the liberal op-eds I want so I don’t really need to consume that.”
20 / evaluation
“Although perhaps, maybe we have actually been… Because we haven’t had a nuclear war yet between two nuclear powers, we think that there is something uniquely stabilizing about having nuclear weapons that it produces this mad scenario where it chastens and disciplines policymakers.”
21 / evaluation
“The problem with the United States is, you can get lots of things on the agenda but there’s all these things that keep it from getting all the way to passage.”
22 / evaluation
“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.”