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
19 published records
01 / belief
“” I say, “No, it’s the fault of the people who did it.” So I would say economists were pretty much not to blame for the opioid crisis.”
02 / belief
“” I suppose I would say around 2000 date, economists for the most part did not understand the importance of the shadow banking system.”
03 / belief
“How long should they be isolated, both from other players but also from the general public? But if we just put together the plan, I think we could safely restart baseball and do it with confidence, knowing that we’re not going to increase the number of infections.”
04 / belief
“” People work hard because they like it. They work on things that they care about and they think others will care about, and that’s an encouraging insight, I think, about people.”
05 / uncertainty
“I don’t know that, in communicating the idea, that charter city is the best name, but I think the idea is still a compelling alternative.”
06 / belief
“In a lot of your work, you’re concerned with corruption, quite appropriately, I would say.”
07 / belief
“If you look around the world, all the efforts since World War II that’s gone into trying to build strong, effective states, to establish the rule of law in a functioning state, I think the external investments in building states have yielded very little.”
08 / belief
“Germany has done a great deal with testing, as you know. But at least now, as we’re speaking, as of, I think, May 12th, their R is still over one.”
09 / belief
“People in the Bank could tell that research was dysfunctional there, but shortly after I arrived, the number two, who I think had been behind this initiative, left to go take a position back in finance minister in Indonesia, and a different number two came into the Bank.”
10 / recommendation
“Also, in terms of moving quickly, I think one of the things we could leverage — because this is a public good — is the sovereign immunity of the states.”
11 / recommendation
“I think we should use the relatively small number of tests it would take to test all the baseball players every day, and let them start playing games in empty stadiums, because you need a lot more tests to test the fans, to have them come in.”
12 / evaluation
“If I have a criticism of macro in economics, it’s like the criticism in epidemiology — we may have biased things a little bit too much towards the models, and we’re not giving enough weight to just the facts themselves. And I think that’s because it’s actually easier to do models than to look at data, so we need to have a little bit of collective pressure to, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what your theory says, but let’s look at the numbers.”
13 / preference
“I agree that if you can target tests effectively, then you don’t have to test as many people because really all you have to do is find enough positives and get them into isolation.”
14 / prediction
“My hunch is that China will eventually realize that the way to pay for the infrastructure that it’s building as part of this Belt and Road program is to do urban real estate development.”
15 / evaluation
“Yeah. But the origins of that article were that I read some books that said economists got a lot more influence and things got worse in the United States, and this was a really troubling argument for me because it’s not easy to dismiss.”
16 / recommendation
“You know, for vaccines, we created a special compensation mechanism so that, instead of litigating, somebody who’s harmed by taking a vaccine — because there’s a small fraction of the population that has a negative side effect — there’s a separate compensation mechanism.”
17 / evaluation
“The upshot is, is that I think because of technical economics and the arguments of economists, antitrust is much more tolerant now of dominant firms, and if we believe that competition’s good in a whole bunch of ways, this could actually be very, very harmful.”
18 / recommendation
“I spent time in Honduras. They were actually willing to try this, but what I think, in retrospect, I should have done, and what I’ll do now, is go first to the countries which are willing to help set something up because a country like Honduras was not — the reason it was willing to do something radical like a new charter city was that it did not have the internal capacity to do something like a charter city.”
19 / recommendation
“I’ve been using a model to try and figure out, what is actually the value of an additional test relative to its cost?”