I'm always cautious about Cowen as he receives backing from the Koch network.
https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/05/sco...
Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
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Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
#52I'm always cautious about Cowen as he receives backing from the Koch network. https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/05/sco...
There is noting wrong getting funded by Koch in principle.
What your source points out is that the agreements Cowen made as a general director of the Mercatus Center seem to violate standard academic norms and "fall short of the standards of academic independence I expect any gift to meet."
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
#53The self-importance of pretty much everything in this interview is literally unbearable.
I will give you the precis: I think X is important, why doesn't everyone think X is important (usually about five sentences of escalating grandeur about the importance of X), because I think X is important and "no-one is talking about X" you know that I am a real genius...on and on.
Cowen is also an utter ignoramus. He seems to confuse being an economist with having knowledge about literally everything (the mistakes Collison makes can be forgiven, there is no reason why an economist shouldn't realise they aren't an expert on literally everything). Btw, afaik, he is the only economist who has actually tried political philosophy too (again, the ego on this guy)...he made the same kind of trite insights and tried to pass them off as signs of his genius there too.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
#54Patrick should take some oratory lessons. As a CEO it is important to be able to speak slowly, be brief and on the point.
Only on HN will you find randos confidently telling a founder-CEO who grew his company from $0 to $35B what's "important" about being a CEO.
Only on HN will you find randos confusing making a lot of money with being good at everything. If you make money, your statements don't automatically become true.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As long as the pie is growing, it can hide or solve by default many existing problems I think one issue with this analogy, is that companies have central points of authority but Western economies don't so much. For example GDP growth doesn't magically fix rising homelessness, and in the absence of central authority it becomes very difficult to address. People often don't like the idea that their "taxpayers money" i…
>For example GDP growth doesn't magically fix rising homelessness Nothing magically fixes homelessness, but GDP correlates well with a host of public benefits, including "poverty reduction and per capita income growth performances are correlated" [1]. All these correlations can be more accurately detailed by searching google scholar. In the US, it seems homelessness has decreased greatly since it was first investigat…
Isn't this a prime example of correlation, not causation?
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
#56What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually doing some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI. I'm a huge fan of Patrick Collison and know that Stripe is also doing tons of experimentation and product innovation, but I was struck by how much less like an academic Zuck sounded. I don't know if it's a good or ba…
Zuck is practical but also naive. Collison does a lot of virtue/wisdom signaling.
Collison strikes me as genuine and focused on actually solving problems. We are in desperately short supply of such people.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe a growing pie is not perfect, but it is greatly preferable to a shrinking one. For a simple example, take a company that looses some contracts and stops growing; you get new conflicts or old ones become critical, ppl start leaving, etc. As long as the pie is growing, it can hide or solve by default many existing problems which would be very difficult or costly to fix otherwise.
Is growing pie sustainable?
> Is growing pie sustainable?
Humans are encountering the limits of connection and communication. This means that even if the pie grows in the aggregate, we're going to fracture.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
#58They discuss the fact that we are seeing linear gains from exponential investment in several fields (healthcare, semiconductors to name a few). This is a fascinating problem.
in semiconductors, it's a natural result of hard physical limits driving up costs for innovation. In the economy overall it's institutional neglect for deep innovation, basic R&D and instead allocation of capital to eCommerce, finance, retail or the gig economy, with ironically companies like facebook contributing to the misery by keeping engineering talent occupied with fiinding better ways to get people to click on ads.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
They discuss healthcare & higher education in parallel, and I do think the cost explosion in both is worth noting... But the differences are as important as the similarities. Some big healthcare cost increases come from increased consumption. It's not just incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost increases. Once upon a time we had less medical care to consume, fewer procedures, cancer treatments…
> It's not just incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost increases. This might be true if there weren't stark counterexamples, e.g. Singapore at 1/4 the cost, with better outcomes. Notably there, government dollars flow through to consumers who choose among competitors by price and quality.
Idk about Singapore specifically, and I'm not commenting on the us setup specifically either.
Health costs, across advanced economies, are on the rise for several decades. The UK system, and others are constantly busting their budgets.
The underlying cost base has grown, due to more types of medical things people are getting.
That doesn't exclude inefficiency of a particular system. The US system is expensive, and a lot of that is probably due to the US system accelarating the trend to more and more expensive procedures.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
#60I loved this interview, and generally have a lot of time for Tyler Cowen’s podcasts and blog.
This topic is one that Peter Thiel has been talking about for over a decade. I have a general theory that whatever smart people are talking about now, Thiel was discussing 10 years before. This is why I always try to find out everything I can about what Thiel is talking about today - it’s like getting a glimpse into the future.