Rapid Fire And Review

 (and China)

Tyler Cowan likes to ask his guests rapid fire questions at the end, often in the format of "Overrated or underrated?" It's an entertaining way of smoking people out, and he does it well.  His production manager returns the favor on him on the 2022 Retrospective podcast.  I usually avoid such things as unlikelyt to provide anything new, as I have listened to all the episodes he is discussing, but I have to get over that.  The retrospectives of intelligent people smoke them out as well.  I hope no one ever does it to me, because I am already incautious. From the transcript, a question sent in (one should know that Tyler is a mostly-libertarian economist):

HOLMES: I want you to answer this rapid-fire because it’s . . . Just answer this as quickly as you can. [laughs] It’s kind of a grab-bag question. [from] Vikash Palit: There are three questions. “What are the pluses and minuses of ending the Fed? What are the top three ways you would change the US healthcare system? What’s the ideal tax system look like, according to you?”

COWEN: In reverse order, the ideal tax system is a progressive consumption tax with a relatively light rate of taxation on capital income, though it can’t be zero because otherwise, people will reclassify their labor income into capital income.

Best ways to change the healthcare system. A lot of that is frozen into place. I’m more focused in my current roles on improving the rate of progress in science and getting more innovation and reforming the NIH and NSF and making them more dynamic and quicker to respond to change.

People don’t usually call that the healthcare system, but that would be my emphasis. If you look at, say, the mRNA vaccines or what seems to be coming against malaria, against dengue, possibly against cancer — that’s yielding huge dividends. Fighting over the scraps of Medicaid expansion or something ultimately seems to me like a misallocation of talent.

Ending the Fed. Well, what do you replace it with? You can’t answer that question in the abstract, but I suspect what you replace it with will not do better. The price of gold is much too volatile to have a gold standard now, even if you liked the classical gold standard. I’m not sure it was better than the Fed, but it wouldn’t be workable now. And what, Bitcoin? That’s a non-starter. So, replace the Fed with what? Just a frozen stock of dollars? Again, seems to me worse than what we have now.

 

The rehashed the interview with Ken Burns - apparently a lot of people wrote in to say that Burns "gave you the interview that he wanted to give," and they debated whether those rehearsed monologues of his were "more authentic" than other interviewees who are less famous and less self-conscious.  They concluded that that is the real Ken Burns, and is thus authentic in some sense. I was impressed that Tyler and his production manager, who had worked for Burns years ago, were able to communicate that he was a brilliant, skilled, polished-in-interview, preachy, controlling bastard without actually saying that. The transcript is the same as the link above. 

About prediction in general:

What are the topics that are hard to predict? Who’s going to win a contest? In most areas, it’s hard to predict. Not in chess. Magnus Carlsen just played Caruana. He beat him 22 to 4 and didn’t lose a single game. That was not hard to predict. The margin of victory was hard to predict, but not that Magnus would win. But if you were to ask me who will win the NBA title this coming year — very hard to predict.

The history of China is very hard to predict. Switching from zero COVID to COVID free-for-all, I was not predicting. I don’t think I got that wrong publicly, but I know in my own mind, I wasn’t expecting that. China, in general, does very rapid shifts that are hard to predict in advance in a way, say, that India does not. My backup answer after sports would be China is very hard for me or, indeed, anyone to predict.