What's Your Take on the Degree of Unmeasured Benefits From the Internet?

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productivity fell so much after either nineteen seventy three or in say, the last fifteen years. Some of it may be that you need to invert your question and ask, not why did productivity slow down, but why was productivity so fast? We're in a world of one and a half per cent productivity growth, if we're lucky. Unfortunately, it's been more like one lately, and that's just what it is. What oes your take on the degree of unmeasured benefits from the internet? High, low, intermediate, intermediate....

Note: This conversation was recorded in January 2020.

Tyler credits Jason Furman’s intellectual breadth, real-world experience, and emphasis on policy for making him the best economist in the world. Furman, despite not initially being interested in public policy, ultimately served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama thanks to a call from Joe Stiglitz while still in grad school. His perspective is as idiosyncratic as his career trajectory, seeing the world of economic policy as a series of complex tradeoffs rather than something reducible to oversimplified political slogans.

Jason joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on how monopolies affect investment patterns, his top three recommendations to improve American productivity, why he’s skeptical of place-based development policies, what some pro-immigration arguments get wrong, why he’s more concerned about companies like Facebook and Google than he is Walmart and Amazon, the merits of a human rights approach to privacy, whether the EU treats tech companies fairly, having Matt Damon as a college roommate, the future of fintech, his highest objective when teaching economics, what he learned from coauthoring a paper with someone who disagrees with him, why he’s a prolific Goodreads reviewer, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded January 16th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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