I Think It's a Very Interesting Idea

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I think almost any moral concept is a useful concept in certain contacts, because all our ideas are proxies for some deeper truth that we don't fully understand. So i often make arguments about individual rights, an individual liberties - even though i ultimately think we need to get past our standard conception of individuals is atomized and understand indiividuals more as being at the intersection of different social circles they're part of. And so i think we should be moving towards a duel perspective on these things. Rather than seeing one as sort of the end point that composes the others....

Glen Weyl is an economist, researcher, and founder of RadicalXChange. He recently co-authored a paper that sets forth an ambitious strategy to respond to the crisis and mitigate long-term damage to the economy through a regime of testing, tracing, and supported isolation. In his estimation the benefit-cost ratio is ten to one, with costs equal to about one month of continued freeze in place.

Tyler invited Glen to discuss the plan, including how it’d overcome obstacles to scaling up testing and tracing, what other countries got right and wrong in their responses, the unusual reason why he’s bothered by price gouging on PPE supplies, where his plan differs with Paul Romer’s, and more. They also discuss academia’s responsibility to inform public discourse, how he’d apply his ideas on mechanism design to reform tenure and admissions, his unique intellectual journey from socialism to libertarianism and beyond, the common element that attracts him to both the movie Memento and Don McLean’s “American Pie,” what talent he looks for in young economists, the struggle to straddle the divide between academia and politics, the benefits and drawbacks of rollerblading to class, and more.

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Recorded April 20th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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