I think privacy legislation is important, but i personally don't care that much about it. I'd like in a world where i thought people were informed. G p r also, though, has been an impediment to competition because the big companies can navigate it much more easily than small ones can. You can make laws that are dependent on size. The recommendations that i made in my u report were a code of conduct for the largest players and it wouldn't apply to the medium or small ones....
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