Is There Anything You Would Like to Do?

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I would love to have, say, malaria vacine. I think would be a great example. Let me give you another example, and look to give examples that are from the world of development economics. So a lot of people in developing countries cook with a small fire in their house. And that creates incredible indoor air pollution which is estimated to kill millions here. It also produces not just carbon emissions, but some things that are much worse for wormin than that per volume. If we want more innovation, we could promise to reward them. There's a whole host of areas in high income countries, or in the united states, where we could relate their technological challenges That aren't attracting quite...

Michael Kremer is best known for his academic work researching global poverty, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019 along with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. Less known is that he is also the founder of five non-profits and in the process of creating a sixth. And Kremer doesn’t see anything unusual about embodying the dual archetypes of economist and founder. “I think there's a lot of relationship between the experimental method and the things that are needed to help found organizations,” he explains.

Michael joined Tyler to discuss the intellectual challenge of founding organizations, applying methods from behavioral economics to design better programs, how advanced market commitments could lower pharmaceutical costs for consumers while still incentivizing R&D, the ongoing cycle of experimentation every innovator understands, the political economy of public health initiatives, the importance of designing institutions to increase technological change, the production function of new technologies, incentivizing educational achievement, The Odyssey as a tale of comparative development, why he recently transitioned to University of Chicago, what researchers can learn from venture capitalists, his current work addressing COVID-19, and more.

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Recorded September 9th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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