Development Economic Researches - What's the First Organization You Found?

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I had written an academic article many years ago proposein a particular way, that the public sector could buy out patents and put the intellectual property in the public domain. I think id like the idea academically, but it didn't really go anywhere politically. And so you can avoid some of the distortions of monopoly. One of the key distortions of monopoly is that when the price is high, when there's mono pricing, less of this get sold. When less of this gets sold, y thats harmful for many products. But in the case of parmesuticals, er that can be very harmful to human health. So the approach was commit in advance to buy the efficient quantity for some products...

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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