BloggingHeads.TV with Robin Hanson

I want to know how you manage to conduct academic work without the aid of coffee. What’s your secret? Coca? Matte?

I’d like to hear you two debate the value of signing up for cryonics.

A seasteading discussion would also be good.

1. How much productivity growth there really was in the last decade?
2. If Robin’s site is called Overcoming Bias, how come it is rarely about behavioral decision science and mostly about freezing your head and God-like supercomputers?

Also, I’d be very interested in hearing you discuss the economics of trust

I am interested in hearing how you deal with the massive amounts of information that you’re presented with every day. How do you organize things efficiently? Do you how much of your productivity is attributable to the idiosyncrasies of your mind’s organization and how much to learned habits?

I would love it if someone would analyze what would have happened if the US gov’t back in August 2007 had declared, “We are not bailing anybody out. If you invested in mortgage-backed securities, it sucks to be you. We will honor FDIC commitments but that is it.”

Would we still have a non-functioning bank sector? Would total losses have been higher than what the taxpayers have already pumped in?

I’m still not buying the whole ‘toxic mortgage backed securities as the cause of the world financial collapse’, and the subprime market unable to pay their mortagage is at fault story.

Here’s some data from http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/chargeoff/chgallsa.htm

I’m an amateur in this realm,(not a professional economist),but more than a few of of formal educaiton and experience. Am I to believe that a charge-off rate of 0.15% of mortgages, and 0.51% of total loans in 1Q/2007 started this whole problem of ‘toxic mortgage backed securities’ that caused this collapse, as is being attributed by the media? Even today the rate is 1.58 and 1.89 for residential and total charge-off rates. It doesn’t feel right to me. I take risks 20 times that big every day and I’ve made money for a long time.

Am I reading the data wrong? Other explanations?

Maybe you can discuss this because I get the sense that the media isn’t picking up on the real story.

Is macroeconomics as a useful discipline?

How do we know who we should listen to when determining macroeconomic policy?

I would like to know how you can cut health care costs while increasing demand for health care and holding supply unchanged.

Health care reform, please!

The failure of enterprise prediction markets to take off, in spite of Robin Hanson pumping them up:
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13184829

Should the U.S. fold and be replaced by something(s) better?

I second Arnold’s request to discuss evolutionary behavior of the sexes. You might also discuss Roissy’s
ideas about this topic.

I second the topic request of new methodologies in economics, such as agent-based modeling and physics-inspired techniques.
If we flagrantly ignore any right to privacy, can we reach into credit card records cross-indexed with demographic information, etc., to get a better handle on “expected future velocity” of money placed into a particular person’s wallet?

@ZBicyclist:
(2) when I save, rather than spend, I don’t put the money into the mattress, I put it into the bank. The government is putting money into those same banks.
So how can it be such a great thing for the government to do it to keep the banks from failing, but such an economically bad thing for me to put money into those same banks for a rainy day?
Here’s my understanding. When you save, you are adding to the bank’s deposits. When the government puts money in, it is adding to the bank’s capital. The banks have too little capital (in some cases they might have negative capital, which is one definition of insolvency). They have plenty of deposits, but this doesn’t help their capitalization problem.

Did I get this right, anyone else?

I’d like to see a biased critique of Taleb’s Black Swan.