Results for “alex tabarrok”
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The wisdom of Alex Tabarrok

by  Tyler Cowen in

This will in relative terms help the larger, better established researchers, right?  And how will it handle GDPR, the right to be forgotten, data storage under EU law, and so on?  What is the chance this has all been thought through properly?

In praise of Alex Tabarrok

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here’s a question I’ve been mulling in recent months: Is Alex Tabarrok right? Are people dying because our coronavirus response is far too conservative?

I don’t mean conservative in the politicized, left-right sense. Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University and a blogger at Marginal Revolution, is a libertarian, and I am very much not. But over the past year, he has emerged as a relentless critic of America’s coronavirus response, in ways that left me feeling like a Burkean in our conversations.

He called for vastly more spending to build vaccine manufacturing capacity, for giving half-doses of Moderna’s vaccine and delaying second doses of Pfizer’s, for using the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, for the Food and Drug Administration to authorize rapid at-home tests, for accelerating research through human challenge trials. The through line of Tabarrok’s critique is that regulators and politicians have been too cautious, too reluctant to upend old institutions and protocols, so fearful of the consequences of change that they’ve permitted calamities through inaction.

Tabarrok hasn’t been alone. Combinations of these policies have been endorsed by epidemiologists, like Harvard’s Michael Mina and Brown’s Ashish Jha; by other economists, like Tabarrok’s colleague Tyler Cowen and the Nobel laureates Paul Romer and Michael Kremer; and by sociologists, like Zeynep Tufekci (who’s also a Times Opinion contributor). But Tabarrok is unusual in backing all of them, and doing so early and confrontationally. He’s become a thorn in the side of public health experts who defend the ways regulators are balancing risk. More than one groaned when I mentioned his name.

But as best as I can tell, Tabarrok has repeatedly been proved right, and ideas that sounded radical when he first argued for them command broader support now. What I’ve come to think of as the Tabarrok agenda has come closest to being adopted in Britain, which delayed second doses, approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine despite its data issues, is pushing at-home testing and permitted human challenge trials, in which volunteers are exposed to the coronavirus to speed the testing of treatments. And for now it’s working: Britain has vaccinated a larger percentage of its population than the rest of Europe and the United States have and is seeing lower daily case rates and deaths.

Here is more from Ezra Klein at the New York Times.

The wisdom of Alex Tabarrok

by  Tyler Cowen in

Alex did not reproduce this passage from his essay on on-line education, so I will did (and Reihan Salaam did):

Productivity in education has lagged productivity in other sectors of the economy because teaching is so labor intensive. Where exactly in the typical classroom is there room for investment, let alone productivity improvement? More chalk? Prior to online education, the bottleneck though which productivity improvements had to pass was the teacher, and we know that improving teacher productivity is very difficult, which is why teaching methods haven’t changed in millennia. Online education vastly increases the potential for productivity increases because it greatly increases the size of the potential market. Bigger markets increase the incentive to research and develop new products (coincidentally the very topic of my TED talk.) A tool used to improve online education–an interface, an algorithm, a new teaching method–can be applied very widely, potentially world-wide, thus greatly increasing the incentive to invest in the education sector, perhaps the most important sector of the 21st century economy.

Here are some budges forward on the accreditation of MOOCs.

Addendum: Here are interesting comments from Joshua Gans.

April Speaking Events: Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Here is a list of events that Tyler and/or I will be speaking at in the near future.

  • Tyler and I will both be at the APEE conference in Las Vegas, April 11-13.
  • Tyler will be speaking on “The Economics of the Jobless Recovery” at Emory University on Thursday April 22, 4-5:15 pm.  More information here.
  • Tyler and I will both be speaking at the Fifteenth Annual University of Kentucky Teaching Workshop on Saturday April 24.  I will be talking about “Seeing the Invisible Hand” and Tyler will talk about the “Impact of the Financial Crisis on the Teaching of Macroeconomics.”  More information and registration here.

Robin Williams and Alex Tabarrok

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I was asked to do a radio interview with KPCC while I was at TED.  The interview had just started and I’m talking about organ donation when into the studio walks Robin Williams!  Naturally all chaos ensues and Robin takes over… but not before I manage to squeeze in an economics joke with Robin playing the straight man!  Some kind of first there.  I’m not sure Robin got the joke but I think this made the host laugh all the more. No one can out talk Robin, however, so he riffs on organ donation and fiscal stimulus for some time.  Eventually Robin goes on his merry way and the host and I get back to organ donation, bounty hunters, voting and other cool stuff.  An amazing experience for me.  Real audio here (try here if that doesn’t work)

Tabarrok on Stranded Technologies Podcast

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I talk with entreprenreur Niklas Anzinger on the Stranded Technlogies Podcast. Niklas summarizes some of the discussion:

  • This episode is an intellectual journey that discovers insights that can be used by entrepreneurs and city developers. We talk about the Baumol effect that Alex uses to explain the now infamous price chart.
  • Alex’s recommendation to new city or governance startups like Prospera, Ciudad Morazan or the Catawba DEZ is to think of city development as a “dance between centralization and decentralization”.
  • Economists have developed concepts that are waiting to be commercialized, e.g. prediction markets. In this episode, we talk about dominant assurance contracts and how they could be used in new city developments and fundraising.

Tabarrok on the Ezra Klein Podcast

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Late last year I responded to an excellent tweet storm from Ezra Klein by in effect saying he should read Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations. And you know what? He did! Ezra then kindly invited me on to his New York Times podcast to discuss public choice, liberalism, and the rise and decline of nations.

A few good quotes from me:

Japan has caught up to us in slowing down.

And

Let me put it in a way that progressives can understand, there is an inequality of voice and that inequality of voice also goes to the rich and the powerful and the people who can hire lawyers and the people who can use these so-called equitable institutions to their advantage—even the people in the marginalized communities have not benefited.

Ezra asked challenging questions and had lots of interesting things to say. I was especially struck by his argument that people want to tell heroic stories about themselves and so rent seeking comes to be redefined as something heroic. I think that’s an important insight which public choice scholars are likely to overlook–it becomes harder and harder to break out of a rent-seeking equilibrium not just because of transitional gains traps and the like but because the equilibrium comes to be seen as virtuous.

You also get to hear me rant about new hiring procedures at GMU and my HOA.

Ezra asks a good question about why developer interest groups don’t dominate the planning process.

We also talk about crypto and decentralized consensus as well as other topics.

Whether you call it state capacity libertarianism, creating the innovation nation, or supply side progressivism, I think this movement, which Ezra is leading from the left, is one of the most important movements today.

Podcast: Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript here.

Emmott Interviews Tabarrok for the Browser

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist and now co-director of the Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy, talks to Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and co-author of the blog Marginal Revolution, on lessons learned from the pandemic so far, and what lies ahead.

Self-recommending. I’d say it’s a very good interview but there was no question that I was outclassed by Bill Emmott’s zoom background, live from Dublin. Many thanks to the ever-excellent The Browser for hosting.

https://youtu.be/0FBjW6KqyTU

Tabarrok on Macro Musings

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Here’s my podcast on Macro Musings with David Beckworth. One bit on China.

Tabarrok: The perspective which we’re getting today is that we’re in competition with China, but actually, when it comes to ideas, we’re in cooperation with China, because the more scientists and engineers that there are in China, then the better that is for us, actually. As you pointed out, if a Chinese researcher comes up with a cure for cancer, great! That’s fantastic! I mean, ideally I would come up with a cure for cancer, but the second best is my neighbor comes up with a cure for cancer, right?

Beckworth: Right.

Tabarrok: So, increasing the size of the Chinese market, with wealthier Chinese consumers, wealthier Indian consumers, that is going to increase the demand to do research and development, and that is going to have tremendous impacts not only in health, but in any field of endeavor which relies on these big, fixed costs. So, any time you have an idea-centered industry, which is a lot of industries today. All of high tech is idea centered. More R&D means more ideas. That comes from having bigger, richer markets.

Can Tabarrok Bridge the Wonks and Burning Man?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

It’s a TED-style talk, and Alex Tabarrok is just getting going, dressed in D.C.-friendly attire (dark gray suit) in front of the usual casual-hip crowd at the Voice & Exit conference in Austin, Texas. Pacing behind the podium, he flashes images of workers, of wastrel, skeleton-thin immigrants seeking labor. Your heart bleeds as he sings his songs of morality and justice and the need for immigrants in any good society and etc., etc., etc.

His pitch to solve this messy hot topic of the day? Two words: open borders.

That’s from an amusing profile of me in OZY, Can Philosopher Alex Tabarrok Bridge the Wonks and Burning Man?

Addendum 1: Tyler’s office is even messier than mine.

Addendum 2: Tyler, of course, blogged this 3 minutes earlier from somewhere in Serbia. How does he bend the laws of space and time?