Podcasts and other recommendations
COWEN: If teaching management techniques to companies is so effective, can we expect similarly large gains teaching personal productivity techniques to individuals who, if anything, should absorb it more rapidly, right? No collective action problem. But it seems, overall, self-help books, life coaching — they seem pretty ineffective. How do we square that larger picture?
BLOOM: I’m not sure they’re pretty ineffective. I don’t know how to evaluate it. I could flip it around. I’ll tell you the economist’s take. I’m going to take your line on this, which is, there is an enormous volume of self-help books and podcasts and newsreels, et cetera. The fact that they exist means people are spending a lot of time reading them, I presume. If you assume that people are rational, it means they get value out of it.
I actually find these things quite useful. I’m not sure I absorb most of the tips. I don’t tend to listen to self-help podcasts, but I read a lot. I read something — there may be 10 tips in there. In fact, before the podcast started, I was talking to Dallas, your producer. She had sent me this whole list of things on what to do with your microphone and video. I had read it all. In fact, she included a link that I went onto. I found a couple of them really useful. I’d say 90 percent of them I’d seen, or maybe it wasn’t applicable, but 10 percent were great.
I actually think that, potentially, they are quite helpful. The issue is maybe on the evidence base. Again, as an economist, ideally, you’d have an RCT. How you’d execute it is not obvious, but you may take a thousand Americans or a thousand Spaniards or something, some sample, and then give 500 of them intensive self-help coaching for a month and see what happens. Quite possibly, somebody’s done this. It may exist, but that would be my way to evaluate these kinds of interventions.
COWEN: Then you must think people are remarkably productive and effective because self-help books are very cheap. The advice Dallas sent you — that was for free. If you think of it in terms of marginal value, given the low price, the marginal gains to being more productive personally — well, you must be very close to the frontier.
But that strikes me as counterintuitive. I see people screwing up all the time, not realizing their potential. I think the market for talent is remarkably inefficient and that people don’t do their very best.
2. Ideas of India: Libertarianism by Necessity
In this episode, Shruti sat down with Ajay Shah to discuss his new book with Vijay Kelkar, In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy, and the challenges facing the Indian state today. Shah is a professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi, India, where he studies economics, law, and public administration. His areas of specific focus are macroeconomics, finance, health, technology policy, and the justice system.
His latest book, In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy, coauthored with Professor Vijay Kelkar, is an excellent overview of their interdisciplinary approach to policy in India. An important theme in the book is that market failure in itself does not justify state intervention. And between market failure and government intervention, we must examine state capacity, the incentives of political actors, and the checks and balances provided by the larger institutional framework.
I was first introduced to Ajay through his work on financial markets, and I have noticed a shift in his thinking. He used to be more focused on technical aspects of economics and about where markets can fail. Now the focus is on working through the rules and institutional arrangements through which we govern ourselves. We talked about this evolution in Ajay’s thinking, his firsthand experience with policy making, his journey as an economist, his major influences, and much more. This conversation was recorded in person in February, before the COVID pandemic. But Ajay’s book with Vijay Kelkar is timeless in its insights and equally applicable, if not more, in the post-COVID world.
I want to give the two-sentence version, my summary of the book, and you tell me if I’ve captured it. It’s a broader book than simply public economics, but I would say that there is the “public economics 101” that we are all taught in economics undergraduate and grad school, which is, when there’s market failure, the government must intervene and it must correct the market failure. Other than market failures, left to itself, the invisible hand works quite well. What you have introduced is a sophisticated public economics second version, which is, it is not just sufficient to say that there’s market failure and the government must intervene, but we need to ask a whole number of questions between market failure and government intervention, which is things like first accounting for incentives of the state actors who are self-interested, et cetera.
Second is to think about capacity constraints and administrative constraints, and in India we really suffer from very weak state capacity, very frail institutions which don’t have the ability to execute. Also information problems, knowledge problems. So just because there’s a market failure, you may not always lead to a government intervention. In fact, there are very small number of cases with a market failure that the answer would be government intervention. A part two of that is, very often the market failure corrects itself, à la Coase or Elinor Ostrom, which is, there is a private, voluntary solution for externality problems. Is that a good summary of the thought process behind the book?
3. Our Pandemic Learning Curve- What we’ve learned — and unlearned — about this coronavirus.
4. Show & Tell #10: How can we prepare kids for a remote work world?
5. Taiwan’s Global Contributions
6. Super 30: Empowering Through Education | Anand Kumar
7. Mo Gawdat | The Illusion of Control
Russ Roberts: What a fascinating book this was. It happens to be something I’m deeply interested in — the question of evaluating whether you can get in a zone, whether you improve performance after you’ve been successful, or whether that’s just a statistical illusion. On one level, it’s a book about those things. On another level, it’s about a lot more than that — a lot of different aspects of life and art and investing. It’s really a fascinating book. And it’s a page-turner. Which is pretty impressive. I enjoyed this book thoroughly. There aren’t many page-turners about probability and uncertainty.
I want to start with an idea of past EconTalk guest Ed Leamer. He says, talking about human beings, ‘We are storytelling, pattern-seeking animals.’ Now, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, ‘We’re easily fooled by randomness.’ Actual coin flips — a sequence of actual coin flips — don’t often look like we imagined they would look. That’s a chunk of your book. Talk about that and our ability to perceive things accurately.
9. The Extraordinary Theorems of John Nash — with Cédric Villani
10. Squares and Tilings — Numberphile
11. An absolutely fantastic book for Data Science Beginners!
12. Geoeconomics and the Balance of Payments