299. "How Much Brain Damage Do I Have?"

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4.6 • 32K Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2017

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

John Urschel was the only player in the N.F.L. simultaneously getting a math Ph.D. at M.I.T. But after a new study came out linking football to brain damage, he abruptly retired. Here's the inside story — and a look at how we make decisions in the face of risk versus uncertainty.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Why is it the case that we have billionaires?
0:06.9	Why should they exist?
0:08.8	The economist Andrew Lowe is a finance professor at MIT.
0:12.8	That's a very strange concept for an economist,
0:15.0	because we usually think that markets are reasonably
0:18.2	competitive.
0:19.3	And if it's reasonably competitive, then no one person
0:22.8	should be able to make billions and billions of dollars.
0:27.2	Isn't interesting ideas, isn't it?
0:29.2	You could imagine market failures producing billionaires,
0:32.3	like monopolies or cronyism.
0:35.2	But yeah, if markets are reasonably competitive,
0:37.9	why do we have billionaires?
0:39.9	Andrew Lowe is not the first economist
0:42.2	to consider this riddle.
0:43.4	In fact, if you went back 100 years, an economist
0:46.0	named Frank Knight had a notion.
0:48.5	And he came up with that notion to try
0:50.5	to explain the difference between ordinary businesses
0:54.1	that would make a reasonable living
0:56.2	versus these incredible captains of industry,
0:59.1	the Andrew Melons, and at that time,
	...

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