Arnold Kling on Reforming Government and Expertise

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2021

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

Economist and author Arnold Kling talks about improving government regulation with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Kling suggests ways to improve the administrative state--the agencies and regulatory bodies that often write the regulations that they enforce. The conversation concludes with Kling's idea for holding public intellectuals accountable for their pronouncements.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.8	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:12.6	Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and
0:17.8	find links down there information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives,
0:23.2	but every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd
0:30.3	love to hear from you. Today is September 14th, 2021. I guess, is economist and author Arnold
0:41.8	Kling, Arnold blog for many years at Econlog, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty, as is Econ Talk.
0:48.4	And he currently writes provocative essays at Substack, which I recommend. This is his 17th appearance.
0:57.6	At Econ Talk, he was last year in April of 2020. We took a fresh look at his book, The Three Languages of Politics.
1:04.4	We have two topics for today. If we get to him, we'll see. They're both innovative ideas that Arnold has,
1:10.1	one for improving government and one for improving our assessment of expertise,
1:15.1	our own and public discourse. I would add, Arnold, welcome back to econ Talk.
1:20.0	Thanks for us. Great to be here. We're going to start with this
1:25.4	interesting idea you have for making government more effective.
1:31.9	In recent years, there's been a lot of talk about what is sometimes called the administrative state,
1:36.0	the part of the government that's regulatory and does a lot of administrative stuff that has gotten
1:42.4	quite large over the last 50 years. Often, it doesn't work quite as well as we want it like.
1:49.6	Some people think that's featured on a bug. You don't. What can we do to make it better?
1:56.7	Let me start by trying to create a contrast between what I'll call naïve libertarianism and what
2:05.6	Tyler Cowan calls state capacity libertarianism, which sounds a bit like an oxymoron.
2:15.6	Basically, a naïve libertarian, as I term it, is somebody who just wants the state to be as small as
2:21.1	possible. Just protect property, keep the piece, don't do anything else. Keep the state in this small box.
	...

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