Coase, the Rules of the Game, and the Costs of Perfection (with Daisy Christodoulou)

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🗓️ 3 February 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

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Summary

Surely perfection is better than imperfection. But applying technology to improve decision-making can backfire. Listen as ed-tech innovator Daisy Christodoulou and EconTalk's Russ Roberts talk about the costs of seeking perfection when technology is used to improve refereeing in sports. They also talk about ways to embrace imperfection and how the economist Ronald Coase can help us understand the power of the rules of the game, both in sports and in life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today's January 6, 2825, and I want to remind readers that voting for your favorite episodes of 2024 closes on February 9th, so please go to eConTalk.org to vote.
0:49.1	My guest today is Daisy Christodoulou. She is the Director of education at No More Marking. She has a substack
0:57.3	with that same name, No More Marking. And she has written three books on education. Her latest book,
1:02.8	which is our topic for today, is I can't stop thinking about VAR. Var in this case is the video
1:10.3	assistant referee, a technology used in football, what
1:12.9	Americans call soccer, but we'll call football throughout this conversation.
1:17.4	And VAR was added to the game to improve decisions made by referees about fouls, off-sides,
1:24.7	other matters.
1:26.2	And this book that you've written, Daisy, is on the surface
1:29.0	about football, but it's really about much more than that. It's about something much deeper.
1:34.2	It's about our endless human desire for perfection, the challenge of designing policy and
1:39.8	rules that actually achieve what we want. I love this book. It actually captures what I think of
1:45.1	as the essence of the so-called Coast theorem,
1:47.6	which we may get to later.
1:49.3	Daisy, welcome to Econ Talk.
1:52.1	Fantastic. Thanks for having me, boss.
1:54.0	When was VAR introduced, and why has it been controversial?
	...

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