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Conversations with Tyler

Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2020

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Glen Weyl is an economist, researcher, and founder of RadicalXChange. He recently co-authored a paper that sets forth an ambitious strategy to respond to the crisis and mitigate long-term damage to the economy through a regime of testing, tracing, and supported isolation. In his estimation the benefit-cost ratio is ten to one, with costs equal to about one month of continued freeze in place.

Tyler invited Glen to discuss the plan, including how it'd overcome obstacles to scaling up testing and tracing, what other countries got right and wrong in their responses, the unusual reason why he's bothered by price gouging on PPE supplies, where his plan differs with Paul Romer's, and more. They also discuss academia's responsibility to inform public discourse, how he'd apply his ideas on mechanism design to reform tenure and admissions, his unique intellectual journey from socialism to libertarianism and beyond, the common element that attracts him to both the movie Memento and Don McLean's "American Pie," what talent he looks for in young economists, the struggle to straddle the divide between academia and politics, the benefits and drawbacks of rollerblading to class, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded April 20th, 2020

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:08.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:12.5

Learn more at mercatis.org.

0:15.2

And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit

0:20.4

ConversationsWithT Tyler.com.

0:28.6

Hello, today I'm chatting with Glenn Wile, who is one of the smartest and sharpest of all

0:33.5

economists.

0:34.7

And Glenn is, among other things, the founder and leader of Radical Exchange Foundation.

0:40.5

Most recently, he is co-author of a significant study on how we should fight back against

0:45.6

COVID-19.

0:46.6

And he and his co-authors have come up with a plan, a rather ambitious plan for a pandemic

0:52.4

testing board and hoping to test as many as 2 million Americans each day.

0:57.2

And welcome.

0:58.2

Thanks so much for having me on Tyler, especially at such short notice.

1:02.1

It's really great to be able to talk about these issues with you.

1:04.9

We will have our usual wide-ranging chat, but also a lot of focus on COVID-19.

1:09.8

But let me start with a simple question.

1:12.6

Why is testing in America right now so hard to scale up?

1:17.1

I think we've got two basic problems.

1:19.3

One is a coordination failure along the supply chain.

1:22.6

And the other is a lot of small innovations that require a lot of regulatory engagement

1:28.9

to get rapidly deployed that need to be really accelerated and coordinated.

...

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