This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 11th,

2022. I'm Caleb Brown at the Cato Institute's new challenges to the

Free Economy Conference held last week.

Former Obama Council of Economic Advisors head

Jason Furman addressed what he sees as the blind spots of the right and left

and even libertarians when it comes to crafting better economic policy.

Truly appreciative of that kind and generous introduction.

I'm also appreciative that somebody's invited me to talk about a topic other than inflation.

I used to have a wide range of topics I'd thought and worked about and have gotten overly

obsessed with that one narrow one.

Perhaps taking off of Jeff's introduction

and that way of thinking, I wanted to start

talking about one of the big problems in public policy is that we don't just have one objective.

We often have many objectives and the objectives we have may differ depending on our values. One objective would be to raise as many

people's incomes as much as possible. We also care about people's lives,

protecting their lives in a pandemic, extending them and letting

them live longer and healthier lives.

We might care about climate change, we might care about poverty, we might care about inequality on this many objectives that could show up on that list.

When thinking about how to make policy with those different objectives, I think there's a sort of classic mistake

that's more common among liberals and a classic mistake that's more common among

conservatives and I'm going to caricature both of these mistakes and of course these don't apply to everyone or everything.

They're just tendencies.

...