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Conversations with Tyler

Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2020

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Note: This conversation was recorded in January 2020.

Tyler credits Jason Furman's intellectual breadth, real-world experience, and emphasis on policy for making him the best economist in the world. Furman, despite not initially being interested in public policy, ultimately served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama thanks to a call from Joe Stiglitz while still in grad school. His perspective is as idiosyncratic as his career trajectory, seeing the world of economic policy as a series of complex tradeoffs rather than something reducible to oversimplified political slogans.

Jason joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on how monopolies affect investment patterns, his top three recommendations to improve American productivity, why he's skeptical of place-based development policies, what some pro-immigration arguments get wrong, why he's more concerned about companies like Facebook and Google than he is Walmart and Amazon, the merits of a human rights approach to privacy, whether the EU treats tech companies fairly, having Matt Damon as a college roommate, the future of fintech, his highest objective when teaching economics, what he learned from coauthoring a paper with someone who disagrees with him, why he's a prolific Goodreads reviewer, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded January 16th, 2020

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi everyone, this is Jeff, producer of Conversations with Tyler.

0:07.6

I wanted to let you all know that today's episode featuring Jason Furman was recorded

0:12.1

in January of this year.

0:14.2

It was originally scheduled to release in March, but when COVID hit, we held the episode,

0:19.5

and now we find ourselves in August, and it's as good a time as any to release it.

0:24.0

So please enjoy this somewhat long-lost episode of CWT with Jason Furman.

0:54.0

Hello, today we are here with Jason Furman, who is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School,

1:05.8

and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama.

1:09.8

Jason, welcome.

1:10.8

Thanks for having me.

1:12.6

First question, why has US investment behavior been so sluggish for so long?

1:17.7

Start with the easy ones.

1:19.0

Exactly.

1:20.0

There's no warm-up here, Tyler.

1:22.0

I think there's a lot of reasons.

1:24.4

Some of it isn't a problem.

1:26.4

It's that you don't need as much investment from businesses in the type of intangible economy

1:32.7

that we have today relative to the type of heavy industry we used to have.

1:38.8

But I think part of the investment shortfall does reflect problems and failures in economic

1:44.0

policy, and in particular, the increase in concentration in certain industries has led

1:51.2

to greater monopoly power and has reduced some of the incentives and need to make investments

1:58.5

in those industries.

...

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