Michael Munger on Many Things

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2010

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

Mike Munger of Duke University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about many things. Listeners sent in questions for Mike and Russ to talk about and they chose ten of the most interesting questions with the idea of talking about each for six minutes. The topics are the scarcity of clean water, asset bubbles, the role of Fannie and Freddie in the financial crisis, can a business pass a tax on to its customers (or maybe even its workers), compassionate food, the study of economics, how to choose a college, the nature of cooperation in a modern economy, the humanity of non-profits, and the American Dream.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is January 12, 2010, and my guest is Mike Munger of Duke University,
0:44.4	longtime friend of this program. Mike, welcome back to Econ Talk. It's great to be back. Our format
0:50.9	today is a unusual, I solicited questions from listeners via our Twitter account, Econ Talker,
0:58.0	and also via my blog, Cafe Hayek. Questions that listeners would like to hear Mike Munger talk
1:05.0	about, and I picked with your help, Mike. We picked the 10 most interesting questions. I may mess
1:12.1	up who asked them. I apologize in advance. And what we're going to do is we're going to have a
1:17.6	weird little format here. We're going to try to limit our answers to each of the questions to six
1:21.9	minutes. I have a timer here. So when you hear the bell go off, Mike, you have to finish your
1:26.2	sentence. And if the bell doesn't go off, because my timer is imperfect, we're going to have to,
1:32.5	I'll just finish my sentence anyway. Exactly. I will just cut you off. So here we go. I'm going to
1:37.8	set the timer. I'm going to wind it up here. And then we're off. First questions from Craig
1:46.1	Morgan, who heard a story on National Public Radio about fresh water scarcity threatening mankind.
1:54.6	And he made a remark. It could be a joke. I'm not sure about peak water. Like we might run out
1:59.3	of water. But I think there's no question that water is very scarce. And it is an important resource.
2:05.6	What are your thoughts on that? Well, it is a bit different from peak oil, which is the analogy.
2:10.3	It's a great one. Then after all, we use up petroleum. We change it chemically when we use it.
2:15.1	What do we don't use it up? We just sort of render it temporarily icky. Or maybe we spread it on
2:21.3	agricultural land. It evaporates. But the basic amount of water is still the same in the world.
	...

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