Robert Frank and Russ Roberts on Infrastructure

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2012

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

Robert Frank of Cornell University and EconTalk host Russ Roberts debate the merits of a large increase of infrastructure spending. In the summer of 2012, Frank and Roberts were interviewed by Alex Blumberg of NPR's Planet Money. That interview was trimmed to ten minutes for a Planet Money podcast. This is the entire conversation. Frank argues that a trillion increase in infrastructure spending, where the projects are decided by a bipartisan commission, would put people back to work and repair a near-failing system at a time when it is cheap to repair it and cheap to fund those repairs. Roberts disagrees with virtually every piece of Frank's argument. This lively conversation covers fundamental disagreements over fiscal policy, the proper role for government, and the political process.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:06.4	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:11.0	Our website is econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find
0:16.0	links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:19.0	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going
0:23.3	back to 2006.
0:25.4	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org.
0:28.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:33.0	This week's episode is a little different.
0:35.2	A few months ago, National Public Radio's Planet Money did a show on policy ideas that
0:40.4	economists across the ideological spectrum agree on, more or less.
0:45.2	But each of us also had ideas where there was no agreement whatsoever, and one of those
0:49.3	came from Robert Frank, a proposal to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure.
0:55.2	That money decided to do a follow-up show on these ideas, so they interviewed Robert
0:59.0	Frank and me to see if he could convince me to support his idea or if I could convince
1:03.8	him to give it up.
1:05.4	Alex Bloomberg, a planet money, interviewed the two of us for almost an hour.
1:10.4	Planet Money then took that hour and distilled it down to 10 minutes as part of a recent
1:14.6	Planet Money podcast, but I thought the full extended conversation might be of interest
1:19.6	to e-contalk listeners.
1:22.2	So with permission from Alex Bloomberg of Planet Money and Robert Frank of Cornell University,
1:27.0	here's that conversation.
	...

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