Policy Punchline

Our host Tiger recently received his first ever podcast interview as a guest on the Economics & Beyond podcast hosted by Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). This is certainly a great honor for him, as Rob’s guests typically range from Nobel Laureates to accomplished public intellectuals. They talked for 3.5 hours, and the interview is being published in two parts. Part 1 is Rob interviewing Tiger on podcasting, the “tyranny of meritocracy,” and the fragility of today’s socio-political discourse. Part 2 is Tiger interviewing Rob on the drawbacks of economics academia, his current work at INET, his previous journey as a policymaker and investor, and the future of market capitalism.

Nolan McCarty is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs and Interim Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He is the co-author of several books, including Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy and Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. His most recent book, Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know, explores the origins, development, and implications of the rising tide of political polarization in the U.S. In this interview, Professor McCarty discusses the current state of American politics and the events that brought us here. Why is polarization more extreme now than it was fifty years ago? What are the consequences of increased polarization? What steps can we take to alleviate this issue? Professor McCarty walks us through contemporary theories and empirical facts of political polarization, explaining the implications of these trends on government, policymaking, and society as a whole. We also dis

Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University and the Director of the Global History Lab, which strives to teach students internationally how to create new global narratives even across divides. Recently, the Global History Lab has brought displaced persons and refugees into its network. His academic focus is global, economic, and Latin American history. His recent books include Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, published in 2013. In this interview, co-hosts Tiger and Rebecca ask Professor Adelman about his views on global interdependence, why he thinks we are at a narrative impasse for multilateralism, how he uses history to understand the current global order, the resurgence of patriotic nationalism, as well as other topics relating to the Biden & Trump administration, international relations, and America’s actions in foreign affairs. Professor Adelman began by explaining how he became interested and involved in history and, specifically, Lati

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg is the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He performs research in macroeconomics, international trade, and urban and regional economics. He has been appointed the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago where he will join the faculty of the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics in the Summer of 2021.

Sheldon Solomon is Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College. He is best known for developing terror management theory along with Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, which is concerned with how humans deal with their own sense of mortality. He studies the effects of the uniquely human awareness of death on human behaviors. He is co-author of several books, including the one we’ll be discussing today – The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. I was initially drawn to Prof. Solomon’s work because I listened to a three-hour long podcast interview between him and Lex Fridman. It was the most enlightening podcast I had listened to on the Lex Fridman Show, without exaggeration. That was a few months ago during a time when I was very confused and stressed. I was working nonstop every day and deciding between whether to pursue an economics PhD or go into the “real world” to work for a few years first before reassessing. Prof. Solomon’s ideas from taking a leap of faith in life to confronting the possi

Austen Allred is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lambda School. It is an online platform that trains you remotely to become a web developer or a data scientist. The user pays no tuition until hired. Austen’s start-up journey began in 2017 with him living in his two-door Civic while participating in Y Combinator (YC), the famous San Francisco-based seed accelerator. This experience became the foundation of Lambda School’s rapid growth. Before founding Lambda School, Austen was the co-founder of media platform GrassWire. He co-authored the growth hacking textbook Secret Sauce, which became a best-seller and provided him the personal seed money to build Lambda. In this interview, co-hosts Tiger and Arsh interview Austen about Lambda School’s business model, his entrepreneurship journey, the future of higher education and credentialism, the powerful influence of Y Combinator in Silicon Valley and whether it’s become less prestigious than before, how Austen got involved in angel investing, the stellar rise of Clubhouse

Ian Jefferies is the President and CEO of the Association of American Railroads (AAR), an organization whose members include the major freight railroads of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and Amtrak. Chuck Baker joined American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association (ASLRRA) as President after a 15-year career in the railroad industry. In this interview, co-hosts Tiger Gao and Sullivan Meyer discuss with Ian and Chuck the basic functions of the American railroad system, business outlook, how the railroad system thinks about the climate challenge, policymaking in the transportation sector and beyond. Sullivan and Tiger start by asking Ian and Chuck what their respective organizations do. In short, the AAR and ASLRRA are trade groups representing their constituent industries in Washington. For the AAR, that means giving voice to the seven Class 1 railroads in the United States, as well as a few hundred other large railroads. The ASLRRA, on the other hand, represents the over 600 shortline and regional r

Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies and Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is one of the most prominent financial and economist historians of our age, and his most recent book “Making a Modern Central Bank: The Bank of England, 1979–2003” was just published in the fall of 2020. In this interview, Prof. James discusses his newest book, the modern history of central banking, global macro-financial trends in the last few decades, his insights on globalization and inflation outlook in 2020, and beyond. Prof. James dives into the details of the most important transformations undergone by the Bank of England, UK’s interactions with the European monetary system, as well as key external influences on the UK like Alan Greenspan and the German Bundesbank. The Bank of England, the central bank of the United Kingdom, was established by the British Parliament in 1694. But ever since its genesis, it struggled over what efficiency and effectiven

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also head of the Global Economics and Management group. Prior to teaching, Professor Simon Johnson worked as the Chief Economist and Director of the Research Department at the IMF from 2007 to 2008. This interview discusses his most recent book "Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream," which raises awareness of the need to continue investments in the U.S. and analyzes the impact of the recent decline of investments in innovation. We trace back the history of public investments in America, like how MIT scientist Vannevar Bush’s bold vision helped start the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) before WWII, which became central to allowing the U.S. leap in military tech and eventually win the War. The post-WWII era in the U.S. saw corroborations between the private sector, federal government, and universities. This led to 2% of

Lee Cronin is a chemist and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and has published over 350 papers and given hundreds of lectures. He also heads the Cronin Group, a lab that is “motivated by the fascination for complex chemical systems, and the desire to construct complex functional molecular architectures that are not based on biologically derived building blocks.” He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals and construct chemical computers, and create complex molecular architecture not necessarily based on biological building blocks. We start by discussing non-carbon-based lifeforms. Dr. Cronin’s interest in this subject comes from an aversion to assuming that carbon is the only life-permitting foundational molecule. He has created inorganic chemical cell

Chris Wheat is the Co-President for the JPMorgan Chase Institute. Prior to joining JPMCI, he served as the Director of Analytics at a financial technology startup, where he led the development of advanced analytics algorithms. He previously was an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and at the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development at Rutgers Business School. As a faculty member, he taught and researched topics in strategy, entrepreneurship, global microfinance, economic sociology, and social network analysis. At JPMCI, he leads research on small businesses and local economic development. The COVID crisis clearly slowed the growth of the small businesses in all contexts, particularly those owned by racial minority groups. Mr. Wheat’s research during the COVID crisis quantifies the harm done to small businesses early in the pandemic and later on towards the end of 2020, via three business research reports that we engage in discussion with. His report titled “Small B

George Church is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT. He is known as the father of synthetic biology and the CRISPR-CAS9 gene editing technology, and he is widely recognized as one of the most important geneticists of our age. In 1984, he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method, which resulted in the first genome sequence. He helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 and the Personal Genome Project in 2005. He leads his own lab in Harvard and is also affiliated with the Broad Institute, the Wyss Institute, and a wide number of private companies that were spun off from his innovations. In this interview, Tiger asks Prof. Church about his time as a graduate student and postdoc, how Harvard took a chance on him for many times during his early research career, his experience starting the Human Genome Project and its wide-ranging impacts, his critical contribution to the CRISPR gene editing technolog

Greg Lewis is an economist and the Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft and co-leads the ALICE (Automated Learning and Intelligence for Causation and Economics) and EconML projects, an effort to develop use AI and machine learning for economics research. He specializes in industrial organization, market design, applied econometrics and machine learning. His work is unified by the twin goals of making better sense of microeconomic data, and using those insights to optimize firm decision making and improve market performance. His research has spanned a range of industries – online retailing, online advertising, procurement, electricity, education. Before joining Microsoft, Prof. Lewis was a professor at Harvard for seven years. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. In this interview, Harsh and Tiger ask with Prof. Lewis about his research on consumer’s shopping trends online, how tech platforms rank search results and products, how to do causal inference using neural nets, how machine learning

Last October, the IEA declared that solar power is “the new King of Electricity.” But as it currently produces only 2% of the global electricity, the newly crowned energy royalty has a long way to go before it will reach full dominance. In Taming the Sun, Dr. Varun Sivaram outlines the financial, technological, and systemic innovations that could allow solar power to provide a third of our energy in thirty years and truly claim the mantle of “Electricity King.” Dr. Sivaram began our discussion by outlining the transformations in solar power that will make it the world’s primary energy source. He hopes that financial markets will make more capital available to fund both small-scale and large-scale solar projects. Solar technology itself also must make a qualitative leap, as incremental improvements in efficiency are replaced by entirely new ways of “taming the Sun.” Perhaps most importantly, energy systems must be revolutionized so solar energy can power transportation, manufacturing, and electric g

Mathias Risse is the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Administration at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. He also serves as the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs and Philosophy and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. His research questions the role of global justice in a wide range of topics like human rights, inequality, taxation, trade, immigration, climate change, and technology. He focuses on the “big questions” of political and moral philosophy in the United States and in a global context. In this interview, Tiger and Marko discuss with Professor Mathias Risse his theory of “grounds of justice” and how technology changes the way we look at global justice. We go over the just nature of technology and how should individuals look at technology as being inherently fair. Risse sheds light on the rising movement across philosophy departments to critique and reform the widely used theory of John Rawls to include minoriti

Robert Langer is an acclaimed chemical engineer, professor, and investor in biomedical technology. He is one of 10 Institute Professors at MIT, which is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. He has written more than 1,500 articles, with 1,400 patents issued and pending worldwide that have been licensed to over 400 companies. He is the most cited engineer in history with an H-index of 283 and over 331,000 citations according to Google Scholar. His inventions are estimated to have affected over 2 billion lives, and his most recent public work involves the coronavirus vaccine created by Moderna, which is the biotech company he co-founded. In this interview, Arjun, Michael, and Tiger discuss with Prof. Langer his early career struggles as a freshly minted graduate student, his groundbreaking postdoc research on blood vessel growth for Judah Folkman that few believed could become reality, the future of tissue engineering technology, why the mRNA vaccine is safe and has withstood the test of

Wingham Rowan has long been a leader in forecasting the interactions between technology and society. For instance, he created, produced, and presented cyber.cafe, Britain’s longest running TV series about the internet. He also was a presenter on his own program for children, Rowan’s Report. More recently, however, Mr. Rowan has been studying the future of labor and how technology can improve the unpredictable nature of the gig economy. He leads Britain’s Beyond Jobs Project and the international nonprofit, Modern Markets for All. His big ideas about Public Official E-Markets, or POEMs, have been implemented recently in Long Beach, CA to great success. At its root, POEMs are an effort to bridge the unequal gap between markets used by the upper and lower ends of the economy. Specifically, there are millions of “irregular” workers who cannot work traditionally scheduled hours. These people need jobs, and they can provide valuable labor to businesses. Mr. Rowan believes that everyday workers and small businesse

Stephen Roach is a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a Senior Lecturer at Yale’s School of Management, where his research and teaching focus on the impacts of Asia on the global economy. One of Wall Street’s most influential economists, Prof. Roach spent more than 30 years at Morgan Stanley, where he was the Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the bank’s Chief Economist. He has written extensively on globalization, trade policy, and international finance. Last October, Prof. Roach published an article in the Financial Times titled “The end of the dollar’s exorbitant privilege.” He argues that the dollar could fall as much as 35 percent by the end of 2021. In this interview, Prof. Roach walks us through the reasoning behind his arguments and discusses the economic and political significance of a dollar crash, mainly pointing to two metrics – a decline in domestic savings and an increase in the current account deficit. Domestic savings was at 1.4% of national income in Q1 2020, c

David Williams serves as the Director of Policy Outreach at Opportunity Insights, a research and public policy lab based at Harvard University dedicated to using big data to improve upward mobility in America. The lab is led by Professors Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Nathaniel Hendren. David is tasked with supporting research and evidence-based policy change by creating and leading partnerships with communities across the country. Opportunity Insights’ current projects include Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO), a national housing mobility initiative, and the Charlotte Opportunity Initiative, a community-wide place-based initiative aimed at improving economic opportunity throughout Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. With a mission to develop scalable policy solutions that will empower families to rise through poverty, Opportunity Insights adopts a unique lab-based, team-based approach to economic research with a large team of “pre-doctoral” research fellows and policy experts. They believe they’re helping

Hunt Allcott is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research visiting the Economics Department at Harvard University in 2020-2021. An applied microeconomist who studies topics in behavioral economics, environmental economics, public economics, and industrial organization, Prof. Allcott is also a Co-Editor of the Journal of Public Economics and a Scientific Director of ideas42, a think tank that applies insights from psychology and economics to business and policy design problems. Prof. Allcott is a leading scholar in the emerging field of behavioral public economics, which asks questions such as: How can we do welfare analysis if choice does not necessarily identify utility? How do we empirically measure consumer bias? How do we set socially optimal policies in the presence of bias? Are nudges a good idea? Behavioral economics extends the study of public economics in three ways: 1) new welfare implications of standard policies; 2) new policy tools like nudges; and 3) better predictions about how pe