Policy Punchline: Recent Episodes
Princeton University
Two in-depth interviews every week with scholars, policy makers, and business executives on frontier ideas & urgent issues in our world.
Sponsored by the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance and the Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies at Princeton University.
Hosted by Tiger Gao '21 and other undergraduate Princetonians.
Visit us on policypunchline.com
A conversation with Jason Furman, Harvard Professor and former Obama Administration economic advisor, discussing key economic policy issues. Furman shares insights on economic resilience, fiscal stimulus responses to the 2008 and COVID-19 crises, healthcare reform, the role of economic analysis in policymaking, and the future of AI in the economy. He addresses how economic indicators can be improved, the challenges of implementing healthcare cost controls, the importance of honest analysis of trade-offs in policy decisions, and his thoughts on integrating AI into economics education.The interview was conducted by Princeton students Alice McCarthy '27 and David Piegaro '25 and is part of the Policy Punchline podcast series, supported by Princeton's Julius Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance.
The Art of the Long-Form: Crafting Epic Business Narratives and Creating Amazing PodcastsEvery Host has a Story....In this latest episode of Policy Punchline, we sit down with David Rosenthal, co-founder and co-host of the Acquired Podcast. From his days as a Princeton "organization kid" to becoming a leading voice in business history storytelling, Rosenthal's journey is as unconventional and inspiring. As a French literature major turned venture capitalist turned full-time podcaster, Rosenthal offers insights into the evolving landscape of tech, entrepreneurship, and digital media.Throughout our conversation, Rosenthal takes us behind the scenes of Acquired, revealing the meticulous research process and unparalleled access that sets his long-form business histories apart. He shares reflections on his time at Princeton, his stint on Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis, and his transition into venture capital. Rosenthal's perspective on the serendipitous nature of career paths and the importance of balancing focus and openness to unexpected opportunities is invaluable to students and young professionals alike.We explore the challenges and triumphs of building a podcast empire, from humble beginnings to becoming one of the largest and best respected technology podcasts. Rosenthal discusses the possible impact of AI on content creation, the future of podcasting, and the enduring value of deep, well-researched storytelling in the age of information overload. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a podcast enthusiast, or simply curious about the inner workings of successful tech companies, this episode offers a wealth of insights and inspiration. Join us as we unpack the art of business storytelling and the unexpected paths that lead to success in the ever-changing world of tech and media.
In this latest episode of Policy Punchline, we dive deep into the world of financial regulation and economic policy with our distinguished guest, Aaron Klein. Klein, the Miriam K. Carliner Chair and Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, brings a wealth of experience from his pivotal roles in shaping U.S. financial policy. His journey—from the halls of Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs to the front lines of financial regulatory reform in DC—provides a unique lens through which we explore the ever-evolving landscape of economic policy. As a key player in the development of the Dodd-Frank Act, Klein draws on his firsthand experience to shed light on the successes and pitfalls of pre- and post-Crisis regulations.Throughout our conversation, Klein touches on his time in Congress to explain what the institution can and cannot do well to respond to financial crises, explores regulatory nuances from predatory banking practices to consumer credit, and emphasizes the pivotal role of technology in reshaping financial services. We explore the profound implications of AI in consumer credit allocation, the debate around central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and the evolving frontier of cryptocurrency regulation. From Klein's critique on the recent AI Executive Order to his perspective on the structural flaws within American central banking, this episode promises a comprehensive exploration of the intersections between financial regulation, technology, and economic policy. Join us as the Brookings scholar and Congress veteran walks us through the wild world of financial regulation.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Pinelope Goldberg, the Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University and former Chief Economist of the World Bank Group. We discuss her extensive research into globalization, trade liberalization, and development. We address some of the most critical questions of global economics: how has the reduction in trade barriers affected countries across the development spectrum, and distributionally within nations? What are many economists getting wrong about trade policy? What various sorts of development paths allow low-income countries to grow rapidly? She leverages her wide body of research to give insight into these questions, including her recent publication “The Uneven Effects of Globalization,” which challenges some of the common critiques of trade liberalization, and other research that has explored the effects of freer cross-border exchange on labor dynamics and inequality within countries. Moreover, she discusses her experience at the helm of economics at the World Bank, describing the hopeful case of Vietnam and the promise of collaboration between international institutions and local governments. Join us on this episode of Policy Punchline for insights from a seasoned practitioner and prominent academic on the all-important problems of global growth.
In this episode of Policy Punchline, we delve into the remarkable career path and insights of Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge and former White House Communications Director. We start with Scaramucci's upbringing on Long Island in the 1970s, its influence on him as he made his way into the heart of Wall Street and eventually the corridors of the White House. Scaramucci describes the corrupting dynamics of power in Washington, and explains conflicts and confrontations he encountered during his time in the Trump administration. He offers his perspective on press freedom and Russian sanctions, which sometimes diverged from the administration's stance. Through this lens, Scaramucci provides a glimpse into the divisive leadership style of President Trump from firsthand experience. He gives us these reflections on the past, but a look forward as well, making his pitch for the role of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in the future of our financial system. From the digitization of assets, to the disruptive potential of decentralized systems, to the role of Bitcoin as a digital store of value, Scaramucci expresses optimism about a world outside of traditional financial institutions. For a wide-ranging conversation about the winding paths to Wall Street, the travails of the Trump White House, the future of finance, and even some wisdom on the good life, join us for this episode with Anthony Scaramucci.
In this episode of Policy Punchline, we are honored to welcome Sir Angus Deaton, the esteemed British-American economist and recipient of the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Sir Deaton discusses the dynamics of wealth, health, and inequality across the globe and, as per his latest book, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, his adopted homeland. We discuss the "deaths of despair" framework developed by Anne Case and Professor Deaton as well as the recent refinement of the theory and popular critiques. We delve into his extensive research on income and health inequality, exploring the intricate relationship between economic prosperity and public health outcomes. He challenges conventional wisdom by emphasizing that inequality within nations can have profound effects on societal structures and individual lives, often leading to significant disparities in health as well as political resentment. We discuss his book "The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality," where Sir Deaton argues that miraculous levels of economic growth have lifted many out of poverty, while also leading to significant gaps in wealth and health that threaten to undermine the progress the world has made. He emphasizes the importance of understanding these disparities and focusing on challenges at home. Throughout the episode, Sir Deaton offers insights into global challenges and the less than ideal responses of economic elites and policymakers to those challenges. Issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic response, trade, automation and climate change, all required making tradeoffs. We consider whether establishment economics has erred in evaluating those tradeoffs, weighing the costs and benefits of policy, and selecting winners and losers. Sir Deaton is deeply concerned for the future relevance and legitimacy of his profession but he is also hopeful that a rising generation of young economists and policymakers may yet set it right. Join us on this episode to explore the profession of economics from every angle, as told by one of its Nobel Prize winners.
In this episode, we are joined by Ashoka Mody, the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in International Economy and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. We discuss his latest book, India is Broken, and dive into some of the larger questions surrounding Indian economic development. Why has India’s development stalled in comparison to other Asian economies? What do the headline GDP growth numbers and international press coverage miss in their optimisim towards India? How can India address its ills including rampant political corruption and inadequate education?These are all questions that Mody answers through an examination of India through multiple lenses: economic, social, historical, and cultural. We join him on this journey and follow up on his arguments as constructed in India is Broken, while also taking them to new places, like the issue of climate change in the policies of Indian economic development. Join us for a conversation that takes a more skeptical view towards the optimism surrounding a “rising” India.
In this episode of Policy Punchline, renown MIT economist Daron Acemoglu takes us through the tumultuous and fascinating history of new technologies and how they have reshaped the societies we live in. He takes us back to the pre-Industrial era, showing that as new technological systems of agriculture changed, exploitative economic systems did not. He busts common myths about the nature of economic growth in the Industrial Age, presenting a darker and more nuanced look at that explosion of economic development. He argues that the advent of the personal computer in the 1980s had a real cost for employment outcomes — not enough new jobs were generated to match the jobs that were replaced by this innovation. Looking back, he proposes that technology can either complement the value of labor, generating new tasks associated with them, or can displace existing workers by performing the same tasks they did. In many ways, the effect of technology one way or another is not inevitable — it is a policy decision up to us. Looking forward, he asks us to take lessons from the past to utilize AI most equitably, ensuring it augments rather than replaces us. From blue collar jobs in the U.S., labor-intensive tasks performed in the developing world to consulting and software engineering fields, the future of our work lies in our hands. In the era of Artificial Intelligence, Professor Acemoglu brings us the wisdom of economic history, a bold new paradigm for assessing technological change, and a lifetime of expertise, to help us make sense of this brave new world.
Marcin Piatkowski is a Professor of Economics at Kozminski University in Warsaw and Lead Economist at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Kozminski University and an MA in Finance and Banking from the Warsaw School of Economics. Professor Piatkowski began his career in Citibank Poland and Citigroup USA. He then served in various governmental and NGO roles, including as an economist in the European Department of the International Monetary Fund, Advisor to the IMF’s Executive Director, and Advisor to Poland’s Deputy Premier and Minister of Finance. Before he moved to the World Bank in 2008, he was Chief Economist and Managing Director of PKO BP, the largest bank in Central and Eastern Europe. In 2018, he released a book with Oxford University Press, called “Europe’s Growth Champion: Insights from the Economic Rise of Poland,” which was awarded the best book in economics in 2019 by the Polish Academy of Sciences.———————————————————————————————————————————————————————Interviewed by Sullivan Meyer '24Edited by Marko Petrovic '24
Dr. Marc Ecko is a serial entrepreneur who has been one of the influential figures of the early 2000s in shaping culture, especially around hip-hop and streetwear. His brand — Ecko Unltd. — amalgamated the cultural elements of hip-hop with Dr. Ecko’s own fashion vision to create a worldwide brand with over a billion dollars in revenue. He then went on to found Complex magazine, one of the foremost media outlets for fashion, hip-hop, sports and popular culture today. Complex has roughly 100 million unique visitors per month and is considered one of the premier media companies, particularly in the digital space. Now, Dr. Ecko is involved with several philanthropic ventures, such as through his role at the XQ Institute, which is dedicated to improving high school education across the country, and the Emerson Collective, an impact investing organization dedicated to reform in the United States and abroad. In this episode, we discuss Dr. Ecko’s journey and how he preserved his own creative vision at scale, while also building a business that can truly shape American culture. For more insights from Dr. Ecko, read his book Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out.
Matthew Yglesias is a leading policy blogger and journalist, and has long pioneered what political media looks like on the internet. He has written about politics and public policy for a wide array of publications, including the American Prospect, the Atlantic, the Center for American Progress, and Slate. In 2014, Matt co-founded Vox with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell, where he served as a senior correspondent. He left Vox in 2020 to start his own Substack, Slow Boring. Yglesias also released his third book in 2020, titled One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. More recently, Matt just launched his new podcast, ‘Bad Takes,’ which seeks to challenge extremely online political opinions.In our conversation, we seek to zoom out from the thrall of internet politics and look at Yglesias’ role in the current political media landscape. How does Matt use Twitter, and what does he think of its role in democratic discourse? What is the future of political media? What does the emergence of individualized media outlets, like Substack, suggest for that future?We transition briefly to some of the ideas that have arisen from our current political media landscape. In particular, how ‘real’ is the push for supply-side liberalism and the Abundance Agenda? Are online political pundits, bloggers, and analysts as responsible for its advent as it might seem?Finally, we ask Matt—a former college student—for his suggestions to current college students. How should they spend their time in school? And what careers should they look at afterward?
(Disclaimer: This episode was originally recorded in July 2021.)
Dr. Tiffany Vora is an educator, researcher, and entrepreneur who is the chair of medicine and digital biology at Singularity University. She does a huge amount of work in science communication, advising startup founders, and science writing. She studied molecular biology and chemistry at NYU and a PhD from Princeton.
In “Science Communication in the Post-COVID era”, we talk about the pace of change in science communication. Given the timing of the interview, we also discuss in detail how the pandemic and being in the virtual/digital space has changed science communication. Dr. Vora believes that many brilliant scientific minds haven’t been trained in science communication, and that there is potential for so much progress in science communication if the gap between knowledge creation and distribution is bridged. Similarly, there is a lot of misinformation out there, and deciding which sources to trustworthy and getting the public to trust them can also be a challenge, especially when a lot of science has inherent uncertainty.
On the education front, Dr. Vora has worked a lot with women and people of color. She believes that in every child there is a scientist and engineer, building and breaking things, asking questions, that the traditional educational system beats out of them and extinguishes their spark of curiosity. Finding a balance between ‘experiential learning’, which Dr. Vora believes can happen in a classroom, too, has a fundamentally different purpose than, say, watching Khan Academy for ‘knowledge acquisition’. Coming out of the pandemic, she hopes many hybrid models will start to embrace both types of learning. And it’s not as if scientific learning for children is gated by high barriers to entry like cost. She gives an example of a cheap microscope or Google Cardboard. While they might not be cutting-edge technology, they work and fulfill their role of instilling a sense of curiosity and excitement.
We hope you enjoy listening to an episode on how similarities like those found between Minecraft and CAD are the ones we need to take the most advantage of to inspire future generations of scientists and engineers, and the future of science communication in the post-pandemic era.
Dr. Ethan Nadelmann is one of the foremost experts on drug policy in the US and the world. Originally from New York City, he received his BA, JD, and PhD from Harvard, then his master’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics. After teaching politics and public affairs at Princeton University from 1987 to 1994, he went on to found and direct the Lindesmith Center and the Drug Policy Alliance, and through them, has advocated for drug policy reform for almost thirty years.
From pushing for marijuana legalization to fighting against the War on Drugs and policies like civil asset forfeiture, his work has impacted countless people both in the US and around the world. Today, he’s also the co-host of the boundary-pushing podcast PSYCHOACTIVE. In this interview, Ryan and Eliot talk to Dr. Nadelmann about lessons he’s learned from his career, possible solutions to current drug issues, and much more.
Professor Christakis is the Sterling Professor of Natural and Social Science at Yale University. His research is focused on understanding social networks through their biological and evolutionary determinants, which encompasses studying a broad range of topics from epidemiology and contagion to human behavior and psychology. Professor Christakis has been recognized for his contributions to the field of sociology, was named a member of the Time 100, and has published many articles and several renowned books relating to epidemiology and evolutionary genetics. In addition to his research, Professor Christakis has practiced medicine in the field of palliative care for many years and continues to advocate for academic freedom and free speech on college campuses.
Host: Neal Reddy Editor: Marko Petrovic
Lord Mervyn King is a professor of economics and law at the NYU Stern School of Business and the School of Law, and the former governor of the Bank of England. He served as Governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of its Monetary Policy Committee from 2003 to 2013. Lord King was knighted (GBE) in 2011, made a life peer in 2013, and appointed by the Queen a Knight of the Garter in 2014.
Lord King’s most recent book, Radical Uncertainty, co-authored with John Kay, examines rationality, decision making under uncertainty, and the flaws with modern economic thinking. The book offers a powerful critique of the current state of economic scholarship and policymaking, arguing that the field of economics has developed an overreliance on fundamentally flawed models as well as misconceptions about risk and uncertainty.
In this episode, we discuss Radical Uncertainty, touching on Lord King’s motivations in writing the book, its core ideas, and the implications of his critique on the future of economic policymaking.
Host: Sam Lee Editor: Marko Petrovic
Gregory Zuckerman is a nonfiction author and special writer at The Wall Street Journal. Before joining the Journal, Zuckerman was managing editor of Mergers and Acquisitions Reports, a trade publication of Investment Dealers’ Digest, and the New York Post as a media reporter.
At the Journal, Zuckerman is an investigative reporter covering business and investing topics. He is a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honor in business journalism. He regularly appears on CNBC, Fox News, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg Television, and more. Zuckerman’s works include The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, and his latest book, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine, covering mRNA vaccine development. A Shot to Save the World was longlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
In this episode, we hit a wide range of topics, starting with how Mr. Zuckerman wrote his book, and his experiences with the characters he writes about. We then discuss public policy and financing, and how the vaccine development process can be critiqued and updated. Finally, we talk about societal perception of science, and how it should change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine development process. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Hosts: Sullivan Meyer and Neal Reddy Design: Ryan Vuono Editor: Marko Petrovic
Professor Sandro Galea is a physician and epidemiologist who is dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. His research is centered on the social factors that influence health and trauma, and his work is highly cited in the field of public health. Some of his most notable work relates to the ramifications of mass trauma after natural disasters and catastrophes, which his latest book, The Contagion Next Time addresses as it confronts the pivotal moment of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this interview, we start by discussing the concept of health itself. What qualifies as health? Are we too limited in our effort to make society healthier? We then move to Professor Galea’s scientific and moral critiques of public policy actions that according to him impact health negatively, from budgetary decisions to international relations. Despite Professor Galea’s critiques of public health policy, we end the interview on an optimistic note— Professor Galea observes that we are in an unprecedented position in history with regards to the medicine and wealth of our society, and with such tools in disposal, it is important to steer clear of pessimism.
This interview marks my last interview as the host of Policy Punchline. I will soon release another recording giving you an update about Policy Punchline’s future, but for now I just want to present to you the following conversation with Prema Gauranga Das.
Over the last three years with Policy Punchline, I’ve interviewed more than 150 guests, mostly public intellectuals, policy makers, journalists, investors… but this is my only interview with a monk – a Hindu monk.
Premji has been a resident monk at Sri Sri Radha Gopinath Temple in Mumbai with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (also known as ISKCON) for the last 20 years. Like many of his peers, Premji completed his Bachelors degree in engineering from the University of Pune, a top university in India, and subsequently had a 4-year stint at India’s largest auto manufacturing company. But he quit his job to become a monk and to explore a more fulfilling and purposeful lifestyle, after being inspired by the teachings of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, and His Holiness Radhanath Swami. Currently he is one of the research and implementation leads for ISKCON’s flagship project, the Temple of Vedic Planetarium, and is compiling his research on the Bhagavata Cosmology.
I conducted the interview in the winter of 2019, right before Covid hit the world. I went on a yoga and meditation trip to India with Princeton University’s Office of Religion Life, led by two fantastic mentors, Vineet and Angela, with a group of 15 students. We traveled for a month during Christmas vacation, visiting yoga institutes, temples, ashrams, and cultural sites. We were accompanied by Premji, who helped plan our trip and guide us through the country, and through many conversations he gradually became an important mentor.
I was truly fortunate to have met Premji. He answered my questions on the Hindu faith, life, and my confusion about my own path forward. He was almost like a beacon of light, using simple principles to help me reason through some of the most difficult philosophical and religious questions that had puzzled me over the years: - Should we be pessimistic in light of the world’s unending sufferings? - Have we made progress as a humanity? - How flexible can one be with their spiritual and religious faiths? - What does it mean to be guided by God? Does one have to be guided by God or some form of greater power? - How do we control our desires? What does it mean to be happy? - What is one’s destiny and how do we discover our true calling? …
Premji and I recorded this conversation towards the end of my trip. We were in Rishikesh, a city on the Ganges river and home to the famous Beatles Ashram. Overseeing sunset on the foothills of the Himalayas, we sat along the Ganges river and chatted for three hours. Hence we named the episode “Satsang on the Ganges,” where the word “Satsang” refers to the idea of group discussions or informal gatherings in hope to better understand the Vedic philosophy –– or, in essence, together pursuing the Absolute Truth.
It’s never my goal to try to change people’s lives via this podcast –– that would be too condescending to think that I should do that –– but I would be honored if the following interview could open a small window for you to explore some of these ideas. You may reach out to Premji by emailing him at prem.gauranga.rns@gmail.com. You may learn more about ISKCON via https://www.iskcon.org/ and https://iskconchowpatty.com/.
Dr. Jean Hebert is a professor at the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is also a professor in the department of genetics, and has conducted research that has been published in renowned journals such as Science. His current scope of research in the Hebert Lab includes devising methods of cell replacement for the adult neocortex after cell damage or age-related degeneration.
In “Do Our Minds Have to Decline With Age?”, we explore just that, diving into topics such as the neocortex and neocortical function, cell damage, and age-related deterioration. ‘Dying of old age’ is not a medical term; rather, it is a description of what happens when critical parts of the body fail. Theoretically, if all parts of the body can be kept ‘young’ and healthy, we might have a chance of extending life indefinitely. While we are a long ways off from that, current cutting-edge research in the field of cell grafting, like conducted at the Hebert Lab, might hold to key to help save failing organs.
Throughout this interview, we discuss the science behind the neocortex, a region of the brain responsible for higher-order brain functions such as motor function, sensory perception, and cognition. We also discuss cell transplantation and grafting, what aging truly means, and possible directions for future research. From his lab’s webpage, “In recent years, the mechanisms underlying how stem cells in the embryo generate the neocortex have become better understood. Armed with this knowledge, the Hébert Lab is developing stem cell transplantation approaches to regenerate adult neocortical tissue after age-related degeneration.” Finally, we discuss the ethics of these methods, such as the usage of embryonic stem cells, as well as the definition of self (Ship of Theseus – at what point does altering the human brain structure fundamentally alter the underlying human being?)
We hope that you enjoy listening to an episode about rethinking aging, something we often take for granted, and learning about the direction of future research in this field.
Dr. Anders Sandberg is a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. He is a senior research fellow on the ERC UnPrEDICT Programme, and a research associate to the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and his research focuses on existential risks and long-term societal and ethical facets of new technology regarding human enhancement.
Existential risks are risks that deal with the end of something — in this case, the end of humanity and Earth-originating intelligent life. As Prof. Sandberg explains, the most dire of risks lead to a lot of interesting implications and there are many interesting links that bridge different risks. Understanding those linkages are interesting and useful in discovering what the risks are, and also what we can do about it. Risks are broadly classified into anthropogenic (in this sense, self-inflicted) and external (natural).
In this episode of Policy Punchline, we discuss both types of risks, and why we should really care. After all, there is a low probability of this kind of existential risk occurring in our lifetime, and we have a fairly resilient infrastructure already in place. As Prof. Sandberg points out, “you can motivate the badness of existential risk in quite a lot of ways, both consequentialist and non-consequentialist”. The conversation then turns to utilitarianism and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the thought process and awareness of the field. Animal welfare (including humans) is brought up, and also the subject of human enhancement. Technological enhancements seem inevitable in the future, and, going back to anthropogenic risks, how this affects the future of humanity is a nuanced topic.
We hope you enjoy listening to an episode on existential risks and utility, a subject that concerns all of us. The pandemic has brought increased attention to how vulnerable humans could actually be to unforeseen threats to our existence, and we hope this interview provokes thought with regards to the future of humanity.
Peter Wendell is the founder of Sierra Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has invested more than $2 billion over the past 35 years in a wide variety of successful technology companies. Peter has taught more than 2,000 Stanford MBAs over the past 30 years, specifically the very popular course Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital with Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Scott Kupor, managing partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He serves on the board of Merck. He just completed his trusteeship at Princeton. He was also chairman of the board for Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO) for six years, during which time PRINCO doubled the University’s endowment.
In this episode, Peter discusses the evolving nature of venture capital investing, the relationship between VCs and their LPs (limited partners), emerging phenomenon like SPACs and cryptocurrencies, whether we’re entering another great age of secular growth for technology, and his personal journey in starting Sierra Ventures. Peter has been recognized by Forbes magazine as one of the 100 best technology venture investors in the United States and named one of the 15 venture capitalists on Upside magazine’s “Elite 100” list of influential U.S. leaders in technology, finance, and business.
Peter started Sierra Ventures as a young investor with some wealthy families’ money –– “they should’ve never given someone like me money to manage,” joked Peter. But it was the age where “it was hard to not make money in venture investing” –– every fund started in Peter’s time had returned money to LPs; not a single fund lost money, in contrast to around a fourth of all bond funds back then collapsing given the Asian financial crises.
Peter bought 6% of stake in Intuit with a $2.5 million investment; now it’s a company with a market capitalization of around $145 billion –– you can do the math. This investment, along with many others, made Peter one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world over the last few decades.
We also ask Peter whether he sees us entering another period of great secular growth for technology. The sentiment amongst pro-tech, pro-growth investors seems to be that the hyper growth stocks (Snowflake, Coinbase, Shopify, Docusign, Twilio, Upstart, etc.) look expensive and many are currently unprofitable, but most have long runways, high margins, sticky customers, and steady revenues. If we value these companies on what they might look like 5 years from now, do most secular compounders still seem fairly valued?
Looking at the market environment today, Peter is very skeptical of the promises of SPACs. He said in his keynote address at Princeton GCEPS that the SPAC boom likely won’t end well because there is a lot of promotion, a lack of regulation, but fundamentally not that many great companies to acquire.
Peter thinks that cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are the future and certainly on the risk frontier, but we still don’t know which chain or project will eventually prevail, so the overall asset class is still a highly risky investment option.
A big proponent of SaaS (especially given how he’s one of the first investors that embraced this idea back in the early days), Peter also believes that we’re still at an early stage in exploring artificial intelligence and the good it could do for the world.
Richard V. Spencer served as the 76th United States Secretary of the Navy from 2017 to 2019. He also briefly served as Acting Secretary of Defense and Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense in 2019. Sec. Spencer’s term as the Navy Secretary was terminated on November 24, 2019, when Secretary of Defense Mark Esper requested his resignation over his handling of the Eddie Gallagher case. Sec. Spencer stated in the resignation letter that he “cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took in the presence of my family, my flag and my faith to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” We discuss this case in this interview, as well as the state of the Navy, competition with other military powers, investment in human capital and frontier military tech, and the philosophy of war.
Dr. Jamil El-Imad is the CEO of The Brain Forum, a neuroscience, brain-computer interface (BCI), and virtual reality (VR) research foundation in Switzerland, as well as the co-founder of NeuroPro, a Swiss-based Digital Health Solutions company that leverage the latest advances in computer science and digital technology to create new and improved tools that support researchers, clinicians, and innovators in pushing the boundaries of brain science and its applications. He is also an honorary research fellow at Imperial College London, and a former IBM software engineer. His key interests include BCI, VR, brain signal analyses, and big data, all of which we delve into in this interview.
Having been out for many years now, most people are probably familiar with virtual reality technology. However, brain-computer interfaces (also known as a neural-control interface), bridges the gap between our mind and a machine by converting brain signals into commands that can be interpreted by a computer, resulting in the desired action. The potential for this technology is profound and could be applied in myriad fields.
In “Connecting Our Brains to the World”, we discuss Dr. El-Imad’s decision to transition from software engineering to a neuroscience focus. Neuroscience is a fascinating field in which research can be taken in many directions. We inquire about Dr. El-Imad’s interest in deep learning (ex. epilepsy prediction), and the limiting factors in brain-computer interactions. Further, the topic of healthcare is explored in some depth, in particular the lag in the healthcare industry’s adoption of seemingly very useful tools and the administrative, logistical, and technological hurdles cutting-edge interfacing technology faces before becoming mainstream. Continuing on this topic, the inequities between the rich and the poor are also explored, as evidenced by the pandemic. In a similar vein, virtual reality also holds promise in the healthcare industry; for example, in the treatment of phobias. We ask our guest what he thinks the development of VR will look like in the future, including the democratization and commercialization of the technology as well as the value from an entertainment standpoint.
We hope you enjoy this episode listening to an episode on the human connection to the machine, and that it provokes deeper thought and discussion on what is possible in this realm of neuroscience.
Toni Townes-Whitley graduated from Princeton University in 1985 with a B.A. in Public Policy and Economics. She then went to the peace corps for three years in Gabon. With a non-tech background, she went on to become the President of the IT and business consulting services firm CGI Federal and presently the President of US Regulated Industries at Microsoft. She leads Microsoft's U.S. sales for Regulated Industries (Financial Services & Insurance; Healthcare & Life Sciences; Federal, State, & Local Government; and Education). Her teams drive digital transformation across national industries and focus on inclusion, equity and access in the emerging digital economy.
She is one of the leading women at Microsoft and in the technology industry. Her role at Microsoft is shaping the role that artificial intelligence and technology will play in systems like policing, education, the U.S. military, and more, especially since the U.S. government is one of Microsoft’s leading clients particularly through the use of its Azure cloud services.
In this episode, we dive into the intersection of tech development and race, innovation, and ethics and hear Toni’s perspectives on digital transformation. She started off by talking about how she ended up at her position at Microsoft and why she chose to work in regulated industries at Microsoft. She focused on the ability for her work in building tech infrastructure to shape the world we live in. Toni said, “the [regulated industries] is probably the hardest set of sectors to work in terms of designing towards a much more complex set of requirements, but it is also the most meaningful because when you get it right, you have an impact that not only affects the industry but generally affects society at large.”
Throughout the interview, Toni emphasizes the importance of a mission-oriented framework to any institution, from the peace corps to Microsoft to government technology initiatives. Toni then moves into talking about key lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic in relation to digital transformation in the sectors of education, healthcare, financial services, and more. She speaks on the emergence of cloud-based technology particularly in the sector of government and the ways in which it enables predictive capabilities, deep analytics, and stronger security.
She then spends time talking through the relationship between Microsoft and the U.S. government. She talks about how Microsoft’s relationship with the U.S. government spans from providing VR technology to transform training for the Department of Defense to using Microsoft Azure cloud services to keep information secure. Toni concludes by sharing her reflections on the importance of an ethics framework in developing new technologies, which Microsoft developed, that have been adopted by governmental and non-governmental organizations across the world.
Mitch Julis is the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Canyon Partners, one of the largest and best-performing multi-strategy hedge funds in the world. If you listen to the end of our interviews or visit our website, you’ll see that Policy Punchline is generously funded by the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance (JRCPPF) at Princeton University. The Center was created by Mr. Julis and named in honor of his father and mother. After 150 episodes, we’re finally having Mitch on the show, and everything is truly coming back in full circle here.
We start the interview with an introduction to Canyon Partners and Mitch’s background. “You can’t be a great equity investor without being a solid credit analyst” – Mitch gives a detailed overview to credit investing, Canyon’s various strategies and funds, and his overarching investment philosophy. We also touch on many of the macro trends before and after Covid, the Federal Reserve’s “insurance policy” for financial markets with persistently low interest rates, the rise of SPACs and Bitcoin, and many more current event topics and beyond.
One of the interview highlights is Mitch’s explanation of “reframing financial and economic analysis as political economy to understand how structure determines behavior and behavior determines structure in the capital markets.” To illustrate how to cope with complex situations, he brings up Canyon’s recent investment in AMC Theatres during the company’s struggle in the Covid pandemic, as well as their previous investment in Caesar Entertainment. He also
A recent book published in April 2021, “The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry,” by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes talks about the Caesars Entertainment restructuring, which Mitch referenced a few times throughout the interview and recommends those who are interested to read more.
Mitch co-founded Canyon Partners in 1990 with Josh Friedman after his old firm Drexel Burnham Lambert was closed. Canyon subsequently flourished into one of the best-performing hedge funds in the world over the last three decades, growing into various strategies from distressed credit to CLOs and real estate.
Disclaimer by Canyon Partners, LLC: • This presentation does not constitute an offer or solicitation to subscribe for or purchase any securities in any jurisdiction.
• Certain information contained herein constitutes “forward-looking statements.” Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events or results may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in such forward-looking statements.
• Nothing contained in this presentation constitutes investment advice or offers any opinion with respect to the suitability of any security or asset class, and the views expressed in this presentation should not be taken as advice to buy, sell or hold any security or asset class.
• Any representative investment or strategy described herein is for illustrative purposes to describe a type of investment Canyon either has acquired or, opportunity permitting, may acquire in the future. Such descriptions are summary in nature and do not purport to list all the salient features of the investment or the strategy described. There is no guarantee that similar opportunities will be available for a fund in the future, or that a fund will acquire further investments of the type described in such summaries.
• Canyon has numerous other investments – successful and not successful. An investment profiled in this presentation may not be held by all Canyon funds. It is not known whether any position(s) currently held will be profitable when sold.
• Past performance of an investment, strategy, or fund is not a guarantee of future results.
• This presentation may contain confidential information and shall not be redistributed without the express written consent of Canyon Partners, LLC.
Paul G. Haaga Jr. is the former acting CEO of NPR, the former chairman and director of Capital Research and Management Company, and the Chairperson of the Facebook Oversight Board Trust.
In this episode, we welcome back Mr. Haaga Jr. to Policy Punchline to discuss Facebook's recent decision on deplatforming former U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
Paul G. Haaga Jr. is the former acting CEO of NPR, the former chairman and director of Capital Research and Management Company, and the Chairperson of the Facebook Oversight Board Trust.
Tim Roughgarden is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and a winner of the Gödel Prize, which is often considered as “the Nobel Prize of theoretical computer science.” His research interests include the many connections between computer science and economics, as well as the design, analysis, applications, and limitations of algorithms. We’ll also talk about his most recent research in the cryptocurrency space, EIP-1559, and the future of Ethereum.
Prof. Roughgarden has been awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Kalai Prize in Computer Science and Game Theory, the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, the Mathematical Programming Society's Tucker Prize, and the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science. He was an invited speaker at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians, the Shapley Lecturer at the 2008 World Congress of the Game Theory Society, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2017. He has written or edited ten books and monographs, and is regarded by many students as one of the best educators in algorithmic game theory.
We start by discussing Prof. Roughgarden’s early work that helped lay the foundations for algorithmic game theory and won him the Gödel Prize. He takes us back to the late 90’s and talks us through the history of the field and the key researchers and papers that helped kick it off. He unpacks the price of anarchy, a formal measure of the extent to which selfishly acting individuals (thus ideally acting according to a Nash equilibrium) can harm collective welfare. A well-known example of this phenomenon is the prisoner’s dilemma.
Prof. Roughgarden then discusses his later work on revenue-optimal auctions, an ongoing area of research in mechanism design. Here a seller wants to sell some number of items to some bidders that each have different values for different items, and wants to make as much money as possible. How should they structure their auction if they don’t have a strong guess for how much the bidders would be willing to pay for each item?
We then turn to Prof. Roughgarden’s most recent work in the cryptocurrency space, particularly EIP-1559. He outlines the current cryptocurrency landscape for us, likening it to the Internet shortly after its inception. He explains the different layers of abstraction at which cryptocurrency technologies can operate, from peer-to-peer networks to consensus protocols to applications such as smart contracts, along with the vast array of computer science problems that comes with them.
Prof. Roughgarden then shares with us his work on the soon to be implemented EIP-1559 proposal for Ethereum. Instead of the previous method where participants bid to have each transaction included in the blockchain, EIP-1559 proposes to internally compute an appropriate price for each transaction. Moreover, the transaction fee is burnt instead of awarded to miners in an effort to counteract the naturally inflationary tokenomics of Ethereum. Prof. Roughgarden’s role in the project was to closely analyze the game-theoretic properties of this new protocol. He notes the growing appetite in the blockchain community for formal academic analysis of protocols.
Finally, Prof. Roughgarden reflects on what might be necessary in order for cryptocurrencies to flourish in the future. He speculates that it will need to become easier for people to participate in blockchains without much prior knowledge, much as anyone can use a mobile phone to interact without needing to know the mechanics of how it transmits and receives signals. He comments on his journey learning about cryptocurrencies and intends to share what he has learned with other academics as he goes along. This fall, he will be teaching a class at Columbia University titled “Foundations of Blockchains”.
My guest today is someone of great personal significance to me. He is my senior thesis advisor and one of the most important mentors in my student career. Atif Mian is the John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 Professor of Economics, Public Policy and Finance at Princeton University, and the Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, which has graciously supported this podcast since day one. Prof. Mian studies the connections between finance and the macroeconomy, and his book House of Debt became an instant international bestseller when it was published in 2014 and kicked off a critical line of research related to debt forgiveness and risk-sharing mechanisms. He is the first person of Pakistani origin to rank among the top 25 young economists of the world by the IMF.
Matt Levine writes the popular daily newsletter “Money Stuff” on Bloomberg Opinion that has over 150,000 subscribers and a “cult-like” following on Wall Street and beyond. He is widely regarded as one of the most iconic, witty, and sophisticated financial writers of our age. Before Bloomberg, Matt was an editor of Dealbreaker, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, and a high school Latin teacher. He holds a heroic status especially amongst college economics majors, and he in fact inspired Tiger to start writing his newsletter on Substack.
Alex Tabarrok is Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. Along with Tyler Cowen, he is the co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of Marginal Revolution University. He is the author of numerous academic papers in the fields of law and economics, criminology, regulatory policy, voting theory and other areas in political economy. He is co-author with Tyler of Modern Principles of Economics, a widely used introductory textbook. He gave a TED talk in 2009. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. It is not an exaggeration to say that he and Tyler Cowen wield an enormous influence over the intellectual discourse today in America, and especially amongst the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Ramesh Ponnuru is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, senior editor with the National Review, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. A leading conservative thinker and pundit, Ramesh has made numerous appearances on shows like Meet the Press and Face the Nation. He is also an alumnus of Princeton, earning a degree in History.
In the interview, we discuss a variety of issues relating to the current political landscape and state of partisan politics. We first dive into free speech issues at colleges and universities in the United States— grappling with some of the key considerations that are informing why environments on college campuses are less encouraging for interchange and compromise between ideological groups.
Ponnuru argues that the free speech issues on college campuses are not a new problem and have continued to ebb and flow based on larger political movements, pushing back against the catastrophizing done by organizations like Turning Point USA. Ponnuru also explains his thoughts on media environments and the curating of news by social media companies.
Because Ponnuru writes so extensively about economic and social issues, we cover his stance on the American family, including his continued advocacy for a child tax credit and overall increased welfare for parents and children. Ponnuru also explains why he believes his pro-life stance is consistent with the Constitution.
We move to discuss Ponnuru’s opposition to President Trump, the contention over election security and the threat of delegitimization of the political process, and his thoughts on the infusion of populism and isolationism into the GOP.
Anthony (Tony) Yoseloff is the Executive Managing Member and Chief Investment Officer of Davidson Kempner Capital Management, one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers with more than $37 billion in assets under management.
Tony graduated from Princeton University in 1996 with a B.A. from the School of Public and International Affairs. He then received a JD and MBA from Columbia University where he was awarded the John M. Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics.
Tony joined Davidson Kempner in 1999. While most graduates at the time pursued opportunities in technology – given the dot-com boom – an early career in investment management enabled Tony to use both his finance and legal skills, appealing to his intellectual curiosity. Over the next two decades, Davidson Kempner grew to be a powerhouse – building out additional investment strategies while expanding its headcount and geographic footprint.
Tony became a Managing Member in 2004 and co-head of the firm alongside Tom Kempner in 2018, establishing a robust foundation for a seamless leadership transition in 2020. However, Tony jokes that when he took over as the sole Executive Managing Member and Chief Investment Officer of the firm in January 2020, Tom forgot to leave him the playbook on “global pandemics.”
“There was a model in my head for how to deal with a financial crisis, but the Covid-19 pandemic was just something nobody had a playbook for,” Tony said. Tony had navigated a large portfolio through the global financial crisis in 2008, the European crisis in 2011, and the Euro debt crisis in 2015. He had also been at the firm during the Long-Term Capital Management crisis in 1998, as well as during the Enron scandal and the U.S. stock market crashes between 2000 and 2002. Tony talks about how he and his team guided the firm through the pandemic, the Firm’s success in bringing people back to the office, the Firm’s increased focus on supporting mental, physical and emotional health, and how to sustain a culture of excellence within a growing global organization.
Outside of investing, Tony engages in a wide variety of philanthropic endeavors. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Princeton University, The New York Public Library and Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. He also serves on the investment committee of The New York Public Library and is a member of the Board of Directors of PRINCO, the investment manager of the Princeton University endowment.
David McCormick is the CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund with over $140 billion in assets under management. David joined Bridgewater in 2009 and was President and Co-CEO before becoming CEO in 2020. Prior to Bridgewater, he was the US Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs in the George W. Bush Administration during the 2008 global financial crisis, and he also had senior roles on the National Security Council and in the Department of Commerce.
In this interview, David talks about his personal journey from the Army to the Treasury and Bridgewater; the ten-year leadership transition that he and Ray Dalio had just completed; the challenges he experienced when managing Bridgewater over the years; macro-financial topics such as Bridgewater’s “Monetary Policy 3” framework; and his vision for a “national innovation policy” allowing for more frontier civilian technology to enter the military space.
Bridgewater is a place that needs very little introduction, especially as founder Ray Dalio’s bestselling book Principles has become not only a nordstar for corporate managers, but also a household read. David tells us about Bridgewater’s distinct culture of radical transparency, critical thinking, and various other principles established by Dalio and how these principles were put to test during the transition process.
David transitioned from Co-CEO to CEO of Bridgewater in 2020, which marked the end of a long leadership transition (Ray had kicked off this “ten-year transition” back in 2010). David recalls that he had taken on various management roles in earlier years as the President of the fund, but initially did not do a very good job. Ray eventually asked him to come back as Co-CEO and later as the sole CEO, and it was a long process with many challenges.
We ask David how he plans on maintaining the firm’s distinctive culture and Principles, especially when Ray has departed. David explains that going forward, the members of Bridgewater will continue to do a lot of soul searching and find the best way to combine Ray’s wisdom with new thinking that needs to be integrated into the firm’s DNA. It will not be a static or rigid process, but rather one that is nuanced, dynamic, and collaborative.
David speaks quite frankly about the fund’s recent drawdowns and underperformance compared to the broader market. He says that Bridgewater has always bounced back stronger after brief periods of drawdowns and that these difficult moments have only made the fund stronger.
In his recent Gilbert Lecture at Princeton, David made two arguments about military innovation today: 1) the “line between civilian technology and military technology is more blurred than ever,” and 2) the military needs to create a culture of experimentation and bring in new entrants, and create the right incentives for people to move up the risk curve. He elaborates on these ideas and proposes his vision for a “national innovation policy.”
In light of the rising tension between China and the U.S., should American firms and Western countries at large reconsider their dependence and interconnectedness with China? Ray has frequently spoken about Asia being the new frontier for investments given the Western developed world now suffers from historically low interest rates and comparatively lower economic growth. Bridgewater has also recently opened new offices in China and raised new funds from local investors. Why is Bridgewater so active in China when the geopolitical risks and ideological division are at an all-time high? We ask David whether he is concerned about Bridgewater’s potential exposure to geopolitical risks.
Lastly, David explains why he believes the U.S. is now at an inflection point – what the U.S. does next will be very important for the future of America’s role in the world. What does he think this role should be? And is David more optimistic or pessimistic in the country’s ability to confront these challenges?
Professor Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs. He is one of the most notable scholars in the entire field of international relations, with an expansive body of work spanning countless books, journals, essays, working at think tanks, advisory groups, and more. In this interview, Princeton freshmen Ryan Vuono and Neal Reddy discuss with Professor Ikenberry the theory of liberal internationalism, lessons from the history of international orders, and the future of the liberal international framework.
Considering that Professor Ikenberry is a leading proponent of the liberal internationalist school of thought within international relations, we start off the interview asking the basic questions for our listeners: what is liberal internationalism, and what does Professor Ikenberry’s vision of liberal internationalism look for today’s international climate.
We move to discuss some of the themes of the book-- the fact that liberal internationalism is fluid in nature, which Professor Ikenberry acknowledges can serve to be both beneficial and deceptive, in that liberal internationalist governments have historically become involved in colonial and imperialist exploitation of the Global South under the guise of free trade. Ikenberry makes clear that while liberal internationalism has become a guise for neoliberal economics, fundamentally it should be a form of international relations that seeks to promote welfare as a more general idea, rather than optimizing economic output.
In the interview, we also reflect on the geopolitical trends since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. While many scholars predicted a United States-led global hegemony and an indefinite stasis of world politics, we’ve seen the rise of populist, both left and right, as a form of backlash to neoliberalism and globalization. Professor Ikenberry sees the recent trends as a rebuke to the idea of realist international relations theory, of which he is a critic. However, he also concedes that the overly liberalized trade that occurred in the 1990s and 2000s that fomented these political movements was highly ignorant of what he sees as prerequisites for liberal internationalism-- a country’s ability to ensure the social welfare of its citizens.
Without this credibility, liberal internationalism has lost its credibility among many voters worldwide, but Professor Ikenberry is hopeful that with a return to the roots of social democracy as is occurring in the United States after the COVID-19 pandemic, liberal internationalism can return and the world, in his mind, will be better for it.
William Bohnett is the Chair of the Advisory Board of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. He served from 2009-2018 as a member of the National Board of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex. Bill sits on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, a non-partisan NGO working on national competitiveness issues, and is a Board Member of American Forests, the nation’s oldest conservation organization. Mr. Bohnett is the President of Whitecap Investments, a private investment firm, and special advisor to Baroda Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. This interview was conducted by Princeton freshman Sullivan Meyer and senior Tiger Gao.
We start by briefly discussing Mr. Bohnett’s educational background at Princeton and career path. He cites the interdisciplinary education he received at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs as a huge aid to his career, especially as a corporate lawyer.
Going off of that experience, we address the green financial market, especially the need to mobilize private capital to address the climate crisis. Bohnett does believe that the private sector requires some motivation to move capital from the public sector, but he views the Biden Administration’s American Jobs Plan as a strong start. Fascinatingly, he views the current bubble amassing around green technology as quite analogous to the “Dot Com” bubble of 1999. He notes, however, that the companies that weathered that bubble—as well as the companies that formed after it, like Google—went on to build the future. He encourages us to “have them courage to look through” the crash “that’s coming.”
We then move on to address upcoming green technologies, such as electric vehicles (EVs) and small- and medium-sized nuclear reactors (SMRs). Bohnett sees both as integral to the climate future, so we discussed the intricacies of both technologies with him. For instance: How will the US adapt to its dependence on Chinese lithium mining? Will the public become more accepting of SMRs than large nuclear reactors? When asked about whether these technologies will dominate the transportation and energy industries of the future, Bohnett stresses an inclusive approach to the green transition. For instance, a green transportation industry will require both mass transit and EVs. Similarly, a future energy market will need SMRs, large reactors, and renewable energy. Above all, he expresses confidence that private capital and the market will properly assess what technologies are needed, and in what amount they are needed.
This conversation is far-ranging, touching on many other aspects of Mr. Bohnett’s career. For instance, we discuss green technologies in relation to China, reflecting his position with the Council of Competitiveness. We address the importance of tree- and green space-restoration, based on his experience with American Forests. We explore the significance of public institutions in relation to the Smithsonian Institution.
Finally, Mr. Bohnett offers his punchline: The climate crisis is a huge, incredibly nuanced challenge facing all aspects of modern life. Accordingly, no one technology, policy, or business is a silver bullet to address the climate crisis. There is no silver bullet, but there is an oncoming wave of climate adaptation and mitigation strategies coming from all corners of the global economy. We should have hope.
Matt Weinberg is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. His primary research interest is in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: auction design, cryptocurrency, voting systems, and more. In this interview, Prof. Weinberg provides both a detailed overview of mechanism design and its philosophical implications, and he discusses his latest research in the mechanism design of cryptocurrency. We go over the mining process of Bitcoin, the proof of stake innovations that are happening with Ethereum 2.0 and other blockchain projects, why Prof. Weinberg is optimistic about Algorand (a cryptocurrency project founded by Turing Award winner Silvio Micali), and other issues in the crypto space and beyond.
One can intuitively interpret mechanism design as the reverse of game theory. Game theory is about what the agents should do given the environment, while mechanism design is about how the environment should be structured in the first place. Prof. Weinberg is a mechanism and algorithm designer. He refines system designs so that they can adapt to more settings over time. The fact that some of these theoretical settings might not model reality perfectly doesn’t bother Prof. Weinberg, as his mission is to narrow in on specific problems and shed light on how we can improve our thinking for them.
Prof. Weinberg provides an overview of blockchain economics and computing mechanism? Namely, what is “a mechanism designer’s view on cryptocurrency?” It seems that a central tenet of cryptocurrency is that it removes trust from the financial system. The thinking goes that right now, the value of the currency is built upon trust in the government and banks. With crypto, however, the value of the currency is guaranteed by the very nature of the technology. How is this achieved? And what are the mechanism design issues that arise from this process?
It strikes us that the value of crypto and DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is still built upon trust. Instead of trusting the financial system, users have to trust blockchains. We understand why computers and blockchains might theoretically be more trustworthy than centralized financial institutions like banks, but the widespread use of crypto is still predicated on trust, and, as we’ve seen with vaccines, public trust in science is not a guarantee. Why would this be any different for crypto?
Blockchain tech is really about "taking away the human component" by empowering smart contracts (essentially apps built on blockchains) and decentralized decision-making mechanisms to guarantee the algorithms run smoothly. Consequently, we will not rely on human and counterparty risks but trust the algorithms. Is this vision a promising one to solve many of the human-centered problems, or in fact just another process that will end up getting muddled by the centralization of human power as shown in Bitcoin mining?
Prof. Weinberg also explains the differences between proof of work vs. proof of stake. He talks about why he believes proof of stake and the Ethereum 2.0 future could represent a better future for blockchain mechanisms than the current proof of work mining process.
Ben Hunt is the creator of Epsilon Theory and inspiration behind Second Foundation Partners, which he co-founded with Rusty Guinn in June 2018.
Nikos Tsafos is interim director and senior fellow of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He’s researched, written, advised, and consulted extensively on a range of fascinating topics, including natural gas, the geopolitics of energy, the future of mobility, and the global energy transition. He is the author of Beyond Debt: The Greek Crisis In Context, published in 2013, and countless articles, reports, and studies in the leading publications in energy policy and foreign affairs, including for National Bureau of Asian Research, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the National Interest.
We began by exploring the role of energy in the foreign policy of previous administrations, covering the importance of fossil fuel imports in decades past and the Trump’s administration’s hope for fossil fuel exports to play a major role in the U.S. approach to Asia and Europe. As America looks to compete with China and others in the race to build renewables, the federal government can and should offer financial incentives on both the supply and demand sides of production for renewables, but must also make structural changes to physical and legal infrastructure to promote clean electricity. Active industrial policy in the United States -- which is taking shape under the American Jobs Plan -- must recognize that endless funding for strategic sectors can be wasteful, trade can undermine even the most ambitious domestic programs, and repurposing legacy facilities for renewable purposes will be crucial.
While Biden’s sweeping proposals for new energy investments have grabbed headlines, there has been another consequential shift in America’s energy policy that has transpired behind the scenes -- the pivot away from natural gas. While there have been no proposals for banning natural gas exports, the administration will certainly look more closely at where American gas is going, and whether it is displacing dirtier energy sources or “locking in” decades of fossil fuel use in place of renewables.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a sweeping strategy for investment in infrastructure across Eurasia, is widely seen as Beijing’s foremost geoeconomic initiative, and a major threat to U.S. interests. But at least on the energy front, Mr. Tsafos contended that American policymakers are often too narrow minded about Chinese-backed projects abroad; other factors, including the quality of a project, the engagement of important stakeholders, and the institutions supporting it, often matter more than where the money is coming from.
International institutions and relationships between the nations in different stages of development will play a major role in the globe’s approach to climate change, and Mr. Tsafos has important insights on this front as well. He suggested that financial incentives could be provided internationally to support nations that are investing in green energy, a global dialogue on green energy could facilitate global renewable energy investment, and global energy trade agreements will help nations avoid endless trade conflict on climate issues. Preparing the world for climate change extends far beyond the G-20, and Mr. Tsafos offered some lessons from his research on how emerging economies can pursue sustainable pathways to development -- progress in the West on renewables helps spur progress in the developing world, stable political institutions matter for sustainable development, and the tradeoff between economic growth and investment in low-carbon energy is often overestimated.
Mr. Tsafos concluded our conversation by recognizing that the climate crisis presents opportunities -- for students who hope to grapple with these challenges, he says “we need your help.”
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. It was published a few days ago. This 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.
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 discuss “affective polarization” and the relationship between social media and political tensions. Does the election of Donald Trump represent a new level of polarization, or is it just more of the same? What should we expect for the future of polarization? Professor McCarty offers insightful answers to these questions and more.
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, Latin America. He participated in activism in Central America in the 1980s’ dealing with civil war and transitional justice. This sparked his interest in understanding how countries relate to one another and the interdependence that is needed for their survival. In order for this globalization to be successful, a narrative which promotes a shared understanding between countries must be created.
1945 was the most recent time period in which a shared sense of purpose was established around the world: fight facisim and stop another depression. This need for globalization and the actions of the different countries was controlled and moderated by the United States. This liberal sense of purpose has reached its end point and is currently fatigued leading to the current situation which calls for a new shared narrative and purpose to be developed.
This need for interdependence began in the middle of the 19th century as a byproduct of the industrial revolution. It created a network in which countries relied on each other for basic necessities critical to their survival. Today, it is clear that 2008/9 were an inflection point and has resulted in us being in a transition period today. This is why there are countering narratives and beliefs regarding how the new global order should look.
We’re now at a narrative impasse, writes Professor Adelman in his recent Project Syndicate column titled “The New History Wars” – “We are now caught between an outdated style of patriotism and a fatigued pluralist alternative. The old national narrative that drove the boom in monuments was born in the heyday of empire and burnished in the twentieth century’s world wars, when founding heroes and myths served as a unifying force. But starting in the 1960s, civil-rights movements, feminism, and an influx of immigrants pushed Western societies to become more inclusive, and the old emblems of patriotism looked increasingly outré.”
While former President Trump was advocating for a return to a focus on the nation state, President Biden is leaning more towards Jill Lepore’s call for a progressive nationalism, one in which America has a shared national identity based on our roots in equality and fairness. Professor Adelman explains how this does not go far enough and instead America must focus on what is good about the nation in its relationship with something that is bigger.
The “Great Statue Reckoning” and the 1776 Commission are both “weaponizations of history” according to Professor Adelman, but he cautions against silencing these narratives and instead urges everyone to listen to the opposing side even if you disagree. People must be heard so that they do not believe that their identities are simply dismissed by society. American society is facing a very difficult situation: how to make those with whom you disagree feel heard even when you reject their very fundamental values and beliefs?
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.
In Prof. Rossi-Hansberg’s recent paper “The Economic Geography of Global Warming,” he seeks to evaluate the economic consequences of global warming using a dynamic model with high spatial resolution. The paper is a perfect example of the kind of spatial economics research that Prof. Rossi-Hansberg pioneers and is particularly recognized for in the economics discipline. This podcast interview focuses on Prof. Rossi-Hansberg’s research in spatial economics and uses this climate change paper as an entry point to explain the methodologies and frameworks in spatial economics.
Spatial economics differs from conventional macro models by recognizing the singularities in space and how the local dimension influences agent decisions. Spatial frictions and shocks can impact the growth of local economies quite dramatically. These questions matter because it’s important to figure out whether changing these frictions could actually spur more growth or will merely lead to static reallocation effects.
Issues such as migration frictions, factor adjustment costs, investment decisions on a local level, and climate change are hard problems to solve. Spatial economics cares about the distribution of expectations and effects, and agents in different areas may care differently about the distributions in the future and that will influence their decisions. Prof. Rossi-Hansberg constructs these dynamic models that can provide a much more nuanced view on these economic questions.
For example, previous models of the economic impact of climate change rely on loss functions that track aggregate output as a function of temperature and other global variables. Importantly, these models do not incorporate local variation and behavioral responses, and therefore do not accurately model the reality of economic adaptation to climate change.
Prof. Rossi-Hansberg’s paper “The Economic Geography of Global Warming” aims to resolve the shortcomings of these previous models by using an integrated assessment model (IAM) with rich spatial data that looks at interactions between regions to show how the effects of global warming on production and migration are large, worrying, and unequal. He gives a detailed overview on how he goes about constructing an IAM and in particular, combining scientific modeling with socioeconomic analysis. He also gives examples of policy implications of the IAM and how they are used to come to practical policy decisions.
The paper notes that climate change does not affect regions in a homogenous fashion. Rather, certain regions of the world are impacted at different degrees than others – from welfare losses of 10% to gains of 15%. Prof. Rossi-Hansberg argues that these differences manifest in differences in productivity and amenities, with places like North America and Russia reaping those benefits. In contrast, the Global South and Europe suffer.
At the end of the interview, we also ask Prof. Rossi-Hansberg about his journey in economics academia over the years and why he decided to move from Princeton to University of Chicago in the coming summer. He praises America’s economics academia for being a treasure that allows one to freely think and push for frontier research, and he explains that his decision to join UChicago stems from a desire to explore new challenges in life after spending years at Princeton.
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 possibility of death were truly profound and changed a lot of my thinking back then.
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, and many other topics in tech and business.
We dig into the details of Lambda School’s operations and philosophy with Austen: Who ends up studying with Lambda? What is the selection process? What is the common trajectory of Lambda graduates? Could Lambda School’s educational model work in fields outside of computer science?
From the perspective of Princeton students, Tiger and Arsh also ask Austen’s thoughts on higher education and credentialism. A liberal arts education is often seen as valuable in the sense that it provides students with many useful assets to enter the workforce with: skills and knowledge, a degree or diploma, and opportunities to network and become involved in their field before graduation. However, companies like Google are now giving accreditation for people who take their software engineering and computer science courses. Tech companies seem to be putting higher value on having particular skills, not on having the broad knowledge of a liberal arts education. Is that the future trend? Where it will matter less and less whether someone went to Princeton or some other Ivy League school? Or will it actually matter more since liberal arts education will become rarer?
Austen is a seasoned entrepreneur and well-connected in the Silicon Valley community. Since Austen is an alumnus of YC, we ask him whether he thinks YC’s prestige and quality have come down over the years as it is now accepting hundreds, instead of just dozens, of companies into its incubator programs every year. It seems unrealistic to expect that there would be hundreds of high-quality startups every year, so is YC simply doing “spray and pray” rather than being actually selective? Does it still function as a true testament to the quality of a startup, or has it more become a place that could give startups more exposure to the VC community but actually adds little value to the companies themselves?
Austen is an early investor of Clubhouse, an audio-only social media app that has recently become increasingly popular amongst people in tech. Austen believes that Clubhouse could easily become a $100 billion company. Tiger, however, is not a fan of Clubhouse and believes that it provides a less thoughtful alternative to podcasts and simply adds more noise to the discourse. They debate the growth potential and future possibilities of Clubhouse.
Last but not least, Austen talks about how he got into angel investing and why the vast majority of Americans have missed out on the tremendous wealth creation that has mostly concentrated in Silicon Valley and taken advantage of by VCs in the past few decades. How could we democratize access to the private market boom? Is such democratization risky or constructive to building a more egalitarian society?
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 railroads all over the country.
They then discuss the role of the railroad industry in America’s economic development and the nature of the rail economy. In the eyes of Chuck and Ian, strong railroads were and continue to be one of the defining characteristics of the American economy. Railroads still face tough competition against other forms of transportation, namely road freight.
We also explore issues of sustainability of railroads and their role in the fight against climate change. Railroads are the most efficient form of ground transportation, and thus central to America’s fight against climate change. At the same time, however, railroads have traditionally carried coal and energy products, so their secondary carbon footprint, at least historically, has been huge. Chuck and Ian make the point, however, that the industry is rapidly shifting away from hauling coal to intermodal freight and dry goods.
The interview wraps up with a discussion of politics and policy. In particular, Ian and Chuck differentiate policy for passenger and freight railroads. They argue that, while freight railroads run most efficiently and effectively with less regulation and government involvement, passenger railroads require government support. They also make a strong case for leveling the playing field between support for road freight and rail freight through shifts in government policy.
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 effectiveness meant. Central banks, especially the Bank of England, used to act behind a veil of secrecy, but the 1980s and 1990s marked a fundamental change in thinking about central banking all over the world following the great inflation of the 1970s, when the UK had the highest inflation rate in the developed world and realized that they needed to emulate other developed countries and establish better monetary policies.
By the 21st century central banks had transformed to be all about efficiency, stability, and transparent communications. Independent central banks are now also seen as the superior model because it would not be subject to political pressure. The journey of “making a modern central bank” thus involved shedding a strongly entrenched idea about British peculiarity or British exceptionalism and learning from the rest of the world.
1979 was a major caesura of the 20th century that started a new phase of globalization: the creation of the European Monetary System (without UK); the Iranian Revolution; Deng Xiaoping began a series of reforms that introduced the principles of the market to China; Margaret Thatcher became the UK Prime Minister; and the UK government announced the immediate removal of virtually all remaining exchange controls…
The period of 1979-2003 can be roughly divided into a few tumultuous periods in global macro-finance. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the US and European nations debated about monetary targeting. In the 1980s, exchange rate became seen as the cornerstone of credibility in Europe, which in turn dramatically influenced the UK’s central banking policies. In the 1990s, inflation targeting was “imported” to the UK on the basis of New Zealand’s pioneering experience.
The evolution of the Bank of England also went together with the evolution of monetary theory. In the beginning, no one knew what the function of the central bank was. Some said it as the institution that controls money and manages the banking system, while others believed that central banks were supposed to produce one fundamental public good – financial stability. Prof. James explains the competing philosophies behind central banking, monetary policy, and the interpretations for money, as well as the various interesting paradigms like Alan Greenspan’s “Spine Theory” that may have dominated monetary policymaking for many years and left profound consequences.
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 our GDP to go into research and development projects, but that number today is 0.7%. When did we start to witness the decline of the government’s tendency to fund science? Prof. Johnson wrote that we can trace it back to the anti-fluoridation messages of the John Birch Society founded in 1958, Senator Barry Goldwater’s election campaign in 1964 that advocated for small government, Senate Majority Leader Michael Mansfield’s criticism of the military due to the Vietnam War, and budgetary pressures arising from the Vietnam War and the Great Society.
Prof. Johnson also talked about how scientists have moved to the left and the political spectrum has shifted to the right – in ways not favorable to supporting unfettered scientific research and its implications. How have the political views of scientists influenced policy decisions for public investments? Shouldn’t this be a non-political, non-partisan process?
One particular example we discussed is the story of the Human Genome Project (you may see our interview with its co-founder George Church on our website). The HGP began in 1990 and cost $3 billion dollars in federal funding. By 2004, the total stock market value of the genomics sector was $28 billion dollars. The project laid important groundwork for the genomic and biotechnology revolution.
We also discuss the limitations of private funding driven by VC firms. Prof. Johnson especially listed the short investment time horizon problem. Is the private sector incentivized to work on the most urgent problems confronting our world rather than simply distributing profits to shareholders? Hard problems like climate change and inequality that require complex, nuanced solutions and not some big “catch-all.” It seems that the inherent incentive structure is such that PE/VC funds need returns 5-7 years, and that means investing in SaaS, consumer goods, and social media rather than nuclear tech / renewables / rethinking capitalism… Are we wasting huge amounts of human and monetary capital into “meaningless” innovations that churn profits but are not helpful to society? Is the only solution channel through the public sector?
Prof. Johnson’s answer is that it’s about complementarity: use the public sector to bring in innovations that can help spur more innovations in private sectors; and then the public sector should step in to regulate the private sector when needed.
Since Prof. Johnson was a Chief Economist at the IMF during the financial crisis, we also ask his thoughts on economic policymaking today and whether massive fiscal stimulus would be urgently needed to get us out of the Covid crisis. He believes that we should prioritize poverty reduction and getting the economy back on track first before worrying about the deficit.
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 cells that act in much the same way as our cells – in essence they are self-replicating and evolving.
This leads to discussion of implications and also nanotechnology, which is closely tied with chemical architecture. Nanotechnology can be split into two categories, according to Dr. Cronin: the biological engineering type, and the materials science/chemist type that deals with molecules and materials at the smallest scale. This leads to questions about whether evolution could be utilized and harnessed for human use.
Dr. Cronin also has an extensive background in education. A major project of Dr. Cronin’s are “chemputers.” Chemputers would be able to synthesize molecules after “reading” it off a paper, which naturally is a huge advancement for materials science and chemistry. We examine how this technology would scale up to practical use, and how it would be implemented in the real world.
We also discuss the possible futures of chemistry education, and how labs will operate in a more automated future world, including the possible risk of very real and dangerous applications of this technology. Such advancements also have implications for academia, and academic research. Further, we explore a more theoretical side to chemistry such as how quantum computing might affect chemistry work. Finally, we discuss Dr. Cronin’s work in energy and battery technology, which ties back into the nanotechnology side of things as well.
We hope you enjoy this interview with a very influential figure in the chemistry world.
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 Business Financial Outcomes during the Onset of COVID-19” shows that cities such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, Orlando seem to report slower economic recovery than cities such as Chicago, Seattle. Cash balances are an important metric of financial health, but the unemployment rate in Chicago is much higher compared to Atlanta. How should we reconcile the differences between these financial metrics in the context of economic recovery?
JPMCI’s report “Small Business Owner Race, Liquidity, and Survival” discusses the importance of developing a holistic understanding of financial health: including cash liquidity, revenues, and expenses. However, we usually hear about unemployment in the economy as the main metric, because that information is more readily available to policymakers and the public. How should we think the availability bias of information regarding small businesses affects government policy? How can we combat the asymmetry of information between policymakers and their constituents? What metric should policymakers look at when deciding how to implement financial stimulus? What is the most efficient way to supply businesses with exactly what they need?
JPMCI also found that the industry downturns during the beginning of COVID were felt equally across different owner races. As business started to pick up, cash balances of White-owned restaurants doubled while those of Black-owned restaurants increased by 38%. However, cash balances of Black-owned personal service firms increased by over 60% compared to those of White- and Hispanic-owned firms, which increased by less than 25%. How can we explain these different recovery rates? What do they tell us about the relationship between race and financial stability in different industries?
More broadly, we discuss the relationship between research and business, expanding into academia and industry. JPMCI holds a unique position that allows Mr. Wheat to conduct research that fits the description of neither scholarly academic nor finance professional. The question of data sourcing comes into play, along with a weighing of interests between private sector firms and public research groups. Furthermore, we explore the impact of business research in public policy. How is business research utilized in the public sphere, and what shape does that take?
For students navigating career paths in finance, tech or entrepreneurship and choosing between academia and business, Mr. Wheat offers insight into how to think about these different sectors from the perspective of an individual who has navigated all of them. His work into the COVID pandemic utilizes methodologies from every sector combined, and our conversation with him tackles the intricacies of COVID impacts on small businesses and the nature of business research in the big picture.
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 technology, the ethical and policy impacts of genome technology, and the urgent problems left unsolved in the field. The Human Genome Project began in 1990 and cost $3 billion dollars in federal funding. By 2004, the total stock market value of the genomics sector was $28 billion dollars. The project laid important groundwork for the genomic and biotechnology revolution that later transpired, and is a wonderful example of public-private partnership that is what this country needs today. What was the exact process like to sequence the first genome? What has it produced since, both scientifically and socially? Was the idea that we could sequence everyone in the world perceived as wild or immature? Meanwhile, the Personal Genome Project that Prof. Church founded in 2005 pioneered a new form of genomics research. The main goal of the project is to allow scientists to connect human genetic information (human DNA sequence, gene expression, associated microbial sequence data, etc) with human trait information (medical information, biospecimens and physical traits) and environmental exposures. How is it different from the Human Genome Project? Prof. Church compares the turning point of genome sequencing with the Internet around 1994, when suddenly everyone started using it. They have already helped bring down the cost of sequencing by 10-million fold. Similar to how Silicon Valley helped the Internet revolution by providing all kinds of softwares, it may be an adequate analogy to say that the HGP has provided the infrastructure like the Internet did, and perhaps the next steps would be additional business models and applications around genome sequencing that would further bring down the cost and make the benefits more widely available to everyone. The cost of reading and interpreting a genome has been shrinking exponentially. As the cost of this technology continues to decrease, what new possibilities will emerge? CRISPR is a way of finding a specific bit of DNA inside a cell. CRISPR-CAS9 is a system biologically found in bacteria; it’s their version of a viral defense mechanism. When viral vectors inject DNA into the bacteria's genetic material, the CRISPR-CAS9 system finds it and switches it out with high precision. It allows us to not only delete certain info, but also precisely add in new sequences in specific locations. Prof. Church explains to us how CRISPR works and his critical contributions to the technology at its infancy. Lastly, Prof. Church speaks to the moral-ethical concerns related to the CRISPR technology and synthetic biology at large. While the concept of gene modification is becoming an increasingly controversial topic, Prof. Church believes that not only is it a net positive to our world, our regulations should focus more on mitigating its impacts in a thoughtful manner, rather than trying to suffocate innovation altogether. “A politician trying to ban iPhones wouldn’t survive very long in office,” he joked.
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 is in some news “the new statistics” and how it’s being integrated into econometrics.
In his recent paper “You Can Lead a Horse to Water: Spatial Learning and Path Dependence in Consumer Search,” Prof. Lewis introduces a new model of consumer search known as spatial learning. He explains his main findings in layman’s terms, and discusses how online platforms have the ability to manipulate consumer purchases to some degree by playing an active role in ranking products during a consumer’s searching process. His key insights focus on how consumers develop beliefs about products they see online, and how those beliefs change through experience and observation of reviews. More importantly, his methods try to understand how a good or bad experience with a particular product influences a consumer’s buying decisions about related products. Prof. Lewis is a leading advocate to use machine learning methods for fundamental research in economics. In this conversation, he breaks down his development of DeepIV: a method for instrumental variable (IV) analysis using deep neural networks. He starts off by explaining IV analysis using simple examples and guides us through the improvements offered by deep learning. He elaborates that while neural networks are incredibly powerful at pattern recognition, their black-box nature offers great challenges as it fails to explain their predictions. Prof. Lewis also addresses some “big-picture” questions about research in general. He talks about application of theoretical models to real-world scenarios, the effectiveness of computer simulations, as well as the age-old debate about how to uncover the “truth” from data. He talks about conducting research in the private sector as opposed to at a university, being optimistic about technology, and even a paper by Bill Gates about pancake flipping.
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 grids at large.
These innovations will help solar power overcome the complex challenges that it still faces, Dr. Sivaram argued. Solar panels can produce energy in unpredictable patterns, and only during certain hours of the day -- a phenomenon known as “the problem of intermittency.” Because grids that rely on solar power will have a large surplus of energy during periods of peak production, solar panels produce electricity when demand is at its lowest. That means solar producers of electricity sell energy at relatively low prices in a pattern known as Solar Value Deflation. Solving these issues could require storing electricity for future use using new battery technologies and hydrogen fuel cells, controlling energy demand so more electricity-consuming activity occurs during peak hours, and expanding the size of the grid to ensure that there is demand for solar electricity whenever it is produced.
Dr. Sivaram is particularly excited about a more speculative model for solar power from Taming the Sun: modular microgrids. He imagines distinct regional microgrids across the country that are linked through High-Voltage Direct Current power lines. Each locality or city would primarily use its own grid, but could “import” or “export” electricity to neighboring grids when solar panels are over- or under-producing. Each microgrid could separate from the national system, so dysfunction in one part of the grid could be easily contained. Dr. Sivaram added that technology that aggregates electricity being produced by individual solar panel owners and distributes it to where it’s needed could be instrumental in such a system.
Innovation of all types, however, is useless until it is applied to major power grids. India is one major electricity market with high potential for solar consumption, which makes it a source of hope for Dr. Sivaram. As India hurtles through stages of development, its energy demands will grow dramatically, and Dr. Sivaram is confident that current enthusiasm about renewables will continue. If he’s right, India will avoid becoming the world’s biggest emitter and move to the forefront of solar power. Though reform is urgently needed in India’s distribution utility systems, solar panel construction is cheaper in India than anywhere else, which is a promising sign for proponents of solar power there.
Global energy markets are at a crossroads, and Dr. Sivaram is leading the effort to put the world on the path away from fossil fuels and towards solar power. But he says that if the world is going to truly tame the sun, “we need new scientific solutions and we need public policymakers who understand what needs to be done.” For anyone interested in cutting-edge scientific solutions and the ideas that will shape the next generation of solar policymakers, this week’s discussion is a must-listen.
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 minorities and marginalized groups and how that has impacted philosophy scholarship. Lastly, we wrap up looking at politics in the United States and how the electoral college impedes the process of having fair and just elections, and why removing it could solve the problem.
Professor Mathias Risse has written three books with both “justice” and “on” in the title, yet all of these works appear to tackle a similar question: how should philosophers handle questions of justice in a global context? It all started with his book On Global Justice where he established his famous “grounds of justice” that global justice can be analyzed on.
However, how do these grounds change when we factor in the rise of technology? Can technology stand alone as its own ground of justice, or will it fit into the other pre-defined grounds of justice? Mathias Risse explains the future of technology in global justice and how technology can fit into his original theory from On Global Justice.
Additionally, we ask Prof. Risse his thoughts on the inherent nature of justice of technology: is technology inherently just? Is technology capable of being just as unjust as human actions and trade? He brings in other notable professors who have researched the topic including Princeton Professor Ruha Benjamin to answer this question on the just nature of technology in society.
John Rawls has provided a foundational understanding of political philosophy, but his work has recently been under fire. Rawls may have been able to provide a great framework for political philosophers but it overlooked the experiences of minorities and marginalized individuals in the United States.
Mathias Risse shares how philosophy departments have been attempting to critique and expand Rawls’ theory to include the viewpoint of marginalized groups in the United States. He shares how this changes our understanding of Rawlsian theory and what work is left to be done in Philosophy departments across the nation to make political philosophy more inclusive.
In the fall of 2020, Mathias Risse along with John Shattuck wrote a series of papers called the “Reimagining Rights and Responsibilities in the U.S.,” where Risse and Shattuck worked to explore areas of domestic politics and public policy that lead to injustice. These reports ranged from LGBTQ+ rights to voting rights and they all ended with a series of policy actions that could be taken to improve American society.
One policy action that is supported is the abolishment of the electoral college, but why would its removal lead to a more just society? How did the electoral college disenfranchise individuals and how does it continue to build a barrier to fair elections? Mathias Risse also takes on this question and shares with us his findings on how the electoral college impacts justice and how removing it can help increase the fairness of U.S. elections.
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 time, the success of Langer Lab in spurring dozens of biotech companies, and the future of medicine amongst many other topics.
Prof. Langer was first offered 20 traditional chemical engineering jobs after he graduated from Cornell’s PhD program. Instead of taking those offers, however, he fought an uphill battle to find a position in medical research, eventually working with Judah Folkman at the Boston Children’s Hospital. Prof. Langer recalls that he didn't know too much biology about chemistry in his early career, so a lot of times he felt he was in the dark.
For the years that Prof. Langer has run his lab, the Langer Lab, he and his team have focused on two broad areas in biomedical engineering: tissue engineering and drug delivery systems. Both research areas lie at the core of many modern medical revolutions, from advanced drugs to synthetic organs.
Another drug delivery breakthrough that Prof. Langer describes more in-depth are star-shaped pills. The guiding principle behind the design is the following: standard pills are only able to deliver their encapsulated drug for a day. There are more crude ways to design pills that can administer drugs for longer periods, but the bulkier design could cause harm to the host, or block part of the digestive system. The star-shaped design solves for this: it is a pill that is small when ingested, expands inside the body, and leaves a large hole in its center for the digestive track to act normally. This kind of pill would make delivering some drugs, like insulin, much easier.
Prof. Langer then goes on to describe some of the broader aspects of these research fields. What are the most promising future applications for tissue engineering and drug delivery research? What are the current obstacles/limitations in research for tissue engineering and drug delivery systems? What capacity does AI have to further push the frontier in research for these fields?
Prof. Langer attributes two reasons to the amazing speed of the mRNA vaccine development process: the superior nature of the technology itself in comparison to previous vaccinat technologies, and the U.S. government’s “Operation Warp Speed” that invested a lot of capital into the private sector while providing regulatory support.
He explains the mRNA vaccine to us: DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes protein. While classically people focused on the protein part when producing vaccines, the process takes too long, and Moderna directly started with the mRNA part. The beauty of mRNA is that one can make it very quickly, give it to the body, and start testing for efficacy.
A key pillar of the mRNA vaccine technology is drug delivery, however. To a patient, the mRNA would get destroyed immediately if not properly encapsulated and protected by nanoparticles when being injected into the body. But once it’s successfully injected into the muscle, mRNA will trigger the body to start making antibodies and immunize the patient.
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 businesses should have access to smart markets, where they can find each other in a way that helps everyone. If the private sector won’t share the ones they use, though, the public sector has an opportunity to step in.
Would it be possible for governments, whether local, state, or national, to establish a system of online labor markets as a public utility? It’s a revolutionary idea. When pitching it, Mr. Rowan often receives pushback, including from us. We dig into the specifics of the system, interrogating where it could have problems and trying to find where its potential could be maximized. POEMs is no “silver bullet solution,” but through our conversation it’s clear that the plan, if properly implemented, can lead to serious positive social good.
Mr. Rowan is driven by a singular mission: to create better markets for gig work, allowing workers and businesses to unlock their entire economic potential. Instead of being at the mercy of an employer’s scheduling, irregular workers can take control and sell their own time through POEMs. Our conversation with him tackles many aspects of the POEMs plan, its possible pitfalls, and the ways it can solve inequality through public policy.
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, compared to the 45-year average of ~7%. The current account deficit plunged to -3.5% of GDP in the second quarter, the sharpest quarterly decline on record, and the massive stimulus package will further blow up the deficit.
What are the implications of such a dramatic dollar crash in valuation, both in the U.S. and abroad? How have the current monetary and fiscal policy regimes exacerbated this issue? And is there anything the U.S. can do to prevent the fall of the dollar?
We also touch on another important market trend: the rise of Bitcoin. Despite the cryptocurrency’s increasing popularity and legitimacy among institutional investors and corporations – most notably Elon Musk and Tesla – Prof. Roach is skeptical about its potential as a global currency. We discuss the implications of Bitcoin’s rise and the difficulty of valuing an asset with no traditional fundamentals.
On one hand, Tiger argues that Bitcoin has never been supported by fundamentals but always by narratives and people’s faith in it. As long as the faith for Bitcoin is strong enough, as long as people’s doubt on the dollar and other forms of assets are strong enough, and as long as the hunt for yield continues, Bitcoin’s price will just keep shooting up.
Prof. Roach counter-argues that by definition speculative bubbles do not go on forever; they always burst. When an asset turns into a speculative bubble, that means people are buying the asset just under the expectation that the prices will keep going up. So by definition, it’s an investor play on price appreciation that is detached from the fundamental value of the asset. That detachment can go on for a lot longer than we think, but ultimately it reasserts itself when the price point involved, for reasons that are very different for each asset, gets so far detached that just the slightest, inconsequential shifts can lead to the bursting of the bubble.
Lastly, having spent the bulk of his career on Wall Street, Prof. Roach critiques the Fed’s monetary policy in the past few decades and reflects on his own forecasting career. He addresses the impact of the Fed’s rapid balance sheet expansion, which some argue is inflating prices of financial assets held by the private sector and, in doing so, primarily benefiting the wealthy. Do there exist more equitable ways of stimulating the economy besides Quantitative Easing (QE)? And, if so, what can the Fed do to implement them?
This is a far-reaching conversation beyond mere topics of the dollar dominance, Bitcoin, and the GameStop saga. It’s about piecing together the large macro-financial trends we’ve witnessed in the past few decades and trying to make sense of what might come next.
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 create the future of social sciences research.
After the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S., the lab embarked on an ambitious project – tracking and providing real-time economic data. At the heart of political debates happening today is the issue of re-opening the economy. On one side of the debate, some are suggesting that businesses need to open up immediately to stimulate an economy in trouble. However, data from last June provided by Opportunity Insights suggested that lifting state-mandated closing of businesses had no significant effect on economic activity.
Likewise with the similar debate on stimulus checks, Opportunity Insights argued that the reduction of consumer spending associated with Covid-19 was due to supply shocks, not a lack of purchasing power per se. In other words, businesses couldn’t open up, and people weren’t willing to spend more because of the concern for the virus. Raj Chetty recommended expanding the social safety net and extending unemployment benefits as a means to limit hardship among low-income workers rather than an all-encompassing stimulus check, which might not be the best solution to boosting consumer spending.
One of OI’s ongoing projects on social mobility at large is Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO), an experiment with the Seattle housing authority. This initiative works to reduce challenges families face when using federal rental assistance to find housing by offering services with the housing search process, help with landlords, security deposits etc. The initiative has shown much success, demonstrating an increase from 14% to 54% in moves to high-upward mobility neighborhoods. One misconception that CMTO’s data overturned is that families live in low-opportunity areas because of differences in rent prices.
Raj Chetty, founding director of Opportunity Insights, has long been praised by many as the most influential applied micro-economist of this generation, especially with his innovation on using big data to study economics and improve upward mobility in America. The sheer vastness of OI’s big data (20 million children in the CMTO project) could lend us nuances that aggregate data cannot. What is the key to using big data to harness economic insights? To put it differently, what is preventing some average data scientist/economist/hedge fund manager with more data to gain more insights on issues like Covid and social mobility than the researchers at OI?
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 people respond to policy.
One of Prof. Allcott’s recent notable studies is on payday loans, a type of short-term, high-interest loan that is typically due on the borrower’s next payday. Critics of payday lending argue that the practice is predatory and can trap vulnerable borrowers in debt they can’t afford, and a number of laws have been passed over the years to regulate the practice. In Prof. Allcott’s study, he seeks to answer the question of whether or not borrowers act in their own best interest (in which case, restricting payday lending would decrease welfare).
He found that the most inexperienced borrowers underestimate their likelihood of borrowing again, whereas more experienced borrowers are accurate in their prediction of future borrowing – sophistication (the ability to predict future preferences) is gained with experience. Therefore, the truth is likely to be in the middle – that neither an outright ban on payday lending nor an utter lack of regulation would improve consumer welfare. How can policymakers take into account this heterogeneity when developing policy? Is it even possible or optimal to do so?
Another fascinating experiment evaluates behaviorally motivated policy (Allcott and Taubinsky 2015). There are tremendous financial costs saved if one uses CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) light bulbs instead of incandescent ones, but many still purchase a large amount of incandescent ones. What explains this? Does it mean that consumers are biased and don’t know what’s best for themselves? How would one quantify the alleged bias in units of dollars?
This is where the topic of “sin tax” comes into play. To impose any sin tax or regulation, it is implicitly assumed that “consumers are unable to make market decisions that yield personal savings, that the regulator is able to identify these consumer mistakes, and that the regulator should correct economic harm that people do to themselves” (Ted Gayer 2011). A key point in Prof. Allcott’s work, however, is that behavioral public economists try to “debias” imperfectly informed or inattentive consumers; they’re not trying to convince them to buy one kind of product or the other, hence minimizing the “demand effects.”
We end the interview with Prof. Alloctt’s recent work “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” in which he and Stanford economist Matthew Gentzkow and others attempt to show how Facebook can impact well-being negatively, both socially and individually. Surveyed subjects were more likely to reduce their awareness of and attention to politics and be less polarized when they’re cut off from social media. It is interesting to note that participants were being paid to temporarily leave Facebook, and many asked for high prices that wouldn’t be sustainable in the long run.
Dave Wasserman is the House Editor for The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan polling and elections forecasting group. Before joining The Cook Political Report, Dave worked as the House Editor for another widely respected polling and elections forecasting firm, Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
At The Cook Political Report, Wasserman is known as one of the nation’s prominent election forecasters. He successfully forecasted the 2016 and 2018 elections, accurately suggesting that Donald Trump may win the presidency while losing the popular vote. He is actively involved in examining House races, using individual districts to key in on larger electoral trends. He collaborated with FiveThirtyEight to produce the groundbreaking “Atlas of Redistricting,” which models redistricting and gerrymandering scenarios for all fifty states.
It’s a rare opportunity to have a preeminent forecaster like Dave on the show to discuss several important topics just as the elections season came to its long-awaited end. To start, we tackled the 2020 Presidential Election, trying to understand why the polls were off yet again. Dave was quite frank with us, stating that he and other elections forecasters relied too heavily on what he calls “spreadsheet crunching.”
For reference, The Cook Political Report, as opposed to FiveThirtyEight and The Economist’s elections forecasting team, is a traditional elections forecaster relying on conventional wisdom. With the rise of data-driven forecasting, Dave argues that pollsters lost track of some tried-and-true political knowledge: the strength of incumbents, the ebbs and flows of political trends that caused voters who voted for Congressional Democrats to rebuke Trump in 2018 to split their tickets, and the polling blind spots for the incredible turnout from white, non-college educated voters.
That is not to say data doesn’t matter at all. We also discussed the data of key demographic shifts — the Democratic Party’s inroads in key suburban areas and their bleeding from the blue-collar union areas that formed the dominant New Deal coalition for much of the 1950s and 1960s.
In addition, Dave argues that because of the growth of data and accessibility to data in politics, the general public has become more attuned to processes like redistricting and voting rights issues, which may buffer the gerrymandering that will happen due to Republican control of state legislatures.
However, Dave is quite pessimistic about disinformation, polarization, and their consequences on electoral politics. He’s quite bearish on Democrats’ chances to hold Congress in 2022, even though he feels Georgia and Arizona have shifted favorably for them. He worries about the consequences of the rampant disinformation on the trust in future elections, and while he sees a depolarization across race and geography in the country, he sees disinformation and irresponsible practices from Beltway media as means of worsening the divide between urban and rural America.
In our interview, we give an unfiltered look at the state of electoral democracy on both the micro and macro levels with one of the nation’s premier forecasters. For more of our previous discussions on election forecasting, you may be interested in listening to the episode “Is Nate Silver Worse than Crackhead Jim? The Success and Tautology of Election Forecasting” and read our essay on Bayesian forecasting in elections.
Steven Kelts is a Lecturer at Princeton University’s Politics Department and University Center for Human Values. A historian of political thought, he is now teaching a seminar titled “Money, Markets, and Morals.” In this interview, Prof. Kelts explains the recent saga of GameStop trades, its connections with historical market fluctuations, and the important normative considerations about market fairness and regulation posed by great intellectuals like John Locke, Bertrand Harcourt, Milton Friedman, and Karl Polanyi.
r/WallStreetBets, a forum hosted on Reddit that is described as 4chan meeting Bloomberg Terminal, was the birthplace of the Gamestop Short Squeeze. What started off as a brilliant way of organizing retail traders to drive up stock prices quickly evolved into a nation-wide political debate posed as a “proletariat revolution” by retail traders against the Wall Street establishment.
We trace all the way back to works by John Locke and the Medieval times when identifiable features of modern markets began to emerge. Prof. Kelts explains why our current way of understanding the market is a new invention. Even though the ballooning of credit and finance is a more recent invention, it is questionable whether markets have indeed become more "free" now than in the past, even though we’re constantly told so.
Prof. Kelts explains to us that markets have not always been thought of in the way they are by neo-classical economists like Milton Friedman or neoliberals like Gary Becker. To think of markets in that way (self-regulating, almost natural, and “functioning best when they are regulated least”) is a choice, and it may not capture the actual practices of market exchange any better (or worse) than a scholastic thinker of the late 1500’s would have captured actual practices.
The Gamestop incident generates questions on the moral foundations of market structures. It helps to point out that even if people today harbor some notion that a market is structured around individual choice, they do so because they think that gives life to a norm of fairness.
People would be appalled if the clearinghouses (as individual businesses) made deals with the hedge funds (as individual businesses) to stop processing orders for “meme stocks” like GameStop. But as in 2008, they also would be appalled if the clearinghouses had extremely low capital requirements for meeting margin calls, essentially allowing players like Robinhood to make uncovered bets and expose us all to systemic risk. So what people want, as Prof. Kelts argues, is a market that’s regulated in the right way, oriented towards fairness to all market participants – not an unregulated market. Nevertheless, it turns out that creating a regulated market also creates all sorts of quirks and oddities within the market, like the capitalization requirements that tripped up the GameStop traders.
What Prof. Kelts finds most interesting about GameStop are the puzzles people now raise about why markets are structured in the way that they are. People assume that markets are structured around some sort of unfettered choice to exchange individually; and he wants his work to demonstrate that this idea of markets is a very modern, and perhaps unrealistic, conceptualization of what a market really is.
This is a far-reaching conversation that touches on many fundamental issues in political theory and the history of political thought. We hope to show you that while the GameStop incident may seem novel and shocking, it is also an old tale of self-regulating markets. It should not change our faith that markets will hold just fine.
David Yamane is Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University. For the first twenty years of his career, Prof. Yamane focused on the sociology of religion. Since 2011, he has researched the sociology of guns.
As Prof. Yamane once explained, “there is no sociology of U.S. gun culture.” Most gun-related studies are epidemiological or criminological, and few people really study why, in many parts of the country, guns are actually a normal part of everyday life. Prof. Yamane seeks to fill this research gap.
Part of the reason there is little sociological research on gun ownership is that in parts of the country with few gun owners, like in left-leaning university environments, gun ownership is particularly stigmatized. Prof. Yamane himself grew up in California and has spent his career in academia, so he was in for a surprise when he moved to North Carolina about ten years ago and found that gun ownership could be normal. It contradicted the narrative he had grown up with.
Prof. Yamane realized he was likely not alone in feeling this. He realized he was also probably not alone one day when he was nearly in physical danger, felt powerless, and went on to buy a gun so that he would never have to feel that way again. Indeed, Prof. Yamane has found that the main contemporary reason for gun ownership is much like his own reason for buying a gun: self-defense.
Defense-oriented gun ownership is a hallmark of Gun Culture 2.0, the current combination of gun-owning reasons and demographics. This is a split from the previous American gun culture, Gun Culture 1.0, which was in large part made up of older white males living in rural areas who wanted to hunt or otherwise use their guns recreationally. Gun Culture 2.0, in addition to being defense-oriented, attracts more young, female, urban, and minority gun owners than Gun Culture 1.0.
Last year, there was what he describes as the “Great Gun-Buying Spree of 2020”: all demographics were interested in buying firearms. Because of a variety of factors, including Covid and civil unrest, people didn’t know if a breakdown of civil society was to follow, and were ready to prepare for the worst. Unlike previous gun-buying sprees, which were motivated by the anticipation of restrictions on gun ownership, last year saw an increase in firearm purchases for the self-defense reasons encompassed by Gun Culture 2.0.
Prof. Yamane breaks up Americans’ views on gun ownership into three categories: ⅓ of the population that would never own a gun; ⅓ already own guns; and ⅓ that is “gun curious” – not opposed to gun ownership but doesn’t feel compelled to own one either. He encourages people who fall into these categories to respect each other’s positions and dearly-held beliefs and be open to understanding.
As someone who straddles the two sides of the gun-ownership debate himself as a liberal gun owner, Prof. Yamane sometimes finds himself with no willing listeners, since one side of the debate can be excessively pro-regulation while the other can be excessively pro-gun, when the answer is ultimately in the middle. Inspired by philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who wrote that “I have sedulously endeavored not to laugh at human actions, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them,” he stresses the importance of thinking like a social scientist, which means bracketing one’s own beliefs and analyzing the situation empirically and neutrally before judging it.
Ewan Kingston is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton High Meadows Environmental Institute and the University Center of Human Values. He works at the intersection of political philosophy, business ethics, and environmental ethics. He has focused on climate change and global supply chains, as well as on the interplay of markets and democracy to outline legitimate and effective institutional designs to solve complex collective action problems. The long conversation between Ewan and Tiger touches on topics ranging from the justification of “joyguzzling” to consumers’ obligations to remedy their purchase of tainted goods.
Ewan defines joyguzzling as “joyriding in a gas guzzler,” an activity that one emits greenhouse gases (GHGs) solely in order to enjoy oneself. Ewan and his co-author and philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argue that there is no moral requirement to refrain from joyguzzling. They acknowledge that climate change is real and needs to be addressed, but they pose a nuanced philosophical question as to the exact nature of individuals’ responsibility and obligation to contributing to carbon emissions.
Some believe that carbon emissions are only harmful in an aggregative and emergent way, and individual emissions do not impose harm on the environment. Therefore, when someone contributes a relatively infinitesimal amount of carbon emission because of a joyride, this person shouldn’t be blamed for the nearly negligible amount of harm they’re causing for the environment. “Just as individual molecules of oil do not cause parts of sensations of sliminess (or yellowish color), so individual molecules of greenhouse gas do not cause parts of dangerous climate impacts.”
Ewan argues that the scientific community cannot answer how exactly a singular joyguzzling activity harms the Earth, and the notion of contribution through the emergent property should not be sufficient to constitute moral blame for the individual emission. We dive deep into his path-breaking philosophy journal and all the important implications these environmental ethics debates may have on policy and social norms.
In relation to environmental ethics, we also discuss consumer ethics. Ewan writes that most consumers buy some “tainted goods” – those that have upstream practices that are morally bad in a significant sense, like chicken from factory farming or roses picked by children exposed to highly toxic pesticides in underdeveloped countries. Ewan has been developing a moral account that privileges contributing to positive structural changes over shunning bad goods and selecting the “right” goods. He advocates that we should think about channeling the unruly benefits and actively compensate for the harm we’ve already caused, rather than obsessing over eliminating the side-effects altogether, which seems to be a goal too unrealistic to achieve.
This interview is part of our ongoing “Aspiring Intellectuals” special coverage, where we interview scholars about more foundational questions in their fields and deal more with the abstract than with concrete questions.
Dr. Parminder K. Jassal is an educational researcher and reformer. While she is currently the CEO of Social Tech Inc., a public benefit corporation trying to increase educational access, her career has also taken her through the ACT Foundation, the Institute for the Future, and a number of large private corporations.
Her own educational story traverses through both India as well as the American public education system where she has experienced both the 2-year and the 4-year system which have helped shape the ways in which she seeks to expand access for other learners.
Throughout this interview we explore many of the broader issues in higher education. These range from the economics of offering Introduction to Microeconomics online, the demographic changes being undergone by the student body, and the unique role that community colleges have to play in the coming changes to higher ed.
We do eventually focus on the underserved group she has spent the most time trying to help - working students. These students are often older, have less flexible schedules, and need to be able to take fewer classes within a given term - all circumstances which the current higher ed system is often bad at addressing. While much of the prior work in the space has focused on local changes like improving advising structures, making transfer of credits easier, etc. Dr. Jassal’s work is much more revolutionary in that she seeks to change the very structures themselves - breaking down the idea that classes should be taken primarily at 1-2 institutions and trying to make online and asynchronous education (a reality which of many has become forcefully acquainted as of late) a permanent component of education.
Through Unmudl, her most recent project and Social Tech’s flagship product, Dr. Jassal has partnered with prominent community colleges to provide an educational experience that allows students to both study and work more flexibly. In this collaborative episode between Policy Punchline and Envision, we discuss Unmudl's unique strategies to educate future generations of students, and the benefits of a flexible model as opposed to a ‘traditional’ or liberal arts curriculum.
Dr. Jassal proposes a system that allows the student to select courses at different institutions, and to enroll in courses that not only are less of an investment than committing to a degree from a four-year institution, but also grant accreditation so that the student has employable skills (backed by certification) that allows them to also be productive members of the workforce.
We hope that you enjoy listening to an episode about rethinking a system we often take for granted, and leave having given thought about what the future of working and learning could look like.
Hey everyone. This is your host Tiger speaking. Happy new year! I hope you’ve all had a very restful holidays season with your loved ones.
I’ve been doing Policy Punchline for two years now and what a journey we’ve come along. We released our 100th episode last November, and in 2020, we built two special coverages – one on the Covid-19 crisis and another on the recent elections season. We’ve really taken some deep dives into issues in policy, media, economics, political discourse… Our team and I have been extremely fortunate to have interviewed people from the highest level of policymaking to the world’s most renowned academics and business executives. Thank you for all your support in 2020.
Even though we’ve come so far, part of me is still craving for more challenges. I want to have harder and longer conversations on more foundational topics – whether it’s quantum computing or bioengineering, whether it’s environmental ethics or human psychology. Rather than asking about policy and current events, I would love to further deepen the content we can present you.
I still have 5 months before I graduate from Princeton and leave Policy Punchline, and I want to use this time to build something new. I want to seek out crazily smart people from orthodox and unorthodox backgrounds who can speak to the fundamental nature of the fields they’ve been studying. They may be professors, or PhD students, or YouTube historians, or blockchain innovators who are also part-time venture capitalists…
I am therefore proud to announce this new segment, which can hopefully gradually evolve into a new podcast, titled “Aspiring Intellectuals.” This is a very pretentious phrase – I understand – but it’s something that’s been on my mind since my sophomore year. I remember talking to my friend Arjun about what kind of people we hope to grow up become and what kind of friends we’d like to surround ourselves with, and he coined this phrase “aspiring intellectuals.”
It’s hard to be an intellectual. One has to love learning, stay curious, be constantly willing to engage in debates about the world and knowledge. One also has to stay open-minded, dispassionate, receptive, and not hold a grudge against those who disagree. That’s a wonderful person if one can fulfill those standards.
I’m not pretentious enough yet to consider myself enlightened already or an intellectual myself, so I added the word “aspiring” in front of it – to show that I’m still in the process of striving to reach that state. I really hope to get there one day, and I want to interview people who are also on this journey of pursuing knowledge and truth.
This will still be a long-form podcast, except even longer and more far-reaching than the current Policy Punchline interviews that my team and I will continue to conduct. I will try to hold conversations that last more than 90 minutes or two hours. You may think of this podcast as a product of inspiration by some of the more famous long-form podcasts focused on science and society such as Eric Weinstein’s The Portal or The Lex Fridman Podcast, and even some of Joe Rogan’s conversations with academics.
We will continue to update the interviews on policypunchline.com. In the meantime, you may follow my daily email at tigergao.substack.com. We’ll see you at our next episode. Thank you again for all your support.
Rob Henderson is a Gates-Cambridge Scholar pursuing a PhD in social psychology at Cambridge University, UK. His experience led him to develop insights on the upper class, luxury beliefs, human nature, and other topics in social psychology that we discuss in this interview.
Rob’s upbringing was turbulent to say the least and shaped him to be a conservative. He bounced around foster homes and experienced the loss of his loved ones at a young age. Having graduated at the bottom of his class in high school, he decided to enlist in the US Air Force. Then, as a veteran, he subsequently enrolled in Yale University as an Eli Whitney undergraduate student. Given his working-class and military background, studying at Yale shocked him as the elite higher education culture was not anything like the army or his childhood.
Luxury beliefs are those that act as status symbols for the elite. In the past, the elites showed their wealth and status by having luxury goods. However, since it’s much easier to obtain luxury items today, the elites now have to display their status by having a set of “luxury beliefs.”
For example, in the 60s, the elite advocated for polygamy as they viewed monogamy was outdated. This belief had a lot of serious second-order consequences as seen from 1960-2005, when the number of working class children who grew up in a two-parent household fell from 95% to 30%. Meanwhile, 95% of children from the affluent class grew up in two-parent households in both 1960 and 2005. In this case, the luxury belief of polygamy harmed only the working class, as growing up in a two-parent family is essential to having a nurturing and stable childhood.
During the recent Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, a lot of college students who previously had not been involved in social justice or cared about BLM suddenly took up the banner of social justice. Is this in some way a luxury belief?
More importantly, who gets to create these luxury beliefs? Are professors and scholars in charge? Mega billionaires? Hollywood celebrities? Media personalities?... Rob interestingly said that the “second tier” elites (elites that are still affluent but not at the top of the social hierarchy) normally create these beliefs.
Our conversation segwayed to college education policies as Rob pointed out that the policies that the affluent enact to supposedly help the underprivileged don’t necessarily work. He criticized educated people’s emphasis on college diplomas for underprivileged kids, saying that the focus should be on stabilizing families, instead, and that education is really a red herring.
In a newsletter, Rob tells the story of a Yale professor who was forced to resign over an unpopular email and of Jordan Peterson being disinvited from Cambridge for a speaking event. He says that one of the trends he’s seen in these elite institutions is “observing social mobs cancel people for dissenting against orthodoxy.” We asked Rob to further elaborate his thoughts on cancel culture on college campuses. How severe is it? Is it really as big of an issue as some conservatives make it to be?
We eventually trace issues from cancel culture to luxury beliefs back to human nature. We know that people feel more true to themselves when they go along with social influences. Why is this, and what is the implication for thinking for oneself? Is what one believes in dependent from the social environment one grew up in? If people feel most authentic following the beliefs of their social environment, how could one break from the beliefs that shaped one’s upbringing or that were most popular at places like Yale and Cambridge?
We eventually end on a discussion on the polarization of the American society today. Rob discussed whether polarization is built into human society and what forces a socially cohesive society to the extremes.
Samuel George is a documentary filmmaker that has gone into each of his projects with the simple goal of listening. Sam describes himself as a filmmaker and analyst for the Bertelsmann Foundation focusing on the intersection of economics, politics, the digital revolution, and daily life. Filming on the ground from the Turkish – Syrian border to the factories of Juarez, Mexico, the films dive inside critical crossroads around the globe.
Traveling abroad to places like Turkey, Latvia, India, Mexico, and other cities in the US, Sam captures the lives of the people on the ground, humanizing the individual experience of the public policy in a unique way that only a documentary film can capture. Sam interviews both policymakers and ordinary people to enter the lives of people that are often neglected.
We start the interview with Sam’s journey towards documentary filmmaking and why he thinks it’s a powerful medium for policy discussions. Guided by a philosophy of “show, don’t tell,” Sam argues that documentary films allow viewers to enter the lives of people in a way that isn’t possible through text or a policy report.
Kenneth, Annie, and Sam explore the production process of documentary filmmaking and what happens behind the camera. In his latest work, "Go-Go City: Displacement in Washington, DC," Sam reveals that he captured 55 terabytes worth of video and only used 8 gigabytes for the final documentary. How do filmmakers decide what goes in the film and what gets cut? When filmmakers go to a site for filming, do they have a plan of what they’re going to capture? Do documentary filmmakers have an agenda in their productions? Do they have to have an agenda?
His most recent work "Go-Go City" explores the intersection of Washington DC’s iconic Go-Go music and the Black Lives Matter protests that took over the streets following the death of George Floyd. Sam, a resident of the capital, explores gentrification in his documentary in three ways: housing, small business, and culture. Though they are all distinct, Sam argues that they are all interconnected in their battle against gentrifying forces pushing them out of the city.
Focusing their time on the individual lives of the local population, Sam’s documentaries have a clear mission to offer viewers a fair representation of the culture and community shown to audiences. Sam dives into the relationship between the filmmaker and the portrayed community. He addresses the interpersonal dynamics of filmmaking and the relationships developed behind the camera.
Sunita Satyapal is the Director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). She is one of the most knowledgeable experts and policymakers on the topic of hydrogen – an ever more important topic in the energy world. While usually hydrogen is overshadowed by its solar and wind peers, it is the most abundant resource in the world and may prove to be a crucial piece to decarbonizing the modern world. Having worked in academia, industry and now government, Dr. Satyapal has a unique perspective on the intersection of these different forces in helping hydrogen reach commercial status.
While hydrogen has come to the attention of financiers and energy aficionados in recent weeks due to proposals by the incoming Biden administration and the success of some smaller hydrogen companies, researchers like Dr. Satyapal have spent years learning the intricacies of not just individual companies, but the micro-level processes of how hydrogen works.
The conservation starts with Dr. Satyapal explaining what exactly hydrogen and hydrogen energy are, debunking some myths and walking us through the power creation and storage processes. We then discuss the cost of hydrogen, which is currently a huge barrier for the technology to come to market, and how cost reduction projections may allow it to compete without subsidies in the near future.
Dr. Satyapal noted how this hydrogen “hype cycle” differs from the previous one, which occurred in the early 2000s. The more mature hydrogen technologies benefited from the previous deluge of investment, but new research and development advancements have pushed it to be far closer to commercialization than ever before. As she oversees various research opportunities, she also emphasizes the importance of government funding in ensuring the success of future R&D.
We also touch on Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (HFCV), its differences from electric vehicles (EV), and the importance of decarbonizing the transportation sector in a long-term view of the country. A competitor to lithium-ion batteries, hydrogen may prove to be the more sensible route towards electrifying fleets of cars and buses.
Overall, our conversation with Dr. Satyapal was filled with optimism and enthusiasm as entrepreneurs, government officials, and academic researchers all help the drive towards making hydrogen an important part of the clean energy future.
Bill Dudley is a senior research scholar at Princeton University’s Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies. He served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2009 to 2018, and as vice chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). He was previously chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs.
He previously came on our show on April 2nd, 2019 to reflect on his career, and he now returns to discuss monetary policies during Covid, the efficacy and necessity of fiscal stimulus, inflation outlook for 2021, the Fed’s switch to “average inflation targeting,” Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and some of the gravest challenges confronted by central banks today.
We started the conservation with a review of the Fed’s unprecedented actions in response to Covid. With the exception of the Main Street Lending Facility, every new policy tool worked well, especially new facilities for public and municipal bond markets. The Fed successfully supported market function and financial stability.
The Fed’s ability to further stimulate, however, is now very limited. What else can it do more? It can buy more asset-backed securities (ABS), mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and other long-term assets. It could also engage in yield curve control or make interest rate negative – though all FOMC members have been opposed to this proposal. But even if the Fed does all this, the effect on the real economy still won’t be too much more.
Average Inflation Targeting was a switch of the Fed’s monetary policy framework introduced this fall in hope to further stimulate inflation. Prof. Dudley indicates how it seems small on paper but could have significant consequences. When the Fed has been missing inflation on the downside for many years, it makes the inflation expectation too anchored to the downside, and monetary policy becomes too tight. Under the new regime, the Fed won’t so easily tighten monetary policy. However, once the U.S. economy returns to full employment, the Fed would likely tighten monetary policy by more because inflation will be higher than 2%, and the Fed would then need to bring down the employment rate to the sustainable level.
Prof. Dudley wrote in his recent Bloomberg column “Five Reasons to Worry about Faster U.S. Inflation” that “Fiscal orthodoxy has shifted: Instead of worrying about rising federal debt burdens, economists now see much greater scope for aggressive action to offset significant shortfalls in demand. As a result, the government probably won’t want to remove fiscal stimulus as quickly as it did after the 2008 financial crisis (a move that led to a disappointingly slow recovery).” Is the tide turning? Are we turning towards Modern Monetary Theory given how the low interest rates and low inflation now make full employment less likely. How does Prof. Dudley respond to these arguments?
A more fundamental question would be: What is the role of central banks, in and outside the context of a pandemic? We saw from the Volcker period when the Fed independently took a firm stance on hyperinflation and acted against many electoral interests. We saw in the Great Moderation period that central bankers actively tried to erase volatility from the markets. We also hear critiques from public intellectuals like Nassim Nicholas Taleb that central banks should try to minimize harm rather than coming up with policies with unintended side effects. What is Prof. Dudley’s philosophy?
Through this far-reaching conversation, we hope to shed light on some foundational issues in central banking and financial history, rooted in but also beyond the current events in economic policy and Covid-19.
William Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy and a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of "Fiscal Therapy: Curing America’s Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future." He is also the Co-Director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and served as senior economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush from 1991-1992.
The dominant narrative around our national debt is all too familiar: every dollar of federal spending is bankrupting the U.S.; harsh austerity will soon be unavoidable; taming deficits means crippling cuts to crucial programs. In this episode, Dr. Gale turns the orthodoxy of fiscal responsibility on its head, offers insights into the economics of federal spending during a pandemic, and discusses his progressive approach to reducing the national debt.
Our discussion centers around Dr. Gale’s most recent book, "Fiscal Therapy." We begin by examining the origins of federal borrowing habits and exploring the history of deficit spending during economic booms – a fiscal pattern that emerged during the Reagan era and has since become the norm.
Today, the gap between revenue and expenditures has as much to do with under-taxing as it does with overspending on entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. While Medicare and Social Security are considered political “sacred cows,” an aging population and rising healthcare costs will bankrupt these programs, making significant reform a bipartisan political necessity.
Turning to the future of the federal budget, Dr. Gale’s emphasis on raising revenue provides a fresh perspective to a largely stale discourse around debt reduction. There is a possibility for consensus, he contends, around several central features of his approach to taxation. He sees potential in a progressive VAT (value-added tax) – a tax on all consumption of consumer goods that funds Universal Basic Income (UBI) for the poor and the lower middle class.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers famously said that VAT faces political hurdles because “liberals think it’s regressive, and conservatives think it is a money machine.” Paired with a UBI, however, a VAT might be on the horizon, argues Dr. Gale. He is also optimistic about his proposal for a tax on all carbon emissions – a market-based compromise between Republicans wary of climate spending and Democrats hungry for tax revenue and climate action.
Dr. Gale’s insights on fiscal policy offer important lessons for today’s spending debates. He makes a strong case for choosing economic relief over fiscal restraint in the current economic climate, promoting a return to economic growth in the short term, and finding a path to a balanced budget in the long term. Specifically, he praised recent congressional funding for education, public transportation, and programs such as SNAP. He notes, however, that falling state and local tax revenue, growing entitlement spending, and state balanced budget requirements make more federal aid to state and local governments essential.
We concluded our conversation with a fascinating discussion about the evolving role of the Federal Reserve in the Covid economy, asking some of the most pressing questions in monetary policy: What are the flaws and contradictions in Modern Monetary Theory? How important were the corporate and municipal lending facilities created by the CARES Act? How long can today’s low interest rates last, and what implications do future rate hikes have for paying down the national debt?
Dr. Gale left us with one hopeful comment, amidst the turbulence and rancor of today’s politics and the structural impediments to fiscal responsibility: that future generations will ultimately prevail over this generation’s debt addiction.
Robinson Meyer is a staff writer and climate reporter at The Atlantic. After covering working on environmental policy and climate change for the last four years of his six years at the publication, Rob and a few of his colleagues at The Atlantic started the COVID Tracking Project in the early days of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, accumulating case counts and death tolls when information on the virus was scarce. The COVID Tracking Project has now grown into being a leading data aggregator for the general public, other news organizations, and local, state, and even federal government-affiliated groups. Rob also is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet.
Rob describes the somewhat accidental realization of the COVID Tracking Project and the challenges of its early days. He talks about how the virus spread undetected, and how his team at The Atlantic started from scratch in constructing a network to understand the virus – starting with their collaboration with the Seattle Flu Project, and eventually evolving into a massive effort in collecting and visualizing the shocking data on the community spread that had occurred in the U.S. for weeks.
Rob, Tiger, Neal, and Sully then discuss the implications of the data, including the questions of contextualization and politicization of scientific data with the coronavirus. For instance, what editorial decisions does the Project make in publishing and displaying certain forms of data when there is so much inconsistency in reporting across states? Rob mentions the problems with the positivity rate as a statistic, and how this data point can easily be manipulated.
The interview then shifts to the cultural and political sphere of the pandemic from the perspective of media narratives. Rob discusses the problems in management stemming from the White House, the lack of adaptability from the CDC and American public health establishment figures, and how that arrogance may have hindered the initial response and left the country off-guard.
At its core, they find the narrative collapse surrounding the COVID response originated as much from Congress as the White House, as Rob explains that the money from the CARES act was integral to a collective response in the spring. The current failure of Congress to make a deal is thus preventing us from entering an endgame strategy, in which public health measures attempt to protect as many people as possible before vaccine immunity becomes widespread.
In the closing minutes of the interview, they then shift to a broader conversation on America’s ability to confront existential challenges. Rob, who also runs The Atlantic’s climate outlet “Planet,” asserts that America never truly solves existential problems; it just manages its way through them. In the case of COVID, America chose to manage the crisis by fast tracking vaccine development, leading to a very different outcome than European and East Asian countries had. We chose that route because we had a largely pre-fabricated vaccine plan, but none for masks or social distancing. Here, Rob makes a key point: our response to an existential crisis is as good as the plans we make to prepare for them.
They end on an important, if disheartening question: How will America remember COVID, and is the country capable of normalizing and ignoring even worse disasters? In short, Rob thinks it is possible, but, even so, he doesn’t believe there is room for pessimism. “If you think that climate change is worth fighting and worth pressing against, then it doesn’t matter if you’re optimistic or pessimistic.” While America’s political system is dysfunctional, the government is not. America, through both the private and public spheres, has a huge capacity for public good. For both COVID and climate, the challenge is not creating new institutions or revolutionizing old ones, but directing the capacity we have to minimize the damage.
Robert Barnes is a lawyer who prides himself on defending the underdog. His clients include Alex Jones and the Covington kids, and he was recently invited by President Trump to be part of the President’s legal team suiting to contend the 2020 election results.
In this interview, Mr. Barnes explains why Alex Jones shouldn’t have been deplatformed, what the “Gated Institutional Narratives” and the Intellectual Dark Web are, and how the institutional media coordinated their efforts to attack Alex Jones.
On the election front, Mr. Barnes dives into great detail that there was no mass, coordinated election fraud as QAnon claimed, but certain parts of the election results are indeed questionable and deserve fair trials and hearings, which unfortunately weren’t given by the courts. He describes how Trump was sabotaged by incompetent lawyers like Sydney Powell who resorted to conspiracy theories rather than evidence, which ended up distracting the legitimate effort to content the election outcome.
A self-proclaimed “constitutional populist,” Mr. Barnes is a leading voice in the fight for free speech. He walks us through the Alex Jones case and explain how the famous “section 230” clause was involved. How should we define true free speech? Where is the line drawn between disagreement versus harassment, defamation, and spreading misinformation? When does someone deserve to be held accountable for their speech online? How can the social media companies “simply include First Amendment rules in the terms and services” and how will that eliminate 90% of the concerns and questions as Mr. Barnes believes? A few weeks ago, famous podcast hosts Eric Weinstein and Lex Fridman released a video called “Joe Rogan is under attack,” in which Weinstein claims that everyone near Rogan’s circle had something terrible happening to them. Is there really some “institution” that is out there to get you and suppress free speech? Tiger challenges Mr. Barnes to explain how such a mechanism works. What was the actual evidence of a coordinated, pre-meditated effort attacking people in the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web?” Or is the issue way overblown by people on the Right?
Tiger also presents a series of facts and evidence against the election lawsuits and asks Mr. Barnes to explain what exactly are the lawsuits trying to get at. What are the differences between signature audits and ballot recounts? What does it mean for a case to have “no standing” from a legal perspective? Has the Trump legal team actually presented convincing evidence to prove the existence of wide-spread fraud? Is there a point of election fraud lawsuits without having the chance of actually overturning the election result since the margins are wide enough to withstand any error? Will these election lawsuits strengthen or hurt the American democracy in the long run? This is the longest and one of the wildest interviews Tiger has ever conducted. It’s not something we normally present to our listeners, but we’re confident that you’ll enjoy this nuanced conversation with many push-backs and challenges from both sides.
Michael Hüther is the director of the German Economic Institute (Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft), one of the most important think tanks in Germany based in Cologne. He previously served on the German Council of Economic Experts and was the chief economist of DekaBank. In this interview, Dr. Hüther discusses Covid’s shock on the German economy, why globalization has become “exhausted,” Germany’s “Golden Decade” in early 2000s and its implications for public investments and debt, and future of European integration.
The last decade was the Golden Decade for Germany. 80%+ people were integrated into the labor market; employment rate consistently went up; the government held a balanced budget… But in some sense, it was also the “Lost Decade” for public investment. The debt break introduced to the Constitution in 2009 forced Germany to maintain a balanced budget, which has been in part achieved through reducing investments in local communities and the greater economy.
With Covid-19’s impacts, the deficits in Germany have become comparably higher, and Dr. Hüther predicts that it would need another two decades for it to come back to a balance. What has changed compared to older days, however, is the relationship between interest rates and GDP growth. Until 2010, the real interest rate was higher than the GDP growth rate. That means a government would have to look for very good investment opportunities to make interest payments for public debt. Today, the interest rate at the “zero lower bound” is much lower than GDP growth, so incurring government debt has de facto become a Ponzi scheme, in which one could easily roll over the debt and no longer create any burden for the future generation.
Covid-19 was a tremendous shock to Germany’s economy, causing a -9.5% shrinkage in the country’s GDP in the 2nd quarter of 2020. The first shock was a pure liquidity shock to businesses that was soon stabilized, allowing the economy to bounce back in the 3rd quarter with +8.5% growth in GDP. Germany thus experienced a V-shaped recovery in some way, but as the country adjusted to the new normal, new uncertainty to risk arose, and the economy still faces grave challenges ahead.
With that, we dive into Germany’s economic structure and its path dependency – tracing its roots back to the 19th-century industrialization and the federalist state structure of Germany. Because Germany didn’t have a big central government, each of the 35 different states had to make their own economic policies. That means until today, there are a lot of regional clusters and networks left in Germany, allowing rural areas to flourish as a part of a larger ecosystem.
We hope this interview can spark your interest in the German and European economies as they navigate through the Covid recovery and the next stages of globalization. If you’d like to learn more about Dr. Hüther’s work, we encourage you to read his book “Exhausted Globalisation: Between the Transatlantic Orientation and the Chinese Way” and follow works published by the German Economic Institute.
Rebecca Henderson is the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard, where she specializes in innovation and organizational change. Her newest book "Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire" examines how capitalism might be reworked so as to strive for a greener, more equitable future. "Reimagining Capitalism" was named to the shortlist of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, and has received high praise from both academia and industry.
Many scholars have argued that capitalism is at a crossroads, as the climate crisis and soaring inequality pose problems that the free market has proven to be incapable of solving. Professor Henderson points to Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics as the origin of these issues. As businesspeople adopted shareholder value maximization as their primary goal, and proponents of free market capitalism attacked government and regulation, capitalism spiralled out of control.
How can businesses balance social responsibility and profitability? What changes need to be made to our current form of capitalism? And can the system truly be reformed? These are the questions that led Professor Henderson to write Reimagining Capitalism. In this interview, we explore these questions and more, diving into Professor Henderson’s insights as well as the research that informed her conclusions. We begin with Professor Henderson’s vision of “purpose-driven capitalism,” in which businesses place profit maximization on equal footing with serving society. How feasible is such an idea? Are there any real-world examples of businesses embracing this philosophy? Professor Henderson argues that, in many cases, the interests of business align with the interests of society.
One of Professor Henderson’s key insights is that business and strong political institutions are complements – not adversaries. In opposition to the classical view of government as detrimental to economic efficiency, Professor Henderson argues that businesses benefit from capable government and regulation. What does this mean for tech giants like Facebook and Google? We discuss potential antitrust activity against these companies, and how it might be carried out in a responsible manner.
Finally, we place Professor Henderson’s research alongside other recent books about capitalism: Thomas Piketty’s "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", Branko Milanovic’s "Capitalism, Alone", Nicholas Lemann’s "Transaction Man", Katharina Pistor’s "The Code of Capital", Glen Weyl on "Radical Markets"… How does "Reimagining Capitalism" differ in its approach to reforming capitalism? What makes Professor Henderson’s insights unique from that from academic economists?
This interview marks the 100th episode of Policy Punchline. We’re truly grateful for all the support you’ve given us over the last two years and sincerely hope that we may continue to explore more exciting ideas on our journey forward!
Jim VandeHei is the co-founder and CEO of Axios and the former executive editor and co-founder of Politico. In this interview, Jim and Tiger discuss the struggles and issues of independent and legacy media platforms, the danger of ideological bubbles within journalist circles, the intellectual opportunity cost of over-analyzing Trump, the deviation from truths and facts in today’s social discourse, and a variety of urgent issues in politics and beyond.
Axios, founded in 2016, has the mission is to deliver the clearest, smartest, most efficient and trustworthy experience for the audience and advertisers alike. It is on the forefront of today’s shift toward more bit-sized media with an emphasis on facts, not editorialization or the journalist’s own opinions.
How does Axios strike the balance between short-form, concise coverage and the full nuance and complexity of the subjects they are covering? How does Axios select the best set of facts and truths when there are often “multiple sides of truths” to a story?
Podcast host Eric Weinstein said “Supply creates its own demand. Optics create its own substance.” It seems that we’re in an era where there is an increasingly diverse and complex set of narratives that can no longer be controlled by the larger institutions. While there is now more high-quality information available than ever before, it has also become easier to spread and consume misinformation and misrepresenting “facts.” Who caused the media slant? The consumer or the supplier? How can consumers realistically make better decisions in their daily media consumption? Is there anything wrong with traditional mainstream media outlets like New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and the like? Is it fair to criticize them as narrative-driven journalism that hides behind the veil of neutrality and rationality, while in fact seeking to push for a certain set of narratives with cherry-picked facts and pandering to their base? Are any of these criticisms fair?
What can the “beltway” media learn from the 2020 elections, when there was no “Blue Wave” as widely reported before the election? Jim has previously discussed the phenomena of the “Trump Bump” – the media covers Trump so much because otherwise they’d see a drop in ratings. How have the Trump presidency and Trump’s relationship with media coverage challenged media norms? Did the media world waste four years of precious time over-analyzing Trump when there was a plethora of more urgent issues left undiscussed – incurring a huge intellectual opportunity cost to our social discourse? On the day before our interview, BuzzFeed announced its acquisition of Huffington Post in an all-stock deal. Is it a merger out of necessity? How hard has it been for independent media platforms even before Covid-19 hit? Why are Axios and Politico two of the very few successful media companies founded over the last two decades?
This is one of the most insightful conversations we’ve had on the media landscape and political discourse – we hope it is a meaningful representation of how far we’ve come for our 100th episode!
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Since the race towards high-powered, destructive bombs during World War II, nuclear technologies have captured the public’s imagination in the discourse over energy and society. Large-scale nuclear fission, which involves the splitting of an atom, has been particularly crucial in the energy mix and electricity production in many Western countries over the past few decades. Nuclear fusion – where two atoms collide to create energy – has played a much lesser role in modern energy systems and is much less known than its fission counterpart. One man is hoping to change that.
Sir Steven Cowley has been at the forefront for pushing frontier research and wide adoption of nuclear fusion technology. A leader in some of the most advanced nuclear projects, including the Joint European Torus and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, Sir Cowley's knowledge and passion for fusion is contagious. Now, as the head of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL), the leading fusion research center in the U.S., Sir Cowley aims to help build one of the largest and most influential fusion labs in the world.
In this interview, Sir Cowley offers his wisdom in describing the complex processes the underline the nuclear fusion process, helping us to better understand the technologies. He explains why the paths of nuclear fusion and fission diverged following the 1940s, pointing out the more difficult nature of a nuclear fusion reaction.
From there, we dive into the role of fusion in the global energy mix, citing it as a cleaner, safer, more democratic, powerful and energy-dense source of power. In other words, fusion is the perfect source of energy. The catch? The world hasn't quite figured out how to produce nuclear fusion energy in large quantities, and we go deep on the scientific and policy hurdles that need to be overcome.
While Sir Cowley believes that there are advancements to be made before building huge commercial fusion plants, he points out that China is in the process of constructing these expensive power producing edifices and may set good examples for the West. China has been much more active investing into nuclear fusion, while some Western powers have declined to pour more money into research.
Finally, Cowley gave his thoughts on the interrelation of physics and religion, the experience of being knighted by Queen Elizabeth, the differences between the scientifically and metaphysically unanswerable questions, and many other deep thoughts on the wide world of energy.
Liam Vaughan’s newest book explores the “Flash Crash” that took place on May 6, 2010. In the span of five minutes, S&P fell 5% and a trillion dollars of valuation was wiped out. Within around 20 minutes, the markets picked back up and resumed to normalcy. The crash was later attributed to Navinder Sarao, or Nav, a London day trader who lives with his parents and trades from his bedroom.
In this interview, Liam joins Tiger and Michael to talk about this fastest drop in market history, Nav’s journey and involvement in the crash, the moral-ethical implications of his arrest, and some fundamental issues of financial markets and emerging tech that allowed such havoc to unfold.
Why should we care about an event that only lasted 20 minutes – shorter than 1/5 of the length of this podcast interview? Was the Flash Crash a Black Swan, perfect storm type of event, or an indicator of something larger such as an unstable trading ecosystem as we move towards automation? What are the definitions of these techniques like “spoofing,” “scalping,” or “high-frequency trading” that seemed to have contributed to an ever more automated financial market and the Crash?
“Nav had fine-tuned the system to the point where he could more or less nudge one of the world’s biggest markets around at will.” Do we now live in a world where it’s indeed possible for a single person, with enough drive and the help of a computer program, can cause such destructive effects on the global economy from their bedroom? If so, what does this mean for national security and general societal stability? Are things really that fragile? Nav is an extremely complex figure. In many ways, he has a number of admirable qualities - determination, single minded focus, mathematical brilliance and utter fearlessness - and yet many of his actions have been described as fraud. Even the way that he is named - by the nickname “Nav” or as the "Hound of Hounslow" (a clear reference to the Wolf of Wall Street) - seems in a somewhat positive or even charismatic manner. How should we view him? Does Liam admire him, see him as a man who committed criminal actions, or think of him as some combination of the two?
Futex, the firm Nav got his start at, was part of a new era of trading taking place in the digital realm as opposed to in-person trading pits. Nav’s strengths - single minded focus, mathematical brilliance, agility, and extreme risk taking - were particularly suited to this new digital trading and were emblematic of the new generation of traders. How has this broader change in personality type of traders impacted the world of finance? The fact that PhD mathematicians and data scientists are basically making more money than MBAs and corporate finance executives must reveal something quite profound about the direction our world is headed towards, right? Is there anything that we could do to deter this kind of behavior for future traders? Regulators seem to be always behind the financial practitioners because the best talents are much more financially incentivized to work for a quant trading firm than for the SEC or CFTC. Is there any way to fix this dead loop and reinvigorate talents within government agencies?
How did the Indian-Americans vote in the 2020 Presidential Elections? Was the nomination of Kamala Harris a decisive factor? How different will India-US ties be in a Biden administration? How did the Narendra Modi administration in India handle the COVID-19 pandemic? What are some of the most grave challenges being confronted by the Indian democractic system?
In this episode, we explore all these fascinating questions with one of the most well-reputed political economists of India – Dr. Milan Vaishnav, a Senior Fellow and the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C. His primary research focuses on issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior. He is the author of the book "When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics" and is the host of the podcast "Grand Tamasha." Being an Indian-American himself, Dr. Vaishnav offers unique insights into the electoral behaviour of the Indian-Americans, a group that became visibly more important in the elections this year.
We begin the interview with unpacking the Indian-American vote in the 2020 Elections. Dr. Vaishnav explains the results of the India-Americans Attitude Survey, a survey conducted by Dr. Vaishnav and his colleagues to understand the electoral behaviour and preferences of the India-American voters. The survey, one the only ones that focuses on the Indian-Ameican community, revealed that much like other voters, Indian-Americans care about basic domestic issues - economy and healthcare. At the same time, the state of India-US relations was an insignificant factor in determining their electoral choice. Countering the general perception of Indian-Americans being overwhelmingly supportive of Trump and the Republiucan Party, Dr. Vaishnav argues that the community is predominantly Democratic. He highlights that the Trump-Modi bonhomie did not cause a shift in the choices of the Indian-Americans.
Talking about the state of the India-US ties, Dr. Vaishnav emphasized that under the Trump administration, the security and diplomatic cooperation between the two nations was tremendously expanded, while the economic cooperation remained stagnant. A Biden administration is expected to continue the growing security partnership, one that surely will be invigorated with the presence of an Indian-American Vice President.
Dr. Vaishnav also delves deep into the successes of the Modi administration in handling the pandemic, amid growing concerns about the state of the Indian economy. He also sheds light on one of the most intriguing questions for Indian political economists: Why is Modi so popular despite widespread concerns over the Indian economy and its sovereignty?
We hope that you enjoy listening to an interview about a country and a community that continues to fascinate and intrigue many. It is our hope that through these series of interviews, we continue to demystify India, Indian-Americans, and the 2020 Elections for our listeners!
A seasoned entrepreneur and financier, Tom Leyden is well versed in every aspect of the solar world. In this episode, Tom speaks about his start in the solar space, how it has evolved over the years, and what he sees as the future of the technology.
Tom narrates his experiences in Africa and Southeast Asia advising companies and governments on solar projects. He explains how solar is not only as a source of power, but also an aid mechanism that will continue to be important abroad from both financial and strategic perspectives. His article "Solar Power for Peace" describes the lasting goodwill that often accompanies solar projects in developing nations.
Tom also believes in a bright future for the American solar market, as some of the experienced foreign developers may continue to see high-potential business opportunities here. He also elaborates on distributed energy, net metering, the theory of "price cannibalization,” and some recent changes in NJ state energy policy.
Tom has done a great deal of work on the Princeton campus, helping the University define and reach their goal to get to 100% net zero emissions by 2045. Tom's team developed Princeton's first solar project and is currently in the middle of a new 17MW solar project that involves locations around Princeton's campus.
Another topic that Tom feels strongly about concerning Princeton's relation to energy is the Princeton endowment investments into the fossil fuel industry. Tom's view on divestment has recently changed, and he is now a leading voice in pressuring Princeton to divest their holdings in key fossil fuel companies. He points to the poor performance of the traditional energy sector in public markets and cites the objectively higher returns of renewable projects.
Tom is passionate about helping students and young professionals find their way in the growing renewables industry. His own enthusiasm for solar is contagious, and it's easy to see why many young people today feel so strongly about the industry.
Full bio: One of the early solar pioneers, Tom began his solar career in 1980 and over the years has held a number of executive management positions. He was VP of Sales and Marketing at EPV, a thin-film PV manufacturer, and at WorldWater, a remote-power and solar-water pumping company that installed solar projects in Africa and Asia. He served as VP of East Coast Operations for PowerLight, the commercial PV pioneer bought by SunPower, where he ran SunPower’s East Coast office in Trenton, and later was VP of Commercial Development at SolarCity. In 2012 he became CEO of the energy storage start-up Solar Grid Storage that was acquired by SunEdison in 2015 and joined EDF Renewable Energy to help lead its solar plus storage group.
Nate Silver, widely considered as the preeminent election forecaster, uses Bayesian methods in his models. What is Bayesian statistics? It just happens that some of our team members have been studying Bayesian concepts, so we hope this explanation could be somewhat helpful in informing you of the foundational methodology that Silver uses to forecast.
The questions we discuss include: - Was Nate Silver right in 2016? (He was and wasn’t). - Can we even judge whether a forecaster is right or wrong? - Are elections chaotic systems that we cannot predict or controlled systems that we can? - Should forecasters incorporate the likelihood of a “Black Swan” event like a coup or contested elections in their models? - Do alternative facts (or truths) exist? - Do we have enough data to make predictions for someone like Trump?
This is a brief recap to our election night livestream, in which we had a four-hour long discussion on various topics such as the evolving nature of our political discourse, the future of ObamaCare after elections, Biden’s clean energy plan, etc.
You may visit policypunchline.com/op-ed to read more about the application of Bayesian methods in today’s political debates, and you may watch our entire livestream on our YouTube channel.
We react to the election outcome so far and discuss why it’s an indictment on the Democratic Party and a victory for Trump.
Does the failed expectations of polling consensus represent an error in election predictions or a cognitive dissonance about the true political feelings of Americans? Have the democrats failed to put forward policy that appeals to Americans, or are they simply losing the messaging war?
Will a (highly probable) Biden presidency with a Republican Senate majority devolve into a lame duck presidency and a replay of the Obama-Tea Party drama that resulted in few major legislative accomplishments? Will the Democratic Party face even greater challenges in consolidating voters moving forward, while the Republican Party seems to be more unified and determined behind Trump than ever?
Trey Gowdy is a former federal prosecutor and Congressman from Greenville, South Carolina. Known for his ability to persuade, question, and debate in courtrooms and Congressional hearings, Mr. Gowdy rose to fame within the Repubican Party. He resigned in 2018 when he could no longer tolerate the hyper-partisanship and polarization of political discourse.
In this interview, Mr. Gowdy discusses the state of America’s political discourse, how both constituents and politicians should be blamed for fueling polarization, social media’s outsized role in shaping people’s beliefs, and his optimism and pessimism for this election season and beyond.
Mr. Gowdy had a stellar career as a prosecutor, achieving the highest performance rating possible for a federal prosecutor two years in a row. His recently published book, "Doesn’t Hurt to Ask: Using the Power of Questions to Communicate, Connect, and Persuade," provides guidance to those who wish to become effective communicators. Mr. Gowdy talks about how politicians make up their minds before a hearing or debate even begins, making the art of persuasion pointless. How does this book relate to partisan politics or the current polarizing political environment? How can people from both sides find better ways to communicate with and convince each other?
We seem to live in an era where people can always find supporting facts for any of their beliefs. Mr. Gowdy reflects on his years as an attorney and explains what makes good facts. The mere existence of a fact doesn’t make it good per se and shouldn’t be sufficient in immediately convincing the voters. Important topics such as healthcare shouldn’t be reduced to 2-minute answers in presidential debates, nor should people rely on 140-character tweets for their opinion on science and politics. What concrete steps can we take to encourage long-form, open-minded dialogues between friends, neighbors, and politicians?
Considering how successful some one-liners are in “riling up the base” – such as many simply label progressives as “communists” or conservatives as “racists” – can we really pin the blame for polarization on the language used? Could there be more fundamental reasons for this polarization that created a political environment where such rhetoric proved more politically beneficial than genuine debate and argumentation? How much can we blame the politicians versus the voters themselves?
We also dive into some more fundamental normative questions: What is the role of government? Does the American legislative branch require foundational reforms in order to break through partisanship? If we end up entering a contested presidential election on November 4th, why is the Supreme Court unable to be seen as an independent, trustworthy institution that could help provide clarity?
Mr. Gowdy and Tiger might disagree on a number of issues, but they both believe in the power of genuine dialogue and feel passionate about creating healthy political discourse in their lives – whether it’s on Policy Punchline and The Trey Gowdy Podcast, or through writings such as "Unified: How Our Unlikely Friendship Gives Us Hope for a Divided Country." We hope this interview could open up an opportunity for you to reflect on some of these matters and spark some discussions with those around you.
Dan Kammen is the Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at the UC Berkeley. Well-rounded in issues across the entire energy sphere, Prof. Kammen has also served in both the Obama and Trump administrations among other public facing duties, in addition to being a founder of and advisor to several private companies.
In this interview, Prof. Kammen discusses his views on the American energy policy after Covid-19 and the elections season, and stresses that social and environmental justice are playing an ever more important role in the future of clean energy, requiring a leader like Biden to put forth bold plans.
He believes that the U.S. missed a great opportunity to push through a green stimulus package after Covid, which showed the necessity for a clean energy-style stimulus. The opportunity was capitalized upon other countries like South Korea and New Zealand, but the U.S. was stymied by partisan politics when it came down to the details.
He remains optimistic, however, when comparing his own Covid recommendations to some of the proposals on the table moving forward. More specifically, his guidance falls directly in line with Joe Biden's Clean Energy Plan, which calls for $2 trillion in spending and a focus on environmental and social justice. Prof. Kammen fully supported both the size and scope of Biden's historical climate platform – calling it one of the most comprehensive energy plans in American history with the right kind of political coalition. Prof. Kammen defends Biden's fracking stance, a policy point that has drawn criticism from many environmentalists and clean energy gurus, but also presents his own call for government intervention into sectors heavily affiliated with fossil fuel interests, such as the cruise and airline industries.
We also dive into the details of a number of emerging technologies. The carbon capture, utilization and removal technology has been garnering attention in the energy community but still faces an uncertain future. Prof. Kammen describes the future possibilities for this technology, as well as the realistic paths that the carbon capture industry could embark on in the coming decades within the greater agriculture and infrastructure sectors.
Nuclear power is a strangely controversial topic in the U.S. today – an energy-dense source that has had some safety issues in the past but is widely regarded by experts as extremely safe. Prof. Kammen describes the potential democratization of nuclear energy but also some of the significant cost and safety hurdles that potentially stand in the way for near-time success.
Finally, we touched on several topics that are currently buzzing around the energy community, such as microgrids, the progression of individuals and families becoming both consumers and producers of energy, the role of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the potential expansion of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), and finally his optimistic vision for the clean energy future.
Katharina Pistor is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and the director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia University. Her most recent book, "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality," examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collateral law, and trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law. "The Code of Capital" was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider. She is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, comparative law, and legal institutions.
There is no shortage of books explaining issues of inequality in 2020, but they fail to address some of the more fundamental questions about the genesis of capital: How is wealth created in the first place? And, relatedly, why does capital often survive economic cycles and shocks that leave so many others adrift, deprived of the gains they had made earlier? “The Code of Capital” seeks to uncover the relationship between capital and law and the impacts such a relationship has on inequality.
The legal code took tangible and illiquid assets, such as land, and made them into intangible and liquid assets, such as patents, copyrights, and securities. Prof. Pistor explains the essential properties of assets in order to be transformed into capital: priority, durability, universality, and convertibility. How have these modules influenced the code and the nature of capital over the centuries?
Underpinned by the wave of globalization and financialization since the 1980s, derivatives, collaterals, trusts, and many other forms of institutions and instruments emerged, and lawyers could easily pick the laws and legal systems for each specific client in order to protect their capital. The status quo legal structure engenders inequality, and reforms are desperately needed.
Insightfully, Prof. Pistor wrote that “what makes the concepts of capital and capitalism so confusing is that the outward appearance of capital has changed dramatically over time, as have the social relations that underpin it.” It’s much easier for one to understand how the physical and intangible representations of capital have transformed over the centuries, but much harder to realize that there are social relations embedded within capital.
Here, we try to define such social relations, and we go in depth explaining the views on capital and capitalism by two intellectuals – Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi. Marx explained the commodification process of goods and labor, while Polanyi disagreed with Marx about classifying them as commodities.
In his famous book “The Great Transformation,“ Polanyi talked about this important concept of “social embeddedness.” He wrote the book between 1940 and 1944 and believed that the market economy had to be socially embedded. Even Piketty devoted huge paragraphs in his book ”Capital & Ideology” to explain Polanyi’s vision: “In the case of the labor market, this meant that wage setting, worker training, limits on labor mobility, and collectively financed wage supplements were all matters to be settled by social and political negotiation outside the sphere of the market.” How would Prof. Pistor characterize the legal embeddedness of markets? Or the social/financial embeddedness of the legal system?
Lastly, we also touch on digital and cryptocurrency and the political theory of money. In Prof. Pistor’s article “Facebook’s Libra Must Be Stopped,” she wrote that “Facebook has now unveiled a cryptocurrency and payment system that could take down the entire global economy.” Why does she think that one new digital currency could wreak havoc on the international economy? What’s Facebook and Libra’s plan? How can we respond to the Libra threat? Here, we also cite Georgetown Professor Stefan Eich’s fascinating works in political theory of money.
In his 2019 book "Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison," Prof. Ahmet Kuru tackles the question of why Muslim-majority countries have historically exhibited high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socio-economic development in comparison with the rest of the world. He rejects the two mainstream views of essentialism, which says that Islam is the root of this phenomenon, and anti-imperialism, which says that Western colonization is the reason for historical and modern problems in Muslim-majority countries.
In this interview, we discuss a broad range of topics related to Islam and democracy in the Middle East. We focused particularly on Turkey, Dr. Kuru’s home country - discussing what it was like to grow up with a father heavily involved in politics, to Erdogan’s response to the coronavirus, to Dr. Kuru’s hopes and predictions for the future of Turkey’s democracy.
We also discussed in great depth the ulema in Muslim-majority democracies, the class of religious scholars who have great public authority due to their ability to interpret sacred texts of Islam written—the Quran and the hadiths (reports about the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad). Dr. Kuru insightfully explained his view of how the ulema have grown in power and influence over the last few centuries, in many countries exerting significant influence over the political elite. Dr. Kuru sees the ulema-state partnership as one that is mutually beneficial, and we delved into what both parties can gain and lose from this sometimes contentious relationship.
Some questions we tackled were: - Can religion and science coexist? Or is there a need for some other unifying force than Islam? - Why does Prof. Kuru think so many scholars on the topic of Islamism have remained stuck in the camps of the essentialist approach or the post-colonial approach? Have other scholars been accepting of his new approach? - Prof. Kuru argues that the ulema-state alliance, or the alliance between the government and the religious elite, sought to undermine the influence of the independent intellectual and bourgeois classes, which contributed to the economic, cultural, and intellectual stagnation of Muslim-majority countries. Why are the intellectual and bourgeois classes so important to social and economic development?
Full bio: Dr. Ahmet Kuru is the Bruce E. Porteous professor of Political Science at San Diego State University in California. He a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington. He is the winner of the Jervis-Schroeder Book Award from the American Political Science Association with the release of his book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison. He has previously co-edited Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, and authored Secularism and State Policies Towards Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey.
"Seeking Virtue in Finance: Contributing to Society in a Conflicted Industry" is the newest book by JC de Swaan, a lecturer in the economics department at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the Bendheim Center for Finance, and a partner at Cornwall Capital, a New York-based investment fund that the movie "The Big Short" portrayed. At Princeton, Prof. de Swaan teaches classes in Financial Ethics as well as Asian capital markets.
Since the 2008 Financial Crisis, a surge of interest in the use of finance as a tool to address social and economic problems suggests the potential for a generational shift in how the finance industry operates and is perceived. Prof. de Swaan seeks to channel the forces of well-intentioned finance professionals to improve finance from within and help restore its focus on serving society. Drawing from inspiring individuals in the field, Prof. de Swaan proposes a framework for pursuing a viable career in finance while benefiting society and upholding humanistic values. In doing so, he challenges traditional concepts of success in the industry, making his work applicable to everyone in and outside of the world of finance.
In this interview, we discuss the fundamental reasons behind frequent ethical violations in the financial industry – from asymmetry of information between financial professionals and customers to flawed corporate culture that incentivizes unethical competition. We also talk about the various ways how individuals can effect positive changes within financial institutions and transform corporate culture.
We even venture to some "meta" questions about institutional and system design: it seems that in order to fundamentally disincentivize unethical behavior in finance and business, one would need to create a system of better sense-making and choice-making – a system with infinite capacity to solve problems that the current world cannot solve well. We would also need more individual ecosystems where people no longer feel the need to climb up a few corporate ladders in order to be considered as successful; and we need to have a better social architecture where one no longer needs to win at the game of power against some external force in order to not lose at the game of power… Is this a realistic vision? Do we need to fundamentally upend the current financial and regulatory regime to root out unethical behaviors?
David Pakman hosts The David Pakman Show, an internationally syndicated television, radio, and Internet political program. In 2005, at the age of 21, Pakman began hosting a local radio station as a "hobby", and by 2011 the show aired on 100 stations and outlets. He was for some time the youngest nationally syndicated political host.
In this interview, David and Tiger talk about the state of political consciousness in America, how independent media like podcasting shape socio-political discourse, some of the hot issues that both the Left and Right are concerned about, and what could go wrong in November's elections with mail-in voting.
How has the political discourse evolved given all the social turmoil and events in the past few months (Covid-19 and BLM most notably)? By discourse, we mean the general norm that dictates how people interact with each other or the way political and social issues are being talked about in public and private. Amongst all the famous podcasts hosts, for example, some say we’re in horrible chaos (Ben Shapiro); some say we’re in the middle of a revolution (Eric Weinstein); some say we’re finally making strides towards progress and equality (Ezra Klein)... What would be David's assessment? Why does he say that he agrees with Ben Shapiro that our political discourse is in chaos?
The media landscape is becoming increasingly fractured, with new platforms such as podcasts, talk radio, and social media becoming alternative sources of information for those who do not tune in to cable news. Is it a positive thing that a handful of large corporations no longer control the news, or is it a problem that people’s political information is now more personalized, which can contribute to polarization? From Ben Shapiro to Ezra Klein, from Joe Rogan to Sam Harris, to what extent has the rise of podcasting contributed positively (or negatively) to contemporary political culture?
David once said there’s a difference between getting passionate about universal healthcare and about shutting down abortion clinics, so he refuses to draw a false equivalence between the far Left and far Right. How has David arrived at his political views and beliefs? He says there are two things he find helpful when talking to people he disagrees with – one is asking the other side “how do you think I came to my position” and the other is “what evidence, if I present it to you, would bring you to my side?” So, what changes would David like to see in the Republican party and the Right?
Lastly, we discuss how likely that a potential transfer of power will even happen peacefully or smoothly. There could be so many opportunities for hiccups due to mail-in voting prompted by the Covid-19 crisis, such as potential delays due to mail in ballots, Trump preemptively declaring victory, or refusing to accept defeat. A recent study shows that short of a Biden landslide, we will likely end up with a constitutional crisis that lasts until the inauguration, featuring violence in the streets and a severely disrupted administrative transition. Is David optimistic? Why does he think that Biden's chance of truly winning the presidency is no more than 50-50?
This is a fascinating discussion on politics and beyond. We encourage you to visit davidpakman.com for more information about David's programs, and we hope that you may walk away from this discussion feeling the urgency to vote in this elections season.
Arvind Panagariya is Jagdish N. Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University and the former and first Vice Chairman of the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog). Previously, he was the Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank.
In this interview recorded in the spring of 2019, Prof. Panagariya discusses India’s economic reforms and future outlook. As he explains, India and China’s per-capita income really diverged starting in the 1980s as China embarked on more ambitious economic liberation plans ahead of India. The quasi-autarky regime in India scuttled foreign trade and was anti-growth by construction.
Growth was important in India's economic policy agenda because one can do little without it. Redistribution wouldn’t have worked because if the state redistributed, everyone would’ve been below the poverty line. There was nothing to redistribute, and nothing to "trickle down" either. Growth was the priority.
In 1991, the economic reforms that India needed finally happened. Financial and trade liberalization truly happened, and with the over 7% GDP growth rate in recent years, India will likely become the world's 3rd largest economy in 7-8 years, surpassing Germany and Japan.
However, because India’s growth trajectory is quite different from those other countries, its challenges are also different. India's economy is still heavily dominated by the agricultural sector, which only grows around 4% in a good year. The transition from agriculture to industry and services has been really slow for the Indian people, and the manufacturing sector has hardly pulled anyone in.
The social revolution happened before labor revolution in India, so the system is employee friendly but not employer friendly. Not only do companies have very expensive acquisition cost, there is also very high cost for public projects (often land could make up to 3/4 of the overall cost). That’s why Prof. Panagariya proposes coastal special economic zones as a helpful solution, like China's Shenzhen model. By utilizing the ports and giving these regions the flexibility and freedom to write their own labor laws, these zones could potentially further spur economic growth for the country.
This interview with Prof. Panagariya was recorded over two separate sittings. Tiger was so fascinated by India after the interview such that six months later, he went on a three-week long yoga & meditation trip to India with Princeton’s Office of Religious Life. We will soon release some of Tiger's additional interviews conducted in India – with Hindu monks and environmental businesspeople - and we hope that you may also treat this interview with Prof. Panagariya as a gateway to learn more about India.
What does it mean to pursue an intellectual life? What are the preconditions for intellectual pursuit, and is it available to everyone? In this long interview, Zena and Tiger go through some of the most contentious debates in academia and beyond – from whether solitude and suffering are required to live out an intellectual life, to whether liberal arts educations are worthy or effective in educating young people.
Zena writes in her book that “if intellectual life is not left to rest in its splendid uselessness, it will never bear its practical fruit.” How should we define the "uselessness" of an intellectual activity? Zena explains that there are intrinsic values to intellectual pursuit itself, regardless of one indeed becomes a successful academic or uses the knowledge for any practical application or not.
A deeper implication of such belief, Zena argues, is that humanists ought to be more confident with the value of their subjects and their teaching. Instead of trying to persuade humanities majors in college that their humanities knowledge will serve them well in consulting interviews, the humanists should abandon such patronizing attitude and believe in the value of the subject and in the students' ability to genuinely seek out intellectual challenges that aren't for any vocational purposes.
Tiger brings up his contrarian viewpoint that humanities subjects often do not push students as hard as STEM subjects, and Zena talks about how humanities disciplines have failed to raise the evaluation standards and continue challenging students. Especially in today's digital age when one can easily Google excerpts and analysis for readings, fewer students are diving deep into original texts to come up with deep reflections, and the humanities subjects seem to be more threatened than ever.
This is one of the longest and most interesting interviews that Tiger has conducted, and it represents our increasing devotion to deep and long-form dialogues here at Policy Punchline. We hope this kind of slight deviation from "policy" debates could allow our podcast to offer you a more diverse range of dialogues, and we sincerely wish that you may join Zena in seeking out the hidden pleasures of an intellectual life.
Dan Berkovitz is one of the five Commissioners at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This interview touches on a wide range of matters in financial regulation. We first discuss the functions of the CTFC – how it regulates commodities, futures, and swaps which all play an important role in our markets despite sounding like abstract financial terms that are so distant to people’s lives. In 1974 when CFTC was first established, the commodities traded in the U.S. were mainly agricultural products, and the CFTC has since evolved dramatically in the past few decades, playing an ever more important role as hedge funds and institutional investors more frequently use commodities and futures contracts to speculate.
One important duty of the CFTC is to help enforce the Dodd-Frank Act. We walk through the history of the Dodd-Frank Act – how it was a law established after the 2008 financial crisis to address some of its causes – and whether there's much validity in the criticism against the legislation. Another important legacy of the Dodd-Frank Act is the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), an inter-agency regulatory framework established to help identify risks that affect the financial industry. What are the tradeoffs in creating larger and inter-agency regulatory bodies, and why are some of the rationales preventing the U.S. from further merging more regulators into a single body?
Some critics say that the CFTC has built a reputation as an “overly aggressive watchdog” of financial markets in the decade after the financial crisis, and Commissioner Berkovitz addresses this concern. His approach to shaping regulation in financial markets emphasizes “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” and he favors a data-driven approach that only makes changes to regulation when there is empirical evidence that markets are not functioning well. We dive deep in how regulators reason through their actions and receive feedback from the public.
Lastly, we go over issues in cryptocurrency – how CFTC has been actively hoping to bring about regulatory changes regarding the distributed ledger technology, and why cryptocurrency and decentralization technology fall into the regulatory realm of the CFTC. How do technological and financial innovations challenge existing regulatory frameworks? And how do regulators catch up with those new changes? Will regulators always be a step late?
Full bio: Dan Berkovitz was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2018 to be one of the five Commissioners at CFTC. Prior to that, he was a partner at law firm WilmerHale, where he got to work with special counsel Robert Mueller, which we will cover later in the interview. Commissioner Berkovitz also served as a CTFC representative to the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), and as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Department of Energy.
What are the SEC enforcement stories behind major cases of fraud such as the Fyre Festival and Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos, or famous settlements such as with Elon Musk and Wells Fargo? Stephanie Avakian is the Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. She has worked on some of the most complex and intriguing investigations, settlements, and financial regulations in recent years.
In this interview, we discuss how the SEC and the greater financial regulatory community handle complex fraud cases while putting forth policy innovations for the fintech space.
We first touch on the technical aspects for judging when a virtual currency is a security and when it’s not. It has been a poignant point of debate whether the SEC should treat cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as financial securities and thus directly regulate them. It has also become more and more difficult to regulate the cyber space at large, such as when celebrities from DJ Khalid to Floyd Mayweather touted cryptocurrencies on social media.
It’s been a long-time debate in the law community what the point of punishment is. When a financial institution commits fraud or crime, what level of punishment should the regulators seek? Do we want to hurt them, cripple them, or merely warn them? In the case of Wells Fargo’s settlement with the SEC, for example, the $500 million fine announced in Feb. 2020 was more about warning and deterring the company from further fraudulent practices than for the purpose of crippling it.
Bio: Stephanie Avakian was named Co-Director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement in June 2017, after serving as Acting Director since December 2016. She was previously the Division of Enforcement’s Deputy Director, serving from June 2014 to December 2016. Before being named Deputy Director, Ms. Avakian was a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where she served as a vice chair of the firm’s securities practice and focused on representing financial institutions, public companies, boards, and individuals in a broad range of investigations and other matters before the SEC and other agencies. Ms. Avakian previously worked in the Division of Enforcement as a branch chief in the SEC’s New York Regional Office, and later served as counsel to former SEC Commissioner Paul Carey. Ms. Avakian received her bachelors degree from the College of New Jersey and a law degree from Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, both with high honors.
Kruskaia Sierra-Escalante is a Senior Manager of Blended Finance at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is the private arm of the World Bank. The blended finance unit manages more than $1 billion in donor-contributions for climate-smart co-investments in IFC projects.
In this interview, we talk about what blended finance is, and how it generally supports high-impact projects in fragile and conflict-affected states that cannot attract financing on strictly commercial terms. By balancing the risky investments with concessional co-financing from donors or third parties, the IFC can tailor lending packages to address the needs of private sector firms in fragile areas.
What makes these loans more attractive to borrowers include pricing (i.e. below-market interest rates or a longer grace period), volume, and a local currency structure. On the creditor side, IFC’s role as a co-lender also mitigates some of the risk that private investors face. Blended finance, Kruskaia noted, is key to delivering on the IFC’s new strategy, which targets climate initiatives, women-led enterprises, and investment in fragile areas.
Rachel Glennerster is the Chief Economist for the UK Department for International Development (DFID), which is the UK's ministry for international development cooperation. Previously, she was the Executive Director of J-PAL (the Jameel Poverty Action Lab) at MIT.
This March, Prof. Glennerster gave the closing keynote remarks at the 2020 annual conference at Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, where she touched on challenges of working in fragile states and the linkages between the macro- and micro-levels. The economic policy tools used in advanced economies either do not exist or are ineffective in poor, conflict-afflicted areas. Shifts in macro-level policies can have devastating effects at the household level, leading to hyperinflation, parallel exchange rates, or major debt crises.
In this interview, we discuss some of the innovative policy and research tools in fragile states, especially RCT (randomized controlled trials). And we touch on various debates on foreign aid, non-profits, and what it’s like to work in Africa.
Some of our questions include: - RCT is a new way of studying impacts of social programs or medicines through randomizing individuals into control groups so that we can assess the actual causality. What is the difference between RCT specifically and other methods that help us conduct careful policy impact evaluations? Is there still a tension between those who accept and not accept RCTs? What are some of the reasonable arguments against the further adoption of RCTs?
What are some of the main advantages and disadvantages to the system of "community-driven development?" Is it better to hand control over development to locals even if this may not be the best way to motivate more systemic change that may have to come from outside communities? Or is this question posing a “straw man” to a non-existent dilemma?
What is it like to advise the distribution of the U.K’s international aid? What is the philosophy behind how nations should give and receive aid? Should it be viewed as a moral obligation, or something that is in the national security or economic interests of the U.K., or both?
Scott Morris is a Senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he directs the US Development Policy Program and co-directs the Sustainable Development Finance Program. He previously served as deputy assistant secretary for development finance and debt at the Treasury Department under the Obama Administration. In that capacity, he led US engagement with the multilateral development banks, as well as US participation in the Paris Club of official creditors.
In this interview, Mr. Morris explains how development finance institutions like the World Bank interact with the U.S. Congress and adapt to the ever more complex situations in international economics.
As the World Bank’s largest shareholder, the U.S. maintains a unique influence in shaping its agenda, and Congress has an important role both in funding U.S. contributions to the World Bank and in overseeing U.S. participation in the institution. Has the U.S. involvement been beneficial to the growth and credibility of the organization? Why not let it become more independent from U.S. influence?
What role will international financial institutions play in the future of development economics? Will their roles be further diminished or become more dominant as more focus is being put on “localization” and “decentralization?”
We also touch on his March presentation at Julis-Rabinowitz Center annual conference, where he started with a look at debt in low-income countries. 44% percent of low income countries are now either at high risk of debt distress or in debt distress, up from 21% just five years ago. During this time, China has emerged as the dominant creditor to the riskiest low-income countries, while the amount of low-income country debt held by development finance institutions and Paris Club lenders has decreased dramatically.
Matt Arnold is the Global Head of ESG at J.P. Morgan Chase and has been a pivotal figurehead in integrating sustainable energy practices into large corporations. One important topic in light of the Covid-19 crisis and the recent Black Lives Matter protests is ESG – environmental, social, and corporate governance. ESG has been a discussion topic in the corporate world for a long time, but the topic has suddenly risen to an ever more important status in the past few months. On the environmental side, there is the call for corporations to move away from fossil fuel and be carbon neutral; on the social side, you have the call for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which is about promoting a more diverse workforce.
Two additional noteworthy aspects related to ESG in light of the recent social turmoil are: one, the demand for more inclusive stakeholding calls to an end to the former principle of “shareholder value maximization.” And two, in terms of economic policy, the “misvaluing” of essential workers during Covid-19 exposes the naïveté of free-marketeer Capitalism underpinned by UChicago-styled economists from the 1980s.
When you think of J.P. Morgan Chase, the first word that comes to mind is likely not “ESG” or “sustainable,” yet one man inside of the JPM headquarter is trying to change that: Matt Arnold. A longtime insider of the environmentalist movement, Mr. Arnold works to help pivot the powerful firm's strategy towards a more environmentally friendly and socially conscientious one.
In this interview, Mr. Arnold takes Tiger and Owen to explore the new consumer drive to hold companies “accountable” to higher environmental standards by being more conscientious with their purchasing dollars. Meanwhile, a broader effort is driving companies to be more transparent about their operations and investments and devote more financial resources to ESG investing. Beyond ESG, Mr. Arnold speaks about the rise of green energy’s affordability, the “divest from fossil fuels” movement, and the international energy scene.
This interview with Mr. Arnold recorded in March and was the last in-person interview we did on campus. Mr. Arnold has so many interesting stories to tell, and I hope you’ll enjoy this interview that can be an introduction to ESG, energy, geopolitics and much more that you may continue to learn more about in future podcasts as part of our energy segment.
Brad Setser is the Steven A. Tanenbaum Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served as the deputy assistant secretary for international economic analysis in the U.S. Treasury from 2011 to 2015.
In this interview, Dr. Setser discusses how tax avoidance schemes by corporations could distort conventional understanding of cross-national capital flows, and how such capital flows through shell companies are driving international balance of payments. He argues we should pay more attention to external debt, particularly on exports and debt in foreign currency, rather than solely focusing on the government debt alone. He highlights the puzzling debt histories of two countries in particular: Japan, which should be in trouble but is not; and Argentina, which gets into trouble no matter what.
We also touch on the important topics of progressive tax policies and how it’s entirely realistic to close down international tax loopholes. It’s noteworthy that Dr. Setser appears in the first chapter of Adam Tooze’s book of “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World” by Adam Tooze, whom we interviewed last spring. It’s very unfortunate that this is a relatively short interview, but we hope it can be an introduction to a vast and important field of issues that you may continue to learn about afterwards.
This interview was recorded in March at the 2020 annual conference of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, and the theme was “Development Finance in Fragile States.” You may read more about Dr. Setser’s conference presentation on our webpage, and you can subscribe to his blog and newsletter “Follow the Money” on the webpage of Council on Foreign Relations.
Quantum computing is the latest “buzz-word” in the tech industry – with over $450 million of private funding investments made between 2017 and 2018 – but what are quantum computers and how will they spark the quantum revolution? Do they truly live up to the “hype” or are the challenges facing them not resolvable in the near future?
In this episode, Tiger and aspiring physicist Harsh Babla interview Prof. Steven Girvin to learn about his cutting-edge research in the field, his perspective on Google’s recent quantum supremacy claim, venture capital investments in the field, national security concerns raised by quantum computers, the philosophical implications behind quantum computing, and more. This might not be your one-stop shop for understanding quantum physics, but it should provide you with the appropriate technical and theoretical background to understand many of the current debates.
Steven Girvin is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University. He’s a theoretical physicist known for his founding role in developing Circuit QED – an architecture now used by Google, IBM, Rigetti, and many other companies to build quantum computers. Prof. Girvin is a strong advocate for the “Second Quantum Revolution.” He explains to us that the first quantum revolution, in the early 1900s, gave us a unique understanding of the world, explaining the strange behavior of atoms and molecules. This kicked off a spree of innovation, revolutionizing information processing with the transistor, atomic clock, and laser.
The past couple of decades have established a new technological era. While first suggested in the early 1980s, quantum computers are finally being physically realized and made commercially available. These devices use the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that would otherwise take classical computers exponentially longer to work out. As such, they’ve emerged as a natural paradigm to accelerate breakthroughs in drug development to save lives, innovative materials for renewable energy generation, financial strategies to live comfortably in retirement, cryptography techniques to ensure provably secure communication, and machine learning methods to supercharge hardware.
While quantum computers might seem like the panacea for many society’s challenges, most quantum computers today aren’t always able to return correct answers for even the most modest calculations. Prof. Girvin explains that this is because current quantum systems are plagued by several pervasive physical constraints: a significant susceptibility to environmental errors, an inability to control multiple qubits simultaneously, a lack of robust error correction schemes, to mention a few. These constraints gradually scramble the information stored in the quantum bits (qubits), limiting the qubits’ lifetimes to only a few microseconds.
Prof. Girvin is very hopeful for the industry to overcome these hurdles, but he’s worried that there’s currently a tremendous shortage of engineers and experts in the field. He believes the education system is overdue for important changes, to get young minds excited about working on quantum computing, without necessarily pursuing a Ph.D. in Physics.
The perhaps slightly technical conversation with Prof. Girvin covers a wide range of topics, from quantum mechanics to education and investing in technologies with far-reaching international consequences. But our curiosity certainly does not stop there, and we end the interview with a short but deep discussion on philosophy. Mathematician Alan Turing was famous for publishing philosophy journals and debating with Wittgenstein. It seems that there’s much overlap between the scientifically and metaphysically unanswerable questions, so we ask Prof. Girvin how science has helped him reason through philosophical questions.
Robert Frank is the H. J. Louis Professor of Management and Economics at Cornell University. His newest book “Under the Influence, Putting Peer Pressure to Work” discusses how social environments profoundly shape our behaviors and how we can unlock the power of social influence – through fascinating ideas from behavioral contagion to consumption taxation.
In this interview, Prof. Frank explains the core ideas of his book in detail: how individuals are constantly “under the influence” of others’ behaviors and thus do not always make the most rational decisions; how Adam Smith’s concept of “Invisible Hand” has been greatly misconstrued and overblown by free marketers; why we have a powerful and legitimate public policy interest in encouraging socially beneficial memes and discouraging socially harmful ones…
We also discuss Prof. Frank’s progressive consumption tax proposal. It may sound surprising to many, but imposing higher tax rates for the rich might not hurt their purchase power because the prices for the scarce goods they pursue will come down correspondingly. However, by taxing lavish spending behaviors, we can discourage competitive biddings that do not improve society’s overall welfare. On the other hand, a progressive consumption tax would encourage saving and investment in ways that income taxes cannot, and a carbon tax will be effective in disincentivizing environmentally unfriendly activities.
The deeper part of the conversation is towards the end, when Prof. Frank and Tiger talk about whether the field of economics needs a somewhat complete reworking – not to simply include more behavioral economists’ opinions, but even rethink the ways we teach about supply & demand and uproot fundamental theorems. It matters because economics is not an objective science, and it is built upon a set of assumptions that often do not hold true in reality when irrational agents come together. We talk about the “mis-valuing” of essential workers during Covid-19 to the glaring naïveté of free-marketeer Capitalism underpinned by UChicago-styled economists from the 80s…
Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos. For more than a decade, his "Economic View" column appeared monthly in The New York Times. His books have been translated into 23 languages, including ”Choosing the Right Pond,“ ”Passions Within Reason,“ ”Microeconomics and Behavior,“ ”Principles of Economics“ (with Ben Bernanke), ”Luxury Fever,“ ”What Price the Moral High Ground?,“ ”Falling Behind,“ ”The Economic Naturalist,“ ”The Darwin Economy,“ and ”Success and Luck.“ “The Winner-Take-All Society,” co-authored with Philip Cook, received a Critic's Choice Award, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and was included in Business Week's list of the ten best books of 1995. Frank is a co-recipient of the 2004 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
IBM Chief Economist Martin Fleming discusses Covid-19’s immediate impacts on labor markets and the long-term trends for the future of work – from automation to artificial intelligence. Given how millions of people have to work from home today, there have been countless research reports springing up talking about “the end of work as we know it.” Some of us at Policy Punchline have always been skeptical about those futuristic claims that portray an utopian image filled with tech innovations but do not seek to present any concrete path on how to get there. If you have the same skepticism, hopefully some of that can be answered by Dr. Fleming.
IBM has long been known for spearheading corporate research and offering forefront business solutions in technology and beyond. Dr. Fleming tells us about the creation of IBM’s Watson, its unique partnership with MIT to jointly research artificial intelligence, as well as other recent innovations in cognitive systems and machine learning meant to aid human decision-making. We talk about IBM’s long history in funding and leading in fundamental science and tech research, and how Dr. Fleming fits in this grand picture as a PhD economist.
Given the rising importance of artificial intelligence and data science, the world of major tech corporations has seen the “rise of data scientists.” Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, Shantanu Narayen at Adobe — and just recently from April 2020 onwards, Arvind Krishna at IBM… These are four Indian-born executives who were trained as engineers and rose through the ranks in technical positions. Their backgrounds are very much different from the stereotypical corporate America managers’ background – in sales and general management after receiving MBA degrees – such as Ginni Rometty, IBM’s previous CEO for the last eight years. Dr. Fleming talks about such fundamental sea change across companies, as well as how young students can take advantage of data science education as early as high school.
The disruptions to labor markets by Covid-19 have been dramatic, but most major changes don’t happen overnight. Dr. Fleming cautions us to separate long-term trends in AI from recent changes ushered in by the fear for viruses. We dig deeper into the economic impacts of automation – how its negative impacts on low-income workers might not be necessarily even across the world. Developing countries, in particular, are the most susceptible to losing areas of the work that have been popular in the past, like call centers. On the other hand, middle-tier workers are the most affected in the U.S., while high and low income workers have seen the most robust growth in job opportunities.
Dr. Fleming has paid close attention to how digital currencies are taking form in many countries around the world – Singapore, China, Canada, and notably Facebook’s Libra, though many of these moves have not been successful. The notion that the Federal Reserve could release their own digital currency is becoming increasingly plausible. Digital currencies, however, are different from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. One practical reason for this transformation to digital currency is how the act of making payments has become inefficient, compared to the immediacy of other tasks, like sending emails or ordering a product. This is a growing danger that if such inefficiencies persist, the international dominance of the dollar could be reduced. However, with such a technological push, Dr. Fleming emphasizes the potential risks and how it could affect financial institutions that derive their income from controlling payment processes.
Made popular by Nobel Laureate and economist Paul Romer, charter city is a new vision for building prosperous cities that can unlock economic potentials and solve common issues in urbanization and poverty for their citizens and countries they are part of. In this episode, Dr. Mark Lutter, Founder of the Charter Cities Institute, discusses what charter cities are, why they are unique compared to special economic zones (SZE), how they can promote progress and growth within a country by reducing regulatory barriers, and how successful examples like Shenzhen and Dubai embody both their advantages and drawbacks.
Due to rapid increases of urban population, many governments in the developing world have shown to be ill-equipped to provide the necessary infrastructure to support the cities. Dr. Lutter has long called into question the conventional and popular idea that urbanization leads to increased productivity and economic growth, and he believes that charter cities could be a bold solution to poorly managed urbanization and global poverty. Our conversation goes over how charter cities can address the pent-up demand for urbanization in developing countries while creating opportunities for all the stakeholders involved, from locals to the governments of host countries. In doing so, we also analyze how new projects arise from private partnerships and how they can integrate with the goals of their host countries and communities.
While charter cities can address the needs of developing countries, they are also worth exploring in mature economies. Allowing people to build new cities in the US or Europe can provide an alternative to existing cities while creating an incentive for regulatory arbitrage, which can trickle down to the rest of the country. The model of charter city offers a blank slate in commercial law, can be developed on greenfield sites (untouched land with no current residents), and can allow for deep governance reforms to be enacted with minimal interference or resistance because of the lack of existing interest groups. Charter cities may be the perfect place to experiment new governance structures proposed by “techno-utopians” from Silicon Valley to around the world.
Dr. Lutter also addresses criticisms for charter cities, such as the possible need for strong central governments during the establishment of charter cities and their incentives to reap the benefits and interfere with organic growth. We also go over a famous charter city blunder in Honduras and the concerns that it would entrench the local elite while limiting freedom of locals. In this context, we also discuss how charter cities can be built so local can actually share the fruits of the progress enabled by the city, as well as how political ideologies intertwine with charter cities and their economic success.
Dr. Mark Lutter is the Founder and Executive Director of the Charter Cities Institute, as well as the host of the Charter Cities Podcast. He is on the Board of Directors of Explorer Academy, a Zambian education platform. He is an advisor to and has a financial interest in the Victoria Harbor Group, a firm that is building a new Hong Kong. He has a PhD in economics from George Mason University where his research focused on charter cities. Prior to launching the Institute, he was Lead Economist for NeWAY Capital, an asset management firm which made early stage investments in charter cities. He has been published in several newspapers and magazines including the Chicago Tribune, City Journal, CityAM, and Cato Unbound.
Currently, Dr. Mark Lutter is involved with several charter city projects. In this episode we discuss his recent work in Zambia, Nigeria, and with the Hong Kong-based Victoria Harbor Group. We also go over how the Charter Cities Institute was formed and what the next steps are for this nonprofit.
Nicholas Lemann’s recent book, “Transaction Man,” is an account of the United States economy in the 20th and 21st century, how it has transformed over time, and the impacts of such transformation on all of us. Specifically, Prof. Lemann examines three remarkable economic and social thinkers who he calls, “Institution/Organization Man,” “Transaction Man,” and “Network Man,” who epitomized and helped create the three main eras of American economy.
In this interview, Prof. Lemann explains these three eras in detail, why none of these models has successfully brought sustainable prosperity to the American people, and how his vision of pluralism might provide a synthesis and possible solutions to today’s urgent social problems.
“Institution Man” = Adolf Berle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s chief theorist of the economy, who imagined a society dominated by large corporations, which a newly powerful federal government had forced to become benign and stable institutions, contributing to the public good by offering stable employment and generous pensions.
“Transaction Man” = Michael Jenson. By the 1970s, the corporations’ large stockholders grew restive under this regime, and their chief theoretician, Harvard Business School’s Michael Jensen, insisted that firms should maximize shareholder value, whatever the consequences may be. This narrative took place very much under the backdrop of “financialization” and heavy deregulations starting in the 1970s, which allowed capital providers and fund managers to suddenly play the role of textbook capitalist.
“Network Man” = Reid Hoffman. Today, Silicon Valley titans like LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman hope “networks” can reknit our social fabric and efficient startups like Uber and Airbnb can replace much of the existing infrastructure.
Bio: Professor Nicholas Lemann is a veteran American journalist and author of six books, including his latest "Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream." He is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School. Previously, he has worked at The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, and a variety of other newspaper and magazine companies, writing about politics, education, business, social policy, and other topics.
Alan Blinder was the Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System under President Bill Clinton. In this episode, we seek to answer questions on the Fed’s unprecedented actions in light of the COVID-19 crisis and their long-term implications, from whether the injection of liquidity is propping up the financial markets in unhealthy ways, to whether the lack of coordination between fiscal and monetary policies could potentially exacerbate inequality like after the 2008 financial crisis…
We say that the Fed’s actions have been unprecedented because it not only pledged to buy an unlimited quantity of government debt, but also decided to support even some of the riskiest corporate bonds; it lowered the target rate to 0-0.25 percent and announced in the June FOMC meeting that it’s not even “thinking about thinking about raising rates…” Is the Fed well-equipped to mitigate the economic effects of a pandemic? In the process, how can we manage the public expectation so that the Fed is not being given “mission impossibles?”
The Fed’s “Main Street” lending to small/medium sized businesses has somewhat pushed the Fed to uncharted territory. While Prof. Blinder believes that the Fed is doing a better job of injecting money into Main Street than it did in 2008, he acknowledges that the Fed is primarily equipped to support large corporations, and as such may play a role in exacerbating inequality. He also argues that the financial system has grown too large, to the point where “the tail is wagging the dog.”
An expert on the 2008 financial crisis, Prof. Blinder walks us through a series of critical comparisons. Today’s crisis is not one created by housing bubbles or elaborate financial instruments, so there generally seems to be less resentment among everyday Americans towards financial elites. But by stepping into junk bond territory, the Fed has effectively backstopped some of the biggest names in the hedge fund and private equity industry and some of the most aggressive speculators. Will there be a strong reaction against financial elites similar to the one we saw in 2008-09 with the Occupy Wall Street movement?
A lot of studies have been done on how the 2008 financial crisis bailout exacerbated inequality in the U.S. One reason often given by economists and journalists is that the monetary policy response was adequate, but the fiscal stimulus didn’t follow suit. How do we ensure that the same doesn’t happen again? How can the Fed and the Treasury be smarter and attach more conditions to the loans and grants they make to large corporations?
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Prof. Blinder dismissed concerns over the inflationary impact of the Fed’s radical monetary policies as “Scarlett O’Hara questions” about the long-term effects of the Fed’s monetary policy – specifically on the deficit and on inflation. He argues that these potential issues are not particularly pressing or worrisome and that these are questions to be dealt with after the coronavirus crisis is averted: “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” In this episode, we probe deeper into the reasoning behind this idea, and whether the fear of the deficit or inflation might undermine the economic recovery in the short and long run.
Full bio: Alan Blinder is the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He previously served as the Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System under Bill Clinton, as well as on Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. Blinder is one of the leading voices in the discourse surrounding fiscal and monetary policy, and has written many best-selling books, including the latest “Advice and Dissent: Why America Suffers When Economics and Politics Collide.”
What is gerrymandering and how does it affect people’s electoral rights? How can we use technology and data to empower communities to get the representation they deserve? More importantly, why is 2020 important besides the presidential elections, and how can it shape American politics for at least another decade? In this interview with Princeton professor Sam Wang, we explore what gerrymandering means for local communities and voters, why it has become such a big issue in the last decade, and what citizens can do about it. We also discuss how COVID-19 impacted the 2020 electoral and redistricting processes in the United States, as well as what it means for the current election and gerrymandering cycles.
Sam Wang is a unique figure: a neuroscientist by trade, he started analyzing politics in the early 2000s, when he was among the first to aggregate US presidential polls and use statistical methods to analyze them. This work led to the establishment of the Princeton Election Consortium, a blog opened with the mission to provide informed analysis of US national elections by members of the Princeton academic community. In 2012, he recognized new, systematic distortions in representation in the U.S. House. Understanding the causes of these distortions launched his interest in voting rights and led to the creation of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project conducts nonpartisan analysis to understand and eliminate partisan gerrymandering at a state-by-state level.
In its landmark 2019 decision on partisan gerrymandering, the Supreme Court acknowledged the Princeton Gerrymandering Project’s analysis. While approving of the Project’s mathematical analysis, the court decided that there was no legal standard for it to act with regard to gerrymandering, so it barred challenges on a federal level. This decision breathed new air in Prof. Wang’s work with the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, encouraging them to adopt a federalist, state-by-state approach to pursue reforms against partisan gerrymandering, a topic that’s discussed at length in the episode.
The episode is co-hosted by Tiger and Theodor Marcu, a 2020 Princeton graduate who worked closely with Prof. Wang and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. He and four other undergraduates founded Representable.org in 2019 to fight gerrymandering across the US with the help of a novel approach: collecting crowdsourced data about communities. Representable allows nonprofits and community members to draw their communities on a map and submit them to an online database that can then be referenced by journalists, nonprofits, redistricting committees, and lawyers in each state. This data can be used to show how proposed or existing district lines may break communities apart, which is a marker of partisan gerrymandering. In the second half of the episode Tiger and Theodor discuss the role that Representable will play in the 2020 redistricting cycle, how crowdsourced data can be used to fight gerrymandering, as well as the role of online platforms in a democracy.
“Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party” is the latest book of Princeton politics professor and historian Julian Zelizer. The book explores how the 50th House Speaker Newt Gingrich started an era where Republicans practiced a ruthless style of partisanship that ignored the conventional norms of Washington and continually tested how far politicians could go in bending government institutions to suit their partisan purposes.
In this interview, Prof. Zelizer, Tiger, and G. Terrell Seabrooks discuss some of its most salient themes and explore the many thrilling stories in this book: such as Gingrich’s takedown of Democrat House Speaker Jim Wright – a pivotal moment when Gingrich “swept the old order aside;” or, in 1983, Gingrich crafted the message of his career – branding the Democratic Party as the symbol of Washington’s corruption in the post-Watergate era…
Gingrich redefined partisanship by expanding the boundaries of what was permissible in the arena of congressional warfare, and he legitimated ruthless and destructive practices that had once been relegated to the margins. Steven Bannon said that when Republicans went for head wounds, Democrats were having pillow fights. Why didn’t the Democrats follow the Republicans’ strategy? Was it because of integrity or was it because of a fundamental lack of political will? We reflect on the history of partisanship and Congressional warfare tactics and hope to provide clarity on the near-term development of American politics.
We also discuss Gingrich’s relationship with the media and President Trump. A historian by training and having received his PhD from Tulane, Gingrich understood the importance of narratives and good storytelling. We explore how Gingrich helped fuel the rise of TV politics, where the line between entertainment and serious policy discourse became increasingly blurred.
As one of Trump’s most trusted advisors, Gingrich was considered for being Trump’s running mate in 2016. Both men are like “pirates,” as Gingrich himself explained: “[Trump] is outside the normal system, he gets things done, he’s bold, he’s actually like a figure out of a movie. In a lot of ways, my entire career has been a little bit like a pirate. I’ve taken on the establishment of both parties, [I’m] very prepared to fight in the media.” However, Trump eventually chose Pence over Gingrich as his running mate in 2016 because he didn’t want a “two-pirate” ticket. Pence was a much safer, composed vice presidential candidate who indeed helped Trump get elected – an outcome that Gingrich had always hoped for.
From Gingrich and the “establishment,” to President Trump and modern legislative floor tactics, this interview delves into the strategy that has helped shape the Republican agenda for the last three decades. Is Gingrich responsible for the partisan divide we see today? How can democrats respond to the increased politicization of lawmaking in Washington? Is this polarization a permanent element of our political system? All of these questions, and more, are answered in this episode. “Burning Down the House” will be available for purchase beginning on July 7, 2020. We also encourage you to listen to Prof. Zelizer’s podcast, Politics and Polls, co-hosted by Princeton professor Sam Wang.
Julian Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs, Princeton School of Public & International Affairs. He has been one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history and is now the author and editor of more than 20 books on American political history. Professor Zelizer is also the co-host of the popular podcast Politics and Polls and a frequent CNN Contributor.
In late June 2020, Covid-19 claimed one of the largest giants in the energy industry: Chesapeake Energy. Chesapeake is a leader in the fracking industry that had been on the rocks for a few years now. In this episode, we detail the rapid rise of the fracking industry with Russell Gold, WSJ senior energy reporter in Texas.
Gold’s first book, "The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World," documents the invention of hydraulic fracturing in 1974, how it is both a threat and a godsend for the environment, and how it led the revival of manufacturing in the United States.
We also discuss Gold’s second book, "Superpower: One Man's Quest to Transform American Energy," in which he discusses renewable energies and focuses on the legendary figure Michael Skelly, who used his Harvard Business School contacts to create impressive companies. The midwest can produce the most amount of renewable energies because of the cheap land and suitable climate, so Skelly’s vision was to build low-cost clean energy options between places such as Oklahoma and non-midwest states. The already crazily complicated deal was even further complicated by the strong political opposition at the time, from which we discuss the today’s landscape from The Green New Deal to a realistic vision for sustainable energy use.
Russell Gold is an award-winning investigative journalist at The Wall Street Journal, responsible for covering all facets of global energy with a particular focus on the U.S. energy boom, power generation and the global energy transition. He’s been covering energy for the journal since 2002 and his reporting has taken him to five continents and above the Arctic Circle two times. In 2010, he was part of the Wall Street Journal team that covered the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. The Journal’s work was awarded the Gerald Loeb Award for best business story of the year and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. In 2020, he will inaugurate a new beat the Journal: Climate change and business. Outside of his work at the Wall Street Journal he’s written two books. His first book, The Boom, was longlisted for the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the year prize in 2014. Superpower, his second book, was published in June 2019.
Museums and galleries have been closed since March under lockdown rules, and there are growing fears among curators that many museums may never open again due to financial difficulties. James Steward is the Director of Princeton University Art Museum, where he leads a staff of 110 with an operating budget of $20 million and collections of over 110,000 works of art that span the globe and encompass 5,000 years of world history. In this interview, we discuss the role of art museums in helping make us better citizens and how the responsibilities of large art institutions may even expand in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic.
An avid museum visitor himself, Tiger also asks Director Steward how the art viewing experience has changed and will continue to evolve in light of Covid-19: - Can the art viewing experience possibly be even better after we take away the shared physical space and give people a chance to reflect in a solitary fashion? - Art museums have always said to perform effects of anti-alienation and symbolize the unification of a social sphere rendered by fragmentation by class division and other societal issues. One often argues that in a place like an art museum, we may finally have a model of utopia as people come together across those obstacles and collectively share an experience. Is this something that art museums can actually achieve, especially after Covid? - Museums often contain people with the same class, race, educational level… What major takeaways could the art museum industry derive from this Covid crisis and the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter movement that might motivate it to change its course, so that museums can in fact achieve such utopian vision – helping restitch our social fabric and transcend divisions?
How can we use evidence, not predetermined cultural scripts based on past pandemics, to evaluate the current Covid-19 crisis? This is the question Dr. Merle Eisenberg raised in his recent Washington Post op-ed. When we talk about coronavirus, we often hear anecdotes from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Why do we focus so strongly on this particular historical example, and what do we miss out on when we ignore earlier histories, such as the Justinianic Plague (550-750 CE), which we will explore in detail in this episode.
What are the differences between the way Covid is being handled compared to past pandemics? From the public’s social distancing measures to the rich people’s fleeing from crowded cities, are there any broad trends and patterns of behaviors during pandemics that consistently lasted throughout history? Are pandemics generally inequality-reducing (like how the Black Death ended Feudalism), or inequality-exacerbating (like today’s billionaires getting richer from Covid)?
In this long discussion on the history of pandemics, Dr. Eisenberg and Tiger also explore topics on state capacity and resilience. For instance, the Ottoman Empire tested by a series of local droughts, shortages and famines during the 1560s–1580s, but the pre-industrial society was able to “contain the damage by shifting tax burdens from the affected areas, ordering fixed price sales of grain from other provinces, and in some cases arranging direct shipments from local or imperial granaries.” It provides an illustration to how societies throughout history develop anti-fragile political structures.
Merle Eisenberg is a late antique, medieval, and environmental historian who investigates how people responded to end of the Roman Empire to shape their communities and create new medieval states. His research projects range from analyzing how rulers issued laws to build frameworks for their states to case studies of how climate change has affected pre-modern localities.
He co-hosts the podcast “Infectious Historians” with Lee Mordechai. The podcast aims to provide a flavor of past disease outbreaks while also discussing some pressing present questions.
Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), Dr. Eisenberg is working on a project entitled “The Making of a Pandemic: Plague, Environment, and the End of Antiquity.” It examines the outbreak of the first great socio-ecological disaster in recorded human history: the first bubonic plague pandemic, commonly known as the Justinianic Plague (c. 541-750 CE).
Multiple tech companies (Amazon, IBM) have—in a rather surprising turn of events—pledged to stop providing facial recognition technology to police departments in light of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. In this episode, Dr. Annette Zimmerman of Princeton University gives context to the wider public debate on algorithmic justice and the biases of artificial intelligence technology that is rapidly unfolding right now.
Dr. Zimmermann, Arjun, and Tiger touch on some of the most long-standing questions in the field of AI research and moral philosophy: - What is algorithmic bias? Is all bias bad? How do we understand algorithmic bias from a moral and philosophical perspective, as well as from a technical perspective? - Where do we see algorithms exacerbating structural injustices in society, and in what precise ways are algorithms doing so? - What are some of the questions unworthy of asking or are merely “AI alarmism” that is not helpful to the discourse? - AI fairness is an active research area. Is reducing bias in the algorithm a fundamental solution, or more of a patch to a deeper problem? If we remove certain features and modify the data and/or algorithm, are we playing God to some extent? In other words, what gives AI researchers the right (let alone the responsibility) to change aspects of the dataset and algorithm? - Is it possible to assign responsibility for the decisions of an AI system to the creators of the system, since they have enough of a degree of control (e.g. the features, the predicted variable)? Is the creator of an AI system is culpable for the decisions made by that AI? - What are the dangers of private companies providing AI services to public institutions? How can we combine top-down and bottom-up approaches to reduce the prevalence of biased algorithms making societal decisions (e.g. SF banning facial recognition)? Do we need a redesign or revamp of social and democratic institutions to deal with the idea of algorithmic decision making? What do you see as the fundamental societal changes we need to make?
Dr. Zimmermann is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, affiliated with the University Center for Human Values (UCHV) as well as with the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). Currently, she is focusing on the ways in which disproportionate distributions of risk and uncertainty associated with the use of emerging technologies like algorithmic decision-making and machine learning — such as algorithmic bias and opacity — impact democratic values like equality and justice. She has a particular interest in algorithmic decision-making in criminal justice and policing.
Jan Vogler from the University of Virginia analyzes the European Union as a polycentric governance system. He is particularly interested in the question of whether this institution with multiple layers of decision-making and a mix of shared and individual responsibilities of governments at different levels can effectively respond to the many challenges it faces today, from Brexit to the international refugee crisis.
Another topic discussed in the podcast is which factors determine citizens’ views of the EU’s central administrative institutions. Since the average EU citizen does not have a lot of exposure to the EU bureaucracy, Dr. Vogler suggests that their perceptions of how the EU’s bureaucracy performs are shaped by domestic experiences with comparable institutions, i.e. domestic local and central bureaucracies. To what extent does this phenomenon explain Euroscepticism and inform us about possible reforms that the EU may need?
We also discuss multiple other topics, including the legacies of imperialism and colonialism with respect to the structure and functioning of public administration and differences between democracy in Europe and the United States. Another interesting aspect of Dr. Vogler's research that was not covered in the podcast is about the impact of the Black Death on democracy in Central Europe, which potentially answers some questions about the long-term impact of Covid-19 on politics and political institutions.
Dr. Jan Vogler is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Political Economy of Good Government in the Woodrow Wilson Dept of Politics at the University of Virginia. Born and raised in Germany, he served in the German Federal Defense Forces and received his bachelor’s degree from the Free University of Berlin. He went on to earn a master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD from Duke University in Political Science with a specialization in Political Economy and Political Methodology.
Stadiums closed; mass sporting events canceled... tough days for the sports industry, which is projected to lose $61.1 billion in revenue in 2020 due to Covid-19, according to one new research study. The NFL is preparing for its season this Fall – how is the league navigating decision making and planning during this time?
Tiger and Arjun invited Mr. Iwao Fusillo back on the show, who is Senior Vice President for Data Analytics and Insights at the NFL. There is so much that data can tell us about this crisis and the appropriate responses the sports industry should take, and few people are as well positioned and informed as Mr. Fusillo to answer some of our burning questions: What are the fans saying about returning to normal? Do they want to start watching games live again, or is there concern about live events? What is the role that data-driven approaches play in a crisis situation like the current pandemic? How is the NFL responding in a data-driven way to Covid? How difficult is it to plan scenarios and conduct extensive stress testing when the current situation is so uncertain, and data and trends seem to change weekly?
You will hear some very surprising data from this interview: for instance, while there is a long-term secular trend in declining households using TV, the NFL continues to increase viewership across all demographic segments including female, Hispanic, and even Gen Z. In fact, for the virtual NFL Draft during Covid, the NFL had the largest year-over-year increase ever in Gen Z viewership at 71%, with female and Hispanic also showing deep double digit increases.
Mr. Fusillo also talks about leadership and decision making in crisis moments. He says that over the course of a 30-40 year career, one would typically need to lead through 3 global crises, and for him, it was 9/11 in 2001, the financial crisis in 2008, and now the 2020 Covid pandemic. At the NFL, in a matter of days after the pandemic hit, Mr. Fusillo's team stood up a credit risk assessment capability used across thousands of league and team sponsors, product and media partners, significantly enhancing the League's risk tolerance and response in this crisis.
And Mr. Fusillo's punchline for us this time? The business world transformed over the past couple of decades where Chief Financial Officers are now just as likely to be tapped for CEO and public company board positions as their COO and CMO counterparts. Mr. Fusillo's prediction is that in the coming 10-20 years, the business world will transform again, where Chief Data Officers will soon become the most likely to be tapped for CEO and board positions. And ironically, COVID-19 somewhat accelerated us on this very positive path for the rise of technologists and data scientists in our business world.
On April 25th, the West Texas Intermediate price for oil futures delivered in May collapsed to -37 to -40 dollars a barrel at one point. It has never happened that oil prices fell into negative territory. While the oil crisis has seemingly stabilized, tons of questions remain. Prof. Jason Bordoff, the founding Director of Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, joins Tiger and Owen for a discussion on the state of oil markets, the future political struggles between oil-producing nations, whether we're at all near the "endgame" stage for fossil fuel, and the broader energy transition in a post-Covid world.
To give a more elaborate explanation of the oil price crash – The first half of 2020 has seen the traditional energy markets in an unprecedented phase of unrest. As COVID-19 brought global movement to a halt and as oil producing countries scrambled to balance the market through cuts of their own, cracks in OPEC+ –– the most powerful oil cartel today –– were clearly visible. The political aftermath of the OPEC+ fallout saw countries increase their production, leading to both an increase in oil supply and a massive drop in demand. With nowhere to put this oil, oil futures went below zero for the first time ever as places to store this unused supply quickly filled up.
Jason Bordoff is the founding Director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. He joined the Columbia faculty after serving until January 2013 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Energy and Climate Change on the Staff of the National Security Council, and, prior to that, holding senior policy positions on the White House's National Economic Council and Council on Environmental Quality. He also hosts his own podcast “Columbia Energy Exchange” that features in-depth conversations with the world’s top energy and climate leaders.
Given the tragic incident of the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests, it’s probably the right time to talk about protests. What are the effective ways to protest? How have the shape and form of protests transformed throughout the past decades as black people fought for their rights? And certainly, how justified is violence or how effective is non-violence in protests?
Unfortunately, some of the protests recently have contained violence and looting, and President Trump even threatened to deploy troops on the protestors, further escalating the tension. Many have accused the protestors for not doing it “right,” but is there a right way to do it? It’s really not as if when black people protested in nonviolent ways, such as kneeling during the NFL anthem, they were embraced with open arms by those in power! So, are people simply hiding behind the attacks on the “means,” when what they truly oppose is the argument itself that BLM? Whether violent or not, how should we think about the role of suffering and the dramatization of suffering throughout the history of protest movements? In today's age, how has social media and the rise of technology transformed the way the public perceives pain and injustice? Does the near unanimity of outrage and activism in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing hint that this is finally the moment for fundamental changes to actually happen in our criminal justice system and beyond?
Policy Punchline is not partisan, but we believe that Black Lives Matter and that there are important, constructive dialogues to be had at the moment. We sincerely hope to play a small role in that by bringing you this conversation with Princeton professor Omar Wasow, one of the most renowned scholars today studying issues related to protest movements, race, and politics.
Omar Wasow is an Assistant Professor in Princeton’s Department of Politics. His research focuses on race and politics, protest movements and statistical methods. Before joining the academy, Omar served as a regular on-air technology analyst and was the co-founder of BlackPlanet.com, a social network he helped grow to over three million active users. In 2003, he helped found a high performing K-8 charter school in Brooklyn. He is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. He received a PhD from Harvard University and a BA from Stanford University.
When we interviewed the famous and controversial Princeton ethics philosopher Peter Singer, he brought up an interesting study by economist Paul Frijters that claims the current set of economic lockdowns are causing 70 times more life years lost than Covid-19 otherwise would had we done nothing. It was surprising to hear such a perspective, since there has been almost unanimous consensus amongst the economics community that the lockdowns are the preferred policy prescription – how did Paul Frijters arrive at this calculation? How justified is his view? And what are the moral-ethical implications of the current measures and his alternative proposals? We reached out, and Prof. Frijters kindly agreed to have this brutally honest conversation with us.
Prof. Frijters has written a series of controversial blog posts on https://clubtroppo.com.au/, topics ranging from how politicians were forced into “crowd-think” and made the unscientific decision of economic lockdown, to why quickly giving everyone Covid to build up herd immunity would be the wisest policy right now. In this interview, we dive deep into those moral-ethical debates and discuss how sensible policy measures can arise out of scientifically rigorous economic thinking. This is one of the most fascinating interviews that Tiger has conducted, and Prof. Frijters’s diagnosis for the current academic environment and social discourse will surely stimulate you in unexpected ways.
Prof. Frijters is currently a Professor in Wellbeing Economics at the LSE. He specializes in applied micro-econometrics, including labor, happiness, and health economics, including measurement and how we all can help the wellbeing of others. He is particularly active with models of cost-effectiveness and how wellbeing can become the driving focus of the nation state bureaucracy.
There has been so much hype about contact tracing technology and how it will be the key to reopening the country. Google and Apple, for example, are building a system to track contact between people who might spread the disease. The idea is simple: since Bluetooth is constantly scanning for other devices, your phone can use wireless signals to see who you’ve been near. Somebody who gets a positive diagnosis can tell the app, which will inform everyone else who has been in proximity to alert them about risks of possible transmission.
So basically, by using Bluetooth technology, our phones can exchange information on who you’ve been in contact with, and if you’ve been in the proximity of someone with Covid, your phone can alert you. This theoretically does away people’s worry about mass surveillance because no location or personal data are actually being recorded by the contact-tracing app – only bluetooth signals. But can this app live up to its promises?
One study suggests that if contact tracers successfully detected 90% of symptomatic cases and reached 90% of their contacts it could reduce transmissions by more than 45%. But this will be difficult in regions still grappling with lots of new infections. Also, if not everyone in a given community uses the app, the efficacy will be significantly reduced. False positives and false negatives will also be significant challenges, and if the app falsely notifies people of their status, it could let the public lose faith in the technology and trust in public health officials.
This interview is an excerpt from our last interview with Mr. Bruce Schneier – public-interest technologist and author of "Click Here to Kill Everybody" – and he explains why contact tracing technology is "dumb" and why we would need to resort to the old-fashioned testing and tracing if we were to go back to normal.
Bruce Schneier is a public-interest technologist and the author of over one dozen books – including his latest, "Click Here to Kill Everybody." He has also written hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter "Crypto-Gram" and his blog "Schneier on Security" are read by over 250,000 people. He is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project.
Bruce Schneier is a public-interest technologist, and his latest book "Click Here to Kill Everybody" seeks to explore risk and security questions in today's hyper-connected world with smart thermostats, "Internet of Things" home devices, self-driving cars, and other "mini computers" that are easily hackable and pose grave security threats.
In this interview, Mr. Schneier explains why tech today is fundamentally different as it’s no longer the same mechanical or electromechanical device but rather all hackable computers; why the "surveillance capitalism" business model of big tech companies in fact encourages security flaws; how open source and decentralization technology can go a long way helping address the issues; and his vision for a secure “Internet+” future and some of the sensible and realistic policies that we can implement...
We also touch on the current COVID-19 crisis and the contact tracing technology that is gaining increasing attention. Mr. Schneier calls it a "dumb idea" and explains why between false positives and our current lack of testing capacity, contact tracing technology does little to address the real issue. A brilliant contrarian, Mr. Schneier provides convincing arguments for antitrust measures against unethical tech business models and harsh critiques on the tech policymaking environment today.
In addition to over a dozen of published books, Mr. Schneier has also written hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter "Crypto-Gram" and his blog "Schneier on Security" are read by over 250,000 people. He is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project.
Many studies have come out suggesting a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups during this Covid-19 crisis. And certainly one cannot attribute this phenomenon simply to the virus itself, but much due to the underlying structural fractures of the American society in its treatment of racial and ethnic minorities for years and decades.
In this interview, Dr. Ellora Derenoncourt of UC Berkley and Princeton provides a detailed historical analysis on racial and economic inequality since the days of the Great Migration and discusses possible post-Covid policy measures to address those critical concerns. Her fascinating research on the Great Migration shows that the beautiful idea of "moving to opportunity" for black families no longer holds true, as the Great Migration cities have typically responded to the influx of black migrants with increasing segregation and spending on policing. The dynamic response from local residents and governments paint a gloomy picture on whether migration can actually lead to better outcomes for black households.
We also dive deep into another strand of her research – the effect of federal minimum wage on the black-white earnings gap. Because many minorities work retail jobs, the increase in minimum wage might simply encourage employers to adopt automation and replace the workers. Therefore, the adoption of minimum wage may further incentivize companies to automate away jobs and increase the racial earnings gap.
Lastly, Ellora talks about how WWII is analogous to our current crisis, as consumer production was also slowed to benefit the war effort then, similar to the current economic freeze. What policy prescriptions should we yield from this analysis? Is it safe to expect a post-pandemic boom similar to that of the postwar era? Is this analogy complicated by the fact that there is no war effort toward which we are redirecting economic output that could serve to stimulate the economy? We discuss how the government can incorporate racial and social considerations when enacting fiscal policies and the wider impacts of our decisions today on inequality.
Ellora Derenoncourt is an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Economics and the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests lie in labor economics, economic history, and inequality.
What can we learn about all the misinformation about Covid-19? Are they mostly incorrect but uncorrelated health tips, or are there specific narratives behind those misinformation that seek to lay groundwork for the post-pandemic public discourse? Are they simply "fake news" spread around by well-meaning citizens, or perpetrated by state actors and organizations?...
In this episode, Prof. Jacob Shapiro, Director of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, discusses what his team and Microsoft have been learning about all the Covid-19 related fake news on the Internet. Meanwhile, in a recent op-ed titled "Coronavirus: Don't forget about the poor kids," Prof. Shapiro addresses some of the most urgent education policy questions during the pandemic, the debates around fairness of digital learning, and how we need to focus on the real problems in this crisis and look ahead for groundbreaking policy solutions.
We also touch on topics from bioterrorism (how unlikely it is to design Covid in a lab) to impacts of the economic shutdown on developing nations (how Pakistan's agricultural harvest will soon suffer). It is a conversation that spans multiple disciplines and dimensions, but all for the purpose of shedding light on some truly brilliant ideas that you probably didn't think of before!
Jacob N. Shapiro is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, a multi-university consortium that compiles and analyzes micro-level data on politically motivated violence in countries around the world. His research covers conflict, economic development, and security policy. He is author of "The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations" and co-author of "Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict." His research has been published in broad range of academic and policy journals as well as a number of edited volumes. He has conducted field research and large-scale policy evaluations in Afghanistan, Colombia, India, and Pakistan.
"Jim Simons is the greatest money maker in modern financial history." Since 1988, Renaissance Technologies' flagship Medallion hedge fund founded by Simons has generated average annual returns of 66 percent, racking up trading profits of more than $100 billion. No one in the investment world comes close. Warren Buffett, George Soros, Peter Lynch, Steve Cohen, and Ray Dalio all fall short of Simons.
How did Jim Simons achieve this feat? Was it that easy for a math researcher at Princeton turned professor at Stony Brook to eventually become a legendary quant investor? In recently published bestseller "The Man Who Solved the Market," WSJ special writer Gregory Zuckerman documented how Simons launched the quant investing revolution, his personal and academic struggles along the way, why it's hard to "beat the market" and even harder to gain insights on the secretive quant hedge fund world.
In this interview with Mr. Zuckerman, we ask him how the rise of quant trading impacts the finance world, whether algorithm-driven trading adds volatility to the markets, whether traditional value investing would eventually be rendered obsolete or inferior, the social impact of quant investing and the ultimate vision of traders like Simons. We also discuss Mr. Zuckerman's investigative writing process as he gained unparalleled access to Simons and the former and current employees of RenTech and other quant finance firms. At the end of the interview, Tiger and Princeton math major Michael Psenka goes in detail explaining the mechanism of quant trading and the meaning of complex terms such as "random walk," "Brownian motion," and "stochastic calculus..."
Gregory Zuckerman is the author of "The Greatest Trade Ever" and "The Frackers," and is a Special Writer at the Wall Street Journal. At the Journal, Zuckerman writes about financial firms, personalities and trades, as well as hedge funds and other investing and business topics. He's a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb award, the highest honor in business journalism. Zuckerman also appears regularly on CNBC, Fox Business and other networks and radio stations around the globe.
Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author of several important books on constitutional theory, including "Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court," and "Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History." He has published widely on American constitutional theory and development, federalism, judicial politics, and the presidency.
Prof. Whittington argued in a recent op-ed titled “Can You Be a Libertarian in a Pandemic” that there are aspects of Libertarianism that are still valid even during a pandemic. In this interview, Prof. Whittington discusses the meaning and implications of Libertarianism in the Covid context; why more autonomy should be given to states, communities, and even individuals in deciding the appropriate response; whether we will see an inevitable expansion of government power after Covid; whether the Libertarian ethos might actually make it structurally, organizationally, and philosophically unprepared for crises such as this; and his pessimism for the future of our political environment...
Alp Basaran is a Congressional candidate for the NJ-09 district. If elected, he would be the 5th Muslim American, 3rd formerly undocumented, and 1st Turkish American Congressman in U.S. history. In this episodes, Alp discusses his values and main policy proposals – universal healthcare, free education, immigration amnesty, and fair economy for all. Why does he believe that those would be the most needed solutions to the current set of societal problems? How does he justify the potential economic costs of his plans? And how would he build the political coalition to back those progressive policies?
Alp and Tiger go deep in discussing contemporary politics and the rise of progressive Democrats in recent years. Why did Bernie fail to inspire "millions of young voters" to turn out for him, and why did Warren fail to unite the centrist and progressive Democrats as promised? How can progressive Democrats bring forth sensible policies and make legislation happen in reality, rather than merely contributing to the shift of the overtone window of political discourse? How should progressive Democrats treat and seek to convince the majority of the voters who disagree with them?
Lastly, Alp also gives a frontline view on what it's like to run a campaign during the Covid-19 pandemic. Are Zoom town-halls effective? How can political candidates think of new ways to connect with voters?
To learn more about Alp's campaign, you may visit https://alpbasaran.com/.
Arthur Caplan is founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU School of Medicine. He is a pioneer in designing public health policies, from founding the National Marrow Donor Program to creating the U.S. system of organ donation and distribution. Dr. Caplan has been busily advising public health officials on the Covid-19 crisis and educating the public through media outlets like the Time Magazine, NYTimes, the Atlantic, etc. He kindly took some time off of his busy schedule to talk to us about the situation on the frontline of Covid care – how doctors are rationing medical resources and making difficult ethical decisions for life and death.
What is the situation like on the frontline right now? Are doctors frequently forced to make triage decisions, or is reality not as bad as the philosophical debate?
Given the scarcity of resources, what should the specific standards be when choosing whom to give care? Should people with chronic conditions, mental illnesses, criminal records, and fatal diseases have the same opportunity to be considered for treatment?
Should there be an ethicist on staff or a rules-based algorithm that can help doctors make decisions? Or does the burden necessarily have to fall on the practitioners (doctors)?
How will this crisis cause more permanent alterations in medical practice? Though triaging and rationing have always existed in situations like organ donation, we’re in a unique situation today that even medical workers now have to face rationing with their equipment. What fundamental lessons should the medical community take away from this crisis? Are there any promising drugs, treatments, or vaccines on the horizon? Why is it crucial to follow through the necessary trials before releasing anything to the public?
How can we get back to normal? Is testing is only and most important way forward both from a public policy and medical standpoint?
And many other fascinating insights from Dr. Caplan…
We sincerely thank Dr. Caplan and all the medical workers on the frontline for working tirelessly for the well-being of our communities. This interview is part of Policy Punchline’s ongoing coverage of the Covid-19 crisis. We’re updating 2-3 episodes per week, bringing you the most frontier ideas on the crisis, and you may find our other episodes on policypunchline.com/covid19.
You may learn more about Dr. Caplan’s work through his Twitter @ArthurCaplan or his website: https://med.nyu.edu/faculty/arthur-l-caplan.
Here are some of Dr. Caplan recent writings: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928537 https://time.com/5819831/coronavirus-testing-back-to-work/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/social-distance-ration-doctors-care/609229/
Facebook invested $5.7 billion for a 10% stake in Indian telecom operator Jio Platforms Ltd, the biggest telecom operator in the country with more than 370 million subscribers. The deal not only made Facebook the largest minority shareholder in the Indian telecom network, but also brought India’s emerging tech scene back into the global spotlight.
In this episode, WSJ Asia tech reporter Newley Purnell gives us a detailed overview of the prosperous tech scene in India, the struggles that local startups face when competing against American & Chinese tech giants, Indian government’s antitrust actions, and emerging trends the land promises. Newley also comments on the socio-political life in India in general – from India’s democracy to caste structures, from religious identities to linguistic barriers, as well as issues in Indian business practices that may hinder growth and inclusivity.
This interview was recorded in February after Tiger’s return from a three-week trip in India. Newley and Tiger originally planned on meeting up in New Delhi to do the interview in person but ended up moving to a remote format. The recording does not touch on the most recent Jio-Facebook deal but still provides timely updates on the Indian tech market and its dynamics.
Newley Purnell is a Hong Kong-based journalist working for the Wall Street Journal, where he covers technology and business. Before joining in 2014, Mr. Purnell was a Bangkok-based freelance journalist, contributing to The Journal, Quartz, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English from Emory University and a Master’s in Business and Economics journalism from Columbia University, where he was a Gray International Reporting Fellow. When this interview was conducted, Newley was based in New Delhi. If you'd like to learn more about Newley's work, please visit "newley.com," where you may sign up for his insightful newsletter!
"What are the economic consequences of an influenza pandemic? And given the pandemic, what are the economic costs and benefits of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI)?" In a recently published economics paper, Prof. Emil Verner and his co-authors find that cities that intervened earlier and more aggressively in the 1918 Spanish Flu did not perform worse and, if anything, grew faster after the pandemic was over. Their findings thus indicate that NPIs not only lower mortality; they may also mitigate the adverse economic consequences of a pandemic.
The paper is titled "Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: Evidence from the 1918 Flu," and it provides crucial justification for the current social distancing measures and guidance on how we should handle this current Covid-19 crisis. In this interview, we ask Prof. Verner about his research methodology, why the 1918 Flu serves as a reliable comparison with the coronavirus outbreak, what recovery measures can be taken after the shutdown ends, and other important debates related to the economics of this crisis.
Prof. Emil Verner is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His current research focuses on the connection between financial markets and economic activity, both in advanced and emerging markets. In several recent studies, he has examined the role of household credit markets in amplifying business cycle fluctuations. In related work, Prof. Verner has also studied the real economic consequences of banking sector distress during financial crises around the world over the past 150 years. Finally, in ongoing research, Prof. Verner is currently exploring what role financial distress has played in the recent rise in populism.
Melissa Reynolds is Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. A historian and humanist, Dr. Reynolds recently published an op-ed in Washington Post comparing the coronavirus epidemic to “the sweat” outbreaks in 15th century Europe. She suggests that, despite the obvious advances in modern medicine since the 15th century, there are similarities between the two epidemics, most notably the failure of government to communicate adequately with the public.
In this interview, Dr. Reynolds explains why the public can so easily fall into misguided conceptions about a pandemic regardless of one's education level; how the government can step in to provide a clear and coherent voice about the pandemic while not being the only authority dictating public opinion; why media follows unique "cultural scripts" that end up posing a potent threat to the health of our socio-political discourse; and many other fascinating historical comparisons between today and the 15th century.
Dr. Reynolds is a historian of medieval and early modern England whose research focuses on practices of reading, writing, and knowledge-making at the moment of transition from manuscript to print. At Princeton, she is working on her first book, tentatively titled, “How To: Practical Books and the Making of Early Modern English Culture,” which examines the circulation of practical knowledge in late medieval manuscripts and early printed books.
Another wave of reflections for capitalism is now kindled by the Covid-19 crisis. Will the fiscal stimulus uplift the average Americans or end up exacerbating inequality? How is the crisis revealing fundamental fractures of the American and Western societies? The world as we have known it for the past decades has come to a stop, and the global socio-economic system might finally be shaken up as businesses remake their supply chains and governments re-envision their globalization goals... As people reflect on those important questions, we think it’s timely to re-introduce an earlier interview with Prof. Branko Milanovic on his book “Capitalism, Alone” and his insightful critique on the present and future of this political-economic system.
“Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World” provides a detailed recount of the path through which Capitalism came to dominate our world; an overview of the different capitalistic systems now govern the world; a range of problems such as inequality that Capitalism has engendered and struggled to respond to; and a deep reflection on the urgent socio-economic challenges our societies now face and how we may address them.
As the public today grows ever more concerned with inequality, one of the most noteworthy ideas in the book is how liberal meritocratic capitalism is a system with inherent characteristics that “enhance inequality.” Drawing from Thomas Piketty and a wide range of literature and data, Prof. Milanovic provides a refreshing view on how we may rethink radical solutions for our dire problems.
Branko Milanović is a visiting presidential professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his book on global income inequality, “Worlds Apart” (2005). His book “The Haves and the Have-nots” (2011) was selected by The Globalist as the 2011 Book of the Year. “Global Inequality” (2016) was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016 and the Hans Matthöfer Prize in 2018, and was translated into 16 languages. It addresses economic and economic and political effects of globalization and introduces the concept of successive “Kuznets waves” of inequality. In March 2018, Milanovic was awarded (jointly with Mariana Mazzucato) the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge.
Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Considered by many as “world’s most influential living philosopher,” Prof. Singer works mostly in practical ethics and is known for his controversial critique of the sanctity of life ethics.
In this interview, Prof. Singer discusses how one may reason through triage decisions when it's no longer hypothetical to decide who lives and dies; whether the negatives of the economic shutdown outweigh the benefits; when governments should be allowed to intervene with individual choices for better public health outcomes; why he advocates for the closing of wet markets; and the long-term moral-ethical impacts of Covid-19...
The interview is co-hosted by Tiger Gao and Arjun Mani, who will also offer an overview of some of the most interesting philosophical, economic, and political arguments central to the crisis today.
Prof. Singer is perhaps best known for his book "Animal Liberation," often credited with starting the modern animal rights movement. A vegetarian himself, he co-founded the Australian Federation of Animal Societies, now Animals Australia, the country's largest and most effective animal organization. He is also the founder of "The Life You Can Save," an organization based on his book of the same name. It aims to spread ideas about why we should be doing much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty, and how we can best do this. Prof. Singer's writings have also heavily influenced the development of the effective altruism movement.
Prof. Singer has written, co-authored, edited or co-edited more than 50 books, including "Practical Ethics," "The Expanding Circle," "Rethinking Life and Death," "One World," "The Ethics of What We Eat" (with Jim Mason) and "The Point of View of the Universe" (with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek). His writings have appeared in more than 25 languages.
Markus Brunnermeier is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics and Director of the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University. In this episode, Prof. Brunnermeier explains the nature of the covid-19 economic shock, why it poses a threat to financial stability, the $2tr stimulus package and why the current solutions for funding small & medium-sized businesses are still insufficient, how to bring the economy back to life in the long run, and other topical political & economic debates related to the crisis.
One of the most prominent economists of our time, Prof. Brunnermeier focuses his research on international financial markets and the macro economy with special emphasis on bubbles, liquidity, financial crises and monetary policy. He promoted the concepts of liquidity spirals, CoVaR as co-risk measure, the paradox of prudence, and the I Theory of Money. He is or was a member of several advisory groups, including to the IMF, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the European Systemic Risk Board, the German Bundesbank and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office.
Dan Michelson is the CEO of Strata Decision Technology, an analytics and financial planning platform that helps over 1,000 leading healthcare organizations and system in the U.S. to figure out and lower their true costs.
In this episode, Dan explains why health systems don't understand the true costs of their treatments and operations, the key interests and incentives for doctors and patients to demand reforms, the reasons why Silicon Valley startups have failed to "disrupt" the industry, and the need to understand healthcare on a deeper level.
Dan also discusses the impact of coronavirus on hospitals’ bottom lines, the enormous responsibilities that healthcare workers are taking on, his optimism of how we will come out of this crisis stronger, and ways we can get both acknowledge the problems and contribute to the solutions. We would strongly encourage you to follow Strata's campaign and tag #MyHealthcareHero to thank those who are risking their lives for our safety.
With close to 30 years of healthcare experience and the mission to "help heal healthcare," Dan has been one of the industry’s key thought leaders in developing the Decision Support, Financial Planning, Electronic Prescribing and Electronic Health Record markets, including serving on the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology and co-authoring the books "Margin + Mission: A Prescription for Curing Healthcare’s Cost Crisis" and "The Electronic Physician."
Nancy Lin is a former senior advisor at Exxon Mobil and has career experiences across the oil and gas value chains, including supply chain logistics, crude oil trading, strategic technology and business alignment studies, long-term market outlook development, and environmental health and safety legislative affairs.
In this interview, Nancy discusses the evolution of cleaner energy sources in the U.S. and abroad and weighs the different policy options necessary to mitigate rising emissions. She also address critical issues surrounding the role of large corporations in combating climate change in the context of government regulation. With her dynamic perspectives on both natural gas technology development and business, Nancy helps us address these questions among others about our global energy transition towards a more sustainable future.
With her B.S.E in Chemical Engineering from Princeton ‘77, Nancy started her career researching project opportunities with Mobil Oil. After pursuing an MBA in Finance from NYU Stern, she shifted to the business side with the supply and logistics group that focused on driving those technologies forward as energy and finance were becoming increasingly intertwined in the 1980s. As Senior Advisor at Exxon, Nancy drove innovation and development of the long-term prospects for natural gas/LNG, and her recommendations to senior management provided input for the corporation’s business decisions outlined in the Exxon Mobil Energy Outlook. After retiring, she consulted part-time for PIRA Energy Consulting Group, an S&P Global company. Nancy is also Co-Chair for the Asian American Alumni Association of Princeton (A4P).
Austan Goolsbee is former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Obama and led the Economic Recovery Advisory Board after the 2008 financial crisis. In this interview, he talks about how he first got involved advising Obama’s Senate campaign in 2004 as a fellow UChicago professor, the critical decision-making moments to save the economy from recession, his reasons of endorsing Pete Buttigieg for President, the efficacy of UBI in an AI economy, and his potential prospects as a stand-up comedian…
Prof. Goolsbee is currently the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. His research has earned him recognition as a Fulbright Scholar and an Alfred P. Sloan fellow. In prior years he was named one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum, and one of the six "Gurus of the Future" by the Financial Times. His ability to explain economics clearly has made Goolsbee popular in the media. Jon Stewart describes him as "Eliot Ness meets Milton Friedman,” and he has twice been named as a "star" professor by BusinessWeek's "Guide to the Best Business Schools."
But perhaps just as importantly, some of the other distinguished titles he’s received include “Salon.com’s one the 15 Sexiest Men of 2010,” “the funniest celebrity in Washington,” etc. WSJ once described him as a “stand-up economist,” and his charisma and thoughtfulness have truly shined through in this podcast interview as he banters with Arjun & Tiger about his career and economic insights.
Prof. Goolsbee now serves on the Economic Advisory Panel to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and has previously served on the Panel of Economic Advisors to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Census Advisory Commission and as a special consultant for Internet Policy to the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. He joined Chicago Booth in 1995.
Professor Jessica Metcalf of Princeton explains how to best understand the novel Coronavirus and emerging diseases in general, why it might take a long while to find and produce a vaccine, why the WHO would declare a State of Emergency around the Coronavirus, how researchers can measure its severity and spread, and what properties of COVID-19 compel her to think it might go global.
Jessica Metcalf is Assistant Professor of Ecology, Evolutionary Biology & Public Affairs at Princeton University, and a demographer with broad interests in evolutionary ecology, infectious disease dynamics and public policy.
Some of her motivating research questions of particular interest include: How will changing human demography impact infectious disease incidence and spread? What drives dynamics of rubella through space and time, and what does this indicate for vaccine control? What are the key influences on dynamics of malaria inside the bloodstream of mice, and what does this imply for control as well as evolution of the parasite? When should reproduction occur in plants where reproduction is fatal (from an evolutionary perspective) and can we link this back to the genetic background using the model plant system, Arabidopsis thaliana? How long do trees live and what does this imply for rates of carbon turnover and recovery following the spread of forest pathogens?
Prof. Metcalf’s teaching focuses on a course titled Epidemiology: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective. Her course aims to communicate both an understanding of the core principles of epidemiology (ranging from classical study designs to core analytical techniques) and a broader perspective into the fundamental drivers of health outcomes (ranging from ecological drivers of the spread of infectious disease to the evolutionary determinants of profiles of late age mortality).
Princeton Investment Company (PRINCO) CIO Andy Golden walks us through Princeton’s investment theses and manager selection processes, speaks to the importance of value add in partnerships, responds to divestment concerns, and addresses upcoming challenges in the finance and private equity industry.
One of the most successful investors and endowment directors today, Andy manages Princeton's $26 billion Endowment through a global network of over 75 investment firms. He has grown the endowment from $3 billion when he arrived more than 20 years ago, and achieved an annualized return of 11.6 percent in the past 10 years – making PRINCO one of the highest performing endowments in the world.
Andy became the third President of PRINCO in January 1995. He came to PRINCO from Duke Management Company where he was an Investment Director. He previously worked as a Senior Associate in the Investments Office at Yale University.
Andy holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Duke University and an M.P.P.M. from the Yale School of Management. He earned the Chartered Financial Analyst designation and is a member of the New York Society of Security Analysts. Andy served as a founding member of the Investors’ Committee of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, and previously served as a member of the Board of Directors of the NAB Asset Corporation, a publicly-traded commercial loan workout specialist. He is a Trustee of the Princeton Area Community Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation and Rutgers Preparatory School.
Before shifting his focus to investing, Andy was a professional photographer. A stand-up guy, Andy enjoys paddle boarding, and hopes to someday return to the pro-am shark wrestling circuit. He wishes he had time to learn golf — he wouldn’t use it to learn golf, but he wishes he had the time.
Co-hosting the interview with Tiger is Arsh Dilbagi, Princeton junior in the Operations Research and Financial Engineering department, who has interned at PRINCO as a summer analyst and is known for his entrepreneurial projects in robotics and beyond.
Joyce Chang is Chair of Global Research for J.P. Morgan, whose research capacities expand across equities, currency and commodities, fixed income, emerging markets, derivatives and structured finance. Ms. Chang’s team has been named the top global research firm for 2017 and 2018 by Institutional Investor.
In this episode, Ms. Chang tells us how the utilization of alternative data has revolutionized financial market research, as well as J.P. Morgan’s cooperation with social organizations in using big data to promote public good. What does the “Volfefe” index tell us about the relationship between Treasury bonds volatility and President Trump’s tweets? With technological change through big data and artificial intelligence, how does the role of an analyst evolve? How has the J.P. Morgan Institute contributed to a socially responsible investment environment?…
Ms. Chang also shares her unique experience as an Asian female working on Wall Street. Her insights into how she thrives in a traditionally male-dominated industry sheds light on how aspiring young professionals could break the “bamboo ceiling” despite of all the challenges.
Ms. Chang began her career as an Emerging Markets Strategist and held top rankings in Institutional Investor surveys for Emerging Markets research from 1997 through 2012, earning 25 #1 individual rankings. In 2014, she was inducted into the Fixed Income Analyst Society Hall of Fame. Ms. Chang was a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch and Salomon Brothers before joining J.P. Morgan Chase in 1999. She is the Senior Sponsor for J.P. Morgan’s Corporate and Investment Bank’s Women on the Move Network, the network for employees of Asian heritage (AsPIRE), and Nonprofit Board Service. She holds a BA from Columbia and an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.
“Most sports and entertainment companies are satisfied by taking a more traditional focus on game attendance, meaning ticket purchases and merchandise purchases as a measure of fan engagement, and they stop there,” said Iwao Fusillo, SVP of Data Data Analytics and Insights at the National Football League.
Since his arrival, however, Mr. Fusillo has spearheaded the NFL’s “data revolution” – from bringing on Amazon as a strategic partner for AI and machine learning technology to introducing wildly successful crowdsourcing programs such as the NFL Punt Analytics Competition and the NFL Big Data Bowl. Mr. Fusillo’s contribution to the NFL in the realm of data analysis have significantly pushed the culturally-significant sport of football forward in ways that even the most dedicated fans may not be aware of.
In this interdisciplinary podcast between data, sports, and the NFL’s business model, our co-hosts Tiger and Arjun talk with Mr. Fusillo about the rapid integration of the latest data analytics advancements into the entertainment and sports industries.
Mr. Fusillo also addresses some of the questions that consumers generally have about living an increasingly data-driven world: How does data analysis make football safer for its players? What are some of the fascinating models that the NFL is using to analyze and predict player performance? Is it a scary vision that our personal health metrics can be tracked at all times by future hardware devices? Is “Big Data” really something that every company should embrace in order to become successful?
With trends indicating that most major companies are implementing data into their operations, Mr. Fusillo offers a unique insider perspective of the technological and business revolution happening across industries beyond tech companies. Listen now to learn how data-driven decision-making will be ubiquitous across the business world in the near future – and also to hear all the funny banter between Mr. Fusillo, Tiger, and Arjun!
Andrew Winston is a prolific writer, consultant, and globally recognized expert on how companies can navigate and profit from climate change while transforming their businesses to be more environmentally friendly. Andrew's first book, "Green to Gold," was the top-selling green business title of the last decade. His latest book, "The Big Pivot," provides a practical roadmap to help leaders build resilient, thriving companies and communities in a volatile world.
In this interview, we tackle some of the most essential debates about climate change and our economy. How can businesses remain profitable while transforming themselves to be more responsive to climate change? What has prevented more businesses from doing so? How can we make sure that debates about climate change are not affected by partisan politics and lobbying efforts? ...
Andrew is also a respected and dynamic speaker, reaching audiences of thousands with an entertaining message of practical optimism: the world’s challenges are great, but businesses have the tools, resources, and creativity to create a sustainable world. He has spoken all over the world – in Europe, Russia, Brazil, the Middle East, and China – bringing his ideas to leadership meetings of the top executives of Fortune 500 companies, large industry conferences, and high-profile events like the World Innovation Forum and TED.
An American singer-songwriter, Mr. Pete Muller forged a rather unconventional path. He founded and now runs PDT Partners, one of the most successful quant investment firms in our world today. But he is also a famous musician, having just recently released his 4th studio album, "Dissolve," and is touring all around the world.
In this interview, Mr. Muller talks about his educational and music journey with us – from studying math at Princeton to starting his hedge fund; from starting his music career in California to pushing himself as a live performer playing on the New York City subway platforms and stages all around the world. He speaks about his morning routine of yoga and cardio, as well as his way of finding a balance between music and finance.
Mr. Muller has long been a champion of music education and the arts. In 2017, he spearheaded the Berklee School of Music's acquisition of New York City's Power Station recording studio, saving the iconic space from being shuttered. In partnership with the city, Muller is helping transform the beleaguered studio into a world-class facility that Berklee will use as its first New York outpost for students.
Beyond his ambitious financial and musical careers, Mr. Muller still finds time to pursue other passions. He is an avid surfer, dedicated yogi, and prolific crossword puzzle constructor – you can find his challenging, music-themed, "meta-puzzles" monthly in the Washington Post.
We are honored to host Mr. Muller on our show and cannot wait to spread his music and ideas to more people.
It seems that American politics has reached a new level of tension. The Democratic and Republican parties have become more polarized over years, and Congress is currently mired in an eye-opening impeachment inquiry, which could alter the course of American history.
But has Congressional partisanship actually gotten significantly worse than before? Are there in fact fewer bipartisan legislations getting passed? Will the Trump impeachment remain a partisan issue or can the two parties ever reach consensus? Do we see reasons of remaining optimistic in the current political climate, and is the pessimism in our current social discourse overblown?
Here to provide some very refreshing views on the impeachment and Congressional partisanship is Prof. Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Professor Lee is one of the country’s foremost scholars on Congressional politics. She has written extensively on American politics, including the award-winning books "Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation" and "Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship."
Are you constantly getting inundated by notifications from your phone? Do you fondly remember the good-old-days when cellphones were just a tool and not an extension of our personalities? How can we make sure that phones and tech products do not induce anxiety in our lives but can actually improve our living quality? ... In this episode, we talk to Kaiwei Tang, Founder of Light Phone, a product that aims to cater to all your unplugging needs – aesthetically and purposefully.
Kaiwei Tang, the CEO and co-founder of LightPhone, hopes to design a product that would give people the opportunity to unplug from the hyperconnected world and eliminate all the distractions from a normal smartphone. One can use a Light Phone for basic utilitarian purposes such as navigation and booking a cab, while remaining disconnected from social media. Kaiwei’s intent behind his entrepreneurial venture is to offer people the peace of mind and a happier lifestyle by eliminating distractions and stress of social media, news, and notifications…
In this episode, we also learn about Kaiwei’s entrepreneurial journey of creating such a product. He also discusses how social media has fundamentally altered human values portending a change in the way we generate ideas and connect with other people. We also talk about the purpose of technology in today’s world and what we can do to fix the problem of over-indulgence in our phones.
Currently, Kaiwei’s company is based in New Lab in Brooklyn. He started his journey by working as a mobile device product lead for almost 8 years with a background in industrial engineering and product designing. He received his master’s degree in Design and Business from Design IIT, Chicago and became the only designer to ever receive full sponsorship from Google for its design incubator program.
Shaun Stewart is currently the CEO of New Lab, a frontier tech incubator located in Brooklyn supporting over 150 startups and 600 entrepreneurs who work on innovations ranging from quantum computing to hydroponic gardening, from autonomous driving to AI in medicine…
In this episode, Shaun discusses the process of incubating frontier tech innovations and supporting entrepreneurs through business development initiatives. He tells us about some of the most exciting innovations happening at New Lab, as well as his personal journey from being in the hotel management industry to the world of tech and entrepreneurship. We also dive into conversations about antitrust regulations for big tech and the intersection of technology with human lives in the modern world.
Shaun was appointed the CEO of New Lab in December 2018. An “inspiring space,” as Shaun calls it, NewLab is the confluence of technological innovators, medical scientists, computer-science geniuses, and climate change combatting pioneers in Brooklyn, an area with the potential of becoming the Silicon Valley on the East Coast.
Prior to heading New Lab, Shaun was the Chief Business Development Officer at Waymo, Google’s self-drive cars initiative, from 2016 to 2018. At Waymo, Shaun was a member of the executive leadership team leading the Operations, Business Development and Strategy functions. Shaun started his career in the online hotel booking sector, working at Expedia from 2002 to 2010 as a Regional Director of Market Management. He then co-founded Jetsetter, a company later acquired by TripAdvisor. He was then invited to help expand Airbnb’s business as the Global Head of Vacation Rentals from 2014 to 2016 before joining Google X. Shaun received his Bachelors in hotel management from Cornell University.
Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist specializing in writing about China’s long-term social issues, such as the country’s search for faith and values, as well as its political and religious challenges. In this episode, Mr. Johnson explains the complexity of Chinese religion and how it is often misunderstood by Westerners, the nuanced relationship between religion and the Chinese government, the ills of the current state of journalism and its implication on the coverage of China, his take on the refugee crisis in Europe, as well as his prescription for creating a more-unified society with meaningful values in the future .
Mr. Johnson is a regular contributor of articles and commentary to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and speaks in the media or to public audiences about China. He also teaches undergraduate courses on Chinese society and is pursuing a doctorate in Sinology at Leipzig University. His two books The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao and Islam in Europe are major focal topics in this episode.
Johnson has also spent a significant amount of time working in Germany. He attended graduate school in West Berlin from 1988 to 1992 and worked as a free-lance writer at the same time, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification for Baltimore's The Sun, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Toronto Star. He worked as The Wall Street Journal’s Germany bureau chief and senior writer from 2001 to 2009, leading coverage on European macro-economics and societal issues.
He is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on China, Stanford University's Shorenstein prize for his body of work on Asia, a grant from the Open Society Foundation, and a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. In the past year, he was also the recipient of the American Academy of Religion's "best in-depth news writing on religion" award for writing on religion.
Blair Effron is one of the most successful American financiers today, having co-founded elite boutique investment bank Centerview Partners and prominently involved in Democratic politics. In this episode, Mr. Effron tells us about his journey as an investment banker, the importance and intellectual excitement of advising companies through their lifecycles, his take on the socio-political gridlock in America, as well as his optimism for humanity’s progress going forward.
Centerview provides advice on mergers and acquisitions, capital restructurings, and other financial matters to 20% of the 50 largest companies in the world by market capitalization. With 50 partners including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, as well as some of the most successful investment bankers in the world, Centerview has risen to become one of the most active and leading institutions shortly after its inception in 2006 with over $3 trillion in advised transactions.
“Our relationship has always been more with Blair Effron than with any one bank,” said Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of PepsiCo. Indeed as those words have shown, Mr. Effron has built relationships with and advised Fortune 500 and multinational corporations across a wide range of sectors – from 21st Century Fox’s $6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones to GE’s $200 billion spin-off of GE Capital... Mr. Effron is also active in Democratic Party politics and was a prominent supporter of John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. He has also hosted President Obama and Secretary Clinton multiple times for political events, and still acts as an important voice bridging the political and financial sectors.
Mr. Effron currently sits on the boards of trustees of The Council on Foreign Relations (Vice Chairman), Lincoln Center (Treasurer), the Metropolitan Museum, New Visions for Public Schools (Co-Chair), Partnership for New York City and Princeton University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative affiliated with the Brookings Institution. He holds a BA from Princeton University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
In this interview, Prof. Tim Besley of LSE highlights issues in development economics and introduces a series of new concepts such as "fragile states" and "the Curse of Denmark" that provide much needed nuances in discussions about development.
As an introduction to this interview, we want to highlight one important point from Prof. Besley’s talk on state fragility in Princeton. He noted how the U.S., U.K., and stable states as such are all recent human contrivances. Humans have really only existed 73 seconds past midnight if we normalize the existence of Earth to 24 hours, and we’ve had stable political systems for merely 0.01 second.
How do we know whether our current systems are stable? “To say that we've transitioned to some new world that is inevitably stable and will never revert would be a very dangerous belief to have,” as Prof. Besley also commented during our interview. It’s dangerous to think that human progress will be linear, and we have to stay vigilant and humble as we continue to tackle the issues in our world.
Here are a few additional comments on normative economic frameworks by our host Tiger:
"On our way back to Prof. Besley’s office after our interview, I asked Prof. Besley about his research and how he sees the future of economic studies shaping up. Prof. Besley told me that when he thinks of a complicated question, he tends to break it down through a few frameworks. One of those frameworks particularly attracted my attention – a normative one that brings a values component into economic analysis. For example, a utilitarian framework or one about happiness could add a much different and helpful dimension to our understanding of certain socioeconomic issues.
"As little as I may know about this new normative approach, I do feel that such interdisciplinary discourse will be highly constructive for our exploration of economic issues. If someone’s knowledge in political theory or moral philosophy could somehow play a bigger role in economic research, that creates a much more exciting future than simply adding more variables into the model. As someone not well-versed in real analysis at all, I am quite excited to be part of that future if we ever come to it."
Investment banks undoubtedly serve an integral function in our financial markets. They help raise capital for companies through equity or debt offerings, provide corporate finance advice on mergers and acquisitions, aid in restructuring processes, and facilitate our economic activities among many other important tasks.
But what is the future for investment banking services as more junior-level number-crunching work is projected to be automated away by tech innovations? Where does the future lie for bulge bracket investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as more boutique advisory firms prove to be more nimble in complex transactions and more knowledgeable in niche verticals?
Melville Mummert is the former Head of European Investment Banking at Raymond James. From a base in Munich, he led the strategic expansion of Raymond James into Frankfurt and London, and recruited and retained a team that grew from 22 to 75 professionals. His team provided advisory services on M&A, capital raising, and restructuring in all phases of transactions in five sectors: tech & services, industrials, healthcare, financial services, and consumer & retail.
Previously, he founded and managed his own international corporate finance advisory practice, Mummert & Co., which focused on technology-based companies in German-speaking countries and was ultimately acquired by Raymond James in 2016.
On their way back to Prof. Stefan Eich's office after the interview, Tiger told Prof. Eich that he had been considering pursuing a Ph.D. because he values intellectual curiosity and derives a lot of joy from constantly learning about new ideas. Prof. Eich chuckled and told Tiger that academia might be one of the most anti-intellectual places of all because people are so focused on their niche and don’t interact with other disciplines enough. We've heard this criticism not only from Prof. Eich – or many other guests like Prof. Reinhard Busse – but almost every academic we've interviewed.
People clearly recognize that the academia needs more people who can draw interdisciplinary connections. If one can bring financial economics, political theory, climate change, and many of the other fascinating debates together in a thoughtful way, this person is most likely a wonderful academic. And we believe that Prof. Eich is such an academic.
While we don’t have the ability to do so yet, we do hope to build Policy Punchline to be as similar to a think tank as possible and bring different voices together. As we strive for that goal, we're excited to present this episode to you.
Stefan Eich is Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Before arriving at Georgetown, he was Perkins-Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University and received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. His research is in political theory and the history of political thought, in particular the political theory of money and financial capitalism.
His book project, "The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes" (under contract with Princeton University Press), recovers debates about money as a constitutive political institution by studying six moments of monetary crisis and their imprint in the history of political thought. Besides its analysis of the conceptual and historical roots of the political theory of money the book offers an account of the modern politics of monetary depoliticization and places this history in conversation with the contested future of money. He is co-editor of a book series on "Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times" with Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings at Stanford University Press.
Jeff Kreisler is just a typical Princeton educated lawyer turned author, speaker, pundit, comedian and advocate for behavioral science. He uses humor & research to understand, explain and change the world.
In this interview, Jeff explains the urgent issues of financial literacy that America currently faces, and he brings in perspectives from behavioral science and economics to shine a new light on the problem. As a continuation to Mr. Pete Colhoun's interview and our efforts to promote awareness for financial literacy, this interview combines intellectual depth and humor and should be a really enjoyable episode for our listeners.
Jeff specializes in politics, money and other human encounters. Winner of the Bill Hicks Spirit Award for Thought Provoking Comedy, Jeff also runs PeopleScience.com, writes for TV, politicians & CEOs, shares witty insight on CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC & SiriusXM and tours most of this planet.
For more information on Jeff's work, please visit: http://jeffkreisler.com/
44% of Americans do not have enough cash to cover a $400 emergency. In 2016, the average college student graduated with $37,000 in debt. 44% of Americans said they would rather discuss death, religion, or politics rather than talking about personal finance with a loved one.
Financial literacy is clearly a huge problem in our society today, and we are very glad that Princeton is hosting a financial literacy day to bring awareness to the issue. We’re glad to have a very prominent voice in advocacy for financial literacy joining us for this interview and discussing the issue of financial literacy.
Mr. Pete Colhoun spent 20 years at global asset management firm T. Rowe Price Group and over that time was Director of Investment Research, Director of Mutual Funds, and President and Portfolio Manager of the New Era Fund. Today, he serves on nine boards, for both profit and non-profit companies, and is a senior investment advisor to the Gates Family Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organizations in Colorado.
We recorded this interview with Trade Talks host Chad Bown back in February. That was a time when we were still uncertain whether a deal would be reached on March 1 between China and the U.S. on whether the 10% tariffs would rise to 25% for the $200 billion Chinese imports to the U.S.
Things have really evolved in the past few months with both good and bad times. The 25% tariffs became a reality, and on August 1, President Trump announced that additional 10% tariff will be levied on another $300 billion of Chinese imports. On August 5, the U.S. officially declared China as a Currency Manipulator, and we saw a huge stock market crash following that announcement.
We’ve saved this interview waiting for the big moment to release it, and I think now is truly a critical moment in U.S-China relations and also an appropriate time for us to release this interview with Chad on the trade war. A few months have passed by, but we truly believe that our listeners can still learn so much from Chad’s insights.
What is the history of American healthcare reforms through the past four administrations? Americans seem to value choice and freedom a lot, so does it mean that a single-payer health system would never work because of such a cultural factor? How should we approach the quintessential problem of balancing storytelling and the day-to-day politics when rolling out long-lasting policies?...
In this episode, Prof. Sherry Glied, former Assistant Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services under President Obama, explains the cultural and political reasons of the current American healthcare gridlock.
In 2013, Sherry Glied was named Dean of New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. From 1989-2013, she was Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She was Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management from 1998-2009. On June 22, 2010, Glied was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services, and served in that capacity from July 2010 through August 2012. She had previously served as Senior Economist for health care and labor market policy on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1992-1993, under Presidents Bush and Clinton, and participated in the Clinton Health Care Task Force. She has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and served as a member of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.
Glied’s principal areas of research are in health policy reform and mental health care policy. Her book on healthcare reform, "Chronic Condition," was published by Harvard University Press in January 1998. Her book with Richard Frank, "Better But Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the U.S. since 1950," was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006. She is co-editor, with Peter C. Smith, of "The Oxford Handbook of Health Economics," which was published by the Oxford University Press in 2011.
What makes a design artful? The realm of design expands from fine arts to technological innovations, from concrete objects to abstract ideas, and this question about the artfulness of design thus not only relates to the aesthetics, but also to a wide range of topics such as ethics and moral philosophy. What are some of the issues we should keep in mind when designing a tech product? How does art relate to and influence the evolution of technology? How do we want to live with the tech innovations and public policies that we designed?
In this episode co-hosted by Tiger and Arjun Mani (Princeton Class of 2021, computer science major with a strong passion for Indian classical music and AI research), Prof. Ge Wang from Stanford will discuss those issues and present his unique vision for the future of our tech and society.
Prof. Ge Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He specializes in the art of computer music design — researching programming languages and interactive software design for music, interaction design, expressive mobile music, new performance ensembles (laptop orchestra and mobile phone orchestra), human-computer interaction, visualization (sndpeek), music game design, aesthetics of technology-mediated design, and methodologies for education at the intersection of art, engineering, and design.
Ge is the author and chief architect of the ChucK music programming language, and the founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk), and co-founder director of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). Ge is also the Co-founder of Smule, a startup company exploring music-making via mobile devices (reaching over 200 million users). Ge is the designer of Ocarina, and Magic Piano for the iPhone and iPad. These expressive musical things (are they toys? instruments?) enable people to play and share music with one another around the world. Overall, Ge aims to explore the art of design with technology for music.
Ge is recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship; he is the author of "Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime" (a MusiComic Manifesto) — published by Stanford University Press.
Jacques Bughin is a senior partner at McKinsey and a director of the McKinsey Global Institute, the firm’s business and economics research arm, and one of its three global co-leaders. He is also a leader in McKinsey’s Media and Entertainment, Corporate Finance, and Strategy Practices and co-leads the Digital Economy Initiative, a recently launched McKinsey knowledge program.
Since joining the firm in 1992, he has been based in Amsterdam, London, Montreal, New York, and Toronto, working primarily with media, telecom, online services, health care, fintech, travel and logistics companies on a variety of issues, including marketing and sales, digital strategy, productivity, business technology, leadership, and organization.
He has coauthored numerous publications, including McKinsey Global Institute reports on globalization, Internet of Things, Big Data, and social technologies and numerous articles in the McKinsey Quarterly as well as academic journals on industrial economics, organization, digitization of firms, and corporate finance. His research has been published in leading international media.
Jacques is a frequent speaker at conferences and universities worldwide on a range of economic and technology trends. He is a fellow at the Aspen Institute, ECORE, a think tank on economic policy in Belgium, and at KUL University. He co-leads the McKinsey Advisory Board on media management at INSEAD.
What causes enduring unemployment? What are the impacts of housing booms and manufacturing decline on employment growth? How can we come up with potential solutions for rising healthcare costs? How should we reconcile normative judgments and empirical analysis in debates about issues like unemployment and healthcare? An applied microeconomist, Prof. Matthew Notowidigdo studies a broad set of topics in labor and health economics using a variety of empirical approaches. In labor economics, his research has focused on understanding the causes and consequences of unemployment duration dependence (state dependence in unemployment), the incidence of local labor demand shocks, and the economic effects of unemployment insurance over the business cycle. One theme across all of these topics is using variation in local labor market conditions to inform economic theories and learn new facts about the labor market. Prof. Notowidigdo’s research in health economics focuses on the effects of public health insurance on labor supply, the effects of health on the marginal utility of consumption, and the effects of income on health spending. An important motivation for this line of research is to inform the design of public health insurance programs. Notowidigdo is a co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, an associate editor at the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER). His co-authored paper that was published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, “What Good is Wealth without Health? The Effect of Health on the Marginal Utility of Consumption," won the association's 2014 Hicks-Tinbergen Medal, awarded to the most outstanding article published in the last two years. Before coming to Northwestern, Notowidigdo was the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Jeffrey R. Shafer is the former Vice Chairman of Citi's Global Banking and Senior Asia Pacific Officer in New York where he was responsible for key Asia Pacific government and corporate client relationships. From 1993 to 1997, Shafer was Assistant Secretary and subsequently Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for International Affairs. At the Treasury Department, he was responsible for international economic and financial issues, focusing on strengthening economic growth and financial stability in both developed and developing countries. Shafer was also responsible for the inter-agency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) process to review foreign investment in the United States. From 1984 until 1993, he held a series of high-level positions at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Prior to the OECD, he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Council of Economic Advisors.
Americans gave $410 billion in 2017, and the U.S. non-profit sector now totals to 11% of the total workforce and 6% of GDP. Philanthropy is such an important sector that is often overlooked by people, so we want to ask some important questions related to charity: What’s the trend in donations by common people today? Is the US charity space oversaturated? How can we distinguish effective non-profits from those that aren’t? How does one manage one’s philanthropic identity nowadays? …
In this episode, Allan Amico, founder of startup DonorUP and a young Princeton alum and entrepreneur, joins us discussing those important questions.
How does Germany’s health system operate? What lessons can the U.S. health system learn from it? Should refugees have European health care? Would Europe be able to support its increasingly older population?…
In this conversation, Prof. Reinhard Busse explains Germany’s complex yet well-functioning health system. He highlights how Americans can learn from a multi-payer system like Germany’s and what we could do to tackle the rising healthcare cost. His perspective from outside the U.S. might provide us some fresh insights on the various kinds of health systems in our world today and how the U.S. could learn from them.
Prof. Busse is the Director of the Department of Health Care Management at Technische Universität Berlin. He is Co-Director of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and editor-in-chief of the international peer-reviewed journal “Health Policy.” His research focuses on Health systems, Health Policy, Health Services, Health Economics, Epidemiology and Public Health.
What are some of the structural issues with big stock exchanges like NYSE and Nasdaq? What are some of the ways people could take advantage of them? IEX Group hopes to address those issues as an alternative to those traditional exchanges and as a fintech startup. In this episode, our guest Mr. Laurence Latimer, who leads IEX Ventures, explains how stock exchanges work, what some of the existing problems in the financial services industry are, and what fintech innovators are discussing today among other topics. Mr. Latimer leads IEX Ventures. IEX Group operates the Investors Exchange (IEX), a stock exchange for U.S. equities that is built for investors and companies. Prior to IEX, Mr. Latimer previously founded LGL Growth Consulting International and has worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. He held various senior roles in venture-backed startups and has led growth initiatives and new market entry in the U.S., Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
What role did the SEC play in the past decade shaping up new financial regulations in the aftermath of the crisis? Is the agency capable of reinventing itself for change? What is the future for SEC regulations for the financial markets and institutions? How can we encourage more IPOs in our public markets? ...
In this episode, Mr. Norm Champ, former Director of Investment Management Division at SEC, discusses the inner workings of the SEC, the efficacy of financial regulations, the drawbacks of the Dodd-Frank Act, the importance of boosting the U.S. public markets, and his book "Going Public" among other topics.
While at the SEC, Mr. Champ played a key role in the SEC’s completion of landmark reforms in 2014 to strengthen the $3 trillion money market fund industry, and led important structural and policy changes in the Division of Investment Management. He was the leader of interactions with the Financial Stability Oversight Council as the Council turned its attention to whether asset management firms are “systemically important.” He also worked on crisis management efforts at securities firms to protect customers of those firms.
Mr. Champ also headed the creation of Guidance Updates and Senior Level Engagement initiatives, both of which were established to provide transparency to the industry about the priorities and goals of the SEC and to create a dialogue between policymakers and the senior management of asset management firms.
Mr. Champ's book "Going Public," which talks about his experiences at the SEC, is available on Amazon. For more information, please visit www.goingpublicthebook.com.
Do you ever think about what your Google searches say about you? What can data tell us about issues in our society like racism, depression, child abuse, and our deepest fears and insecurities? Many years after the emergence of the term “big data,” we truly need a fresh perspective to understand ourselves.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is here to answers those questions. Seth is the author of New York Times bestseller "Everybody Lies," which was published in 2017 and one of the Economist Magazine’s books of the year.
Seth has used Google searches to measure racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humor, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among many other topics. He has worked as a data scientist at Google and a visiting lecturer at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times.
Seth received his BA in philosophy, Phi Beta Kappa, from Stanford, and his PhD in economics from Harvard.
More so than for other countries, the management of water resources is an important aspect of public policy and politics. Today we’re going to try to identify some of the common themes of the relationship between water, politics, governance in contemporary China and the rest of the world.
Our guest for this episode is Dr. Scott Moore. He’s the Director of the Penn Global China Program at University of Pennsylvania. His first book, "Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins," examines how climate change and other pressures affect the likelihood of conflict over water within countries. We’d like to especially thank Princeton’s Center on Contemporary China for sponsoring this episode and for connecting us with Dr. Moore.
Mr. Bill Dudley succeeded Tim Geithner as the New York Fed’s president in 2009 after the financial crisis. He has since then become a forceful advocate for cultural change at large financial institutions and argued for keeping a tight rein on banking activities. Mr. Dudley retired from the position after a 10-year term but still actively voices his opinions on the financial sector and will be teaching in Princeton this upcoming fall.
In this long conversation, Mr. Dudley talks about his early career after completing an economics Ph.D. in UC Berkeley, a mission-focusing approach to financial regulations, thoughts on the risks of recession and the next big crisis, and the toughest moment in his career among many other topics.
Mr. Dudley is certainly the most influential monetary policy maker to ever come on Policy Punchline, but he is so personable and friendly that Tiger called him “a chill guy” during the interview… Make sure you don’t miss out on this interview with this visionary policy maker.
A few punchlines? Unlikely to have a recession soon. Banking sector is very healthy. Beware of cyber risks. Live a frugal life.
Official bio: William C. Dudley became the 10th president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on January 27, 2009. In that capacity, he served as the vice chairman and a permanent member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the group responsible for formulating the nation's monetary policy.
Previously, Mr. Dudley served as executive vice president of the Markets Group at the New York Fed, where he also managed the System Open Market Account for the FOMC. The Markets Group oversees domestic open market and foreign exchange trading operations and the provisions of account services to foreign central banks. Prior to joining the Bank in 2007, Mr. Dudley was a partner and managing director at Goldman, Sachs & Company and was the firm's chief U.S. economist for a decade. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs in 1986, he was a vice president at the former Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. Mr. Dudley was an economist at the Federal Reserve Board from 1981 to 1983.
Mr. Dudley received his doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982 and a bachelor's degree from New College of Florida in 1974.
In 2012, Mr. Dudley was appointed chairman of the Committee on the Global Financial System of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Previously, Mr. Dudley served as chairman of the former Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems of the BIS from 2009 to 2012. He was a member of the board of directors of the BIS.
Bringing up the Superbowl at a Sunday BBQ is cool, but bringing up science is much less “socially acceptable”… Likewise, people read about politics and celebrity gossips, but why not the science section in newspapers and magazines? Is it just because science journalism is fundamentally less interesting? Or is it because our society lacks appreciation for science and intellectual discourse?
Mr. Mike Lemonick is here to answer those questions and provide his insights on Trump’s latest science policies. Mike is Opinion Editor at Scientific American. He has written more than 50 Time magazine cover stories on science, and has written for National Geographic, The New Yorker and other publications.
This interview will be co-hosted by both Tiger and Brian Kraus. Brian is a graduate student in Princeton and the host of “These Vibes Are Too Cosmic,” a talk radio program at Princeton’s WPRB 103.3 FM where experts share cutting-edge science research with listeners on and off campus. It’s truly a pleasure for Policy Punchline to collaborate with Brian on this interview and share his years of science knowledge and radio show hosting experience.
Where does the future lie for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria? Should President Trump pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan or not? What should policy makers think about when considering whether to intervene in another country’s affairs and exporting democracy? Is the U.S. retreating itself from the global order? Has the Trump administration done any damage to the foreign services system? …
Here to answer those questions is one of the most respected career ambassadors within the U.S. Foreign Service and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom –– Ambassador Ryan Crocker. He has served as United States Ambassador to Afghanistan (2011–2012), Iraq (2007–2009), Pakistan (2004–2007), Syria (1998–2001), Kuwait (1994– 1997), and Lebanon (1990–1993).
A few punchlines? - Before President Trump further withdrew troops, where we were in Afghanistan was adequate. It's not great, but it's not awful either. And we are helping the Afghans maintain a rough stability where they are neither losing nor gaining considerable bits of ground.
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Democracy has to be built from the ground up in terms that reflect the realities the fears and the desires of the people who actually live there.
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We should only use the military when we see no alternative except the use of military force. Getting in isn't a problem for us –– we have the greatest military on earth, and people just get out of our way when we get there, but we don't focus enough on what's next. Once the guns fall silent, as they did literally days afterwards in Iraq and in Afghanistan, that's the part of the process where we need to think through the consequences.
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Americans are known for their lack of strategic patience. We are an impatient people, and that's how we built our great country.
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There is a great sense of relief in the State Department, both foreign service and civil service, that Rex Tillerson is no longer the Secretary of State. He did more damage to the State Department and the foreign service as institutions than we have ever experienced before.
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For more information, please visit policypunchline.com
It’s been ten years since the 2008 financial crisis, and scholars and policy makers are still reflecting on its causes and effects. The world has gone through a series of tightening regulations and de-risking; the transparency and interdependence of the financial sector have improved… But is the crisis truly over? In 2018, 10 years after the crisis, a compelling analysis of what really happened was published –– "Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World."
Prof. Tooze teaches and researches widely in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary history. From a start in modern German history with a special focus on the history of economics and economic history his interests have widened to take in a range of themes in political, intellectual and military history, across a canvass stretching from Europe across the Atlantic.
A few punchlines?
Using the national economic paradigm from the 20th century to explain the financial crisis is outdated. The “macrofinancial” revolution tries to re-map the global economy through interlocking corporate balance sheets and cash flows, and that’s a much more novel perspective.
The only place that we’re seeing growth dynamic enough and credit building up rapid enough to see anything remotely like the 2008 crisis would be China, though we’re not sure about its whiplash effects.
When you say “too big to fail” nowadays, you probably don’t even think of the banks anymore, and the attention has shifted to big techs and many other corporations.
In our last episode, Dr. Celeste Wallander discussed Putin’s Revisionist vision, Russia’s micro-aggression in Eastern Europe, the effect of American sanctions, and the possibility of a nuclear escalation among many other topics… In this episode, we continue our conversation with her. She will explain why military technology could be a "human construct," how the current discourse on Russia is too politicized, and how policy making differs from academia...
Dr. Wallander is the President of the U.S.-Russian Foundation and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia (2009-2012).
She served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russia/Eurasia on the National Security Council (2013-2017), professor at American University (2009-2013), visiting professor at Georgetown University (2006-2008), Director for Russia/Eurasia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2001-2006), Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (2000- 2001), and professor of Government at Harvard (1989-2000). She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council of the United States, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
US-Russia Relations After the Mueller Report: Revisionism, Salami Tactics, and Nuclear Escalation
On March 24th, special counsel Robert Mueller released his report that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 election. Russia is now urging President Trump to reset relations, but will the two countries ever return to a more normalized dynamic?
Here to provide her insights on US-Russia relations is Dr. Celeste Wallander, President of the U.S.-Russian Foundation and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia (2009-2012). She will discuss Putin’s Revisionist vision, Russia’s micro-aggression in Eastern Europe, the effect of American sanctions, and the possibility of a nuclear escalation among many other topics…
Dr. Wallander served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russia/Eurasia on the National Security Council (2013-2017), professor at American University (2009-2013), visiting professor at Georgetown University (2006-2008), Director for Russia/Eurasia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2001-2006), Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (2000- 2001), and professor of Government at Harvard (1989-2000). She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council of the United States, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Cautiously optimistic” — that’s the punchline Deutsche Bank Chief Economist Torsten Slok gave for the world economic outlook. Why is there so much angst for a potential recession? How should we react to all the different opinions and reach our own thesis on the economy? How do investment bank economists produce their forecasts?…… All those questions will be answered in this interview.
Dr. Slok joined Deutsche Bank Securities in the fall of 2005. Dr. Slok’s Economics team has been top-ranked by Institutional Investor in fixed income and equities for the past five years. Dr. Slok currently serves as a member of the Economic Club of New York.
Prior to joining the firm, Dr. Slok worked at the OECD in Paris in the Money and Finance Division and the Structural Policy Analysis Division. Before joining the OECD he worked for four years at the IMF in the Division responsible for writing the World Economic Outlook and the Division responsible for China, Hong Kong, and Mongolia.
Dr. Slok studied at University of Copenhagen and Princeton University. He has published numerous journal articles and reviews on economics and policy analysis, including in Journal of International Economics, Journal of International Money and Finance, and The Econometric Journal.
What's the next step for North Korea's denuclearization after President Trump and Kim Jong Un failed to reach a deal in Vietnam? Would the U.N. Security Council be a viable approach for finding solutions? How does the Security Council work and how do different major players exert their influences?
As a real expert on the U.N., China, and global security issues, Prof. Courtney Fung is here to answer those questions. She’s an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. Her forthcoming book, “China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status”, will be published by Oxford University Press in fall 2019.
We’d like to especially thank Princeton’s Center on Contemporary China for sponsoring this episode and for connecting us with Prof. Fung.
From the Treasury Department to Citi, from W.H. to Mastercard, Amb. Michael Froman has truly had such a diverse range of work experiences across the public and private sectors. In this episode, we continue our conversation with Amb. Froman and focus more on his career after W.H.
Amb. Froman served in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as the U.S. trade representative from June 2013 to January 2017. He is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; vice chairman and president, strategic growth, at Mastercard; and James R. Schlesinger distinguished professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. He worked to open foreign markets for U.S. goods and services, enforce America’s rights in the global trading system, and foster development through trade.
We also made a short video of the interview that highlights some of the most fascinating ideas Amb. Froman talked about, so make sure to check it out in addition to our full audio episode! Please visit youtu.be/ykeVmYrW6DA.
For more information, please visit policypunchline.com
Mar. 1 was the deadline for U.S.-China trade negotiations, making it so timely for us to discuss trade issues and policies. It's an honor for Policy Punchline to present our interview with Amb. Michael Froman, who will explain how trade negotiations happen, the advantages of multi-lateral trade deals, prospects of U.S.-China relations, Pres. Trump's underlying philosophy for trade...
Amb. Froman served in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as the U.S. trade representative from June 2013 to January 2017. He is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; vice chairman and president, strategic growth, at Mastercard; and James R. Schlesinger distinguished professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. He worked to open foreign markets for U.S. goods and services, enforce America’s rights in the global trading system, and foster development through trade.
We also made a short video of the interview that highlights some of the most fascinating ideas Amb. Froman talked about, so make sure to check it out in addition to our full audio episode! Please visit https://youtu.be/ykeVmYrW6DA.
For more information, please visit policypunchline.com
Prof. Glen Weyl from Princeton University discusses ideas in his new book "Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society." The book was just listed in “The Economist’s books of the year” among many other praises. In this interview, Prof. Weyl explains how his vision could be a unique solution to many of our problems today, the role of blockchain technology in social change, and the future of Liberalism among other topics.
Prof. Weyl is now a Principal Researcher at Microsoft and the founder of the RadicalxChange movement. He graduated from Princeton in 2007 as the valedictorian of his undergraduate class, and he received his PhD degree in economics at Princeton in the following year of 2008.
Prof. Weyl is hosting the 8th Annual Conference for Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance from Feb. 21 to 22. The conference is titled "Radical Mechanisms 10 Years After the Financial Crisis." This conference explores new ideas and mechanism designs aimed at addressing some of the most pressing issues facing financial markets and the macro-economy. The conference will also feature a mix of speakers including experts on blockchain, fintech, financial decentralization, and innovative mechanism design. For more information, please visit https://jrc.princeton.edu/annual-conference/2019.
Prof. Weyl book can be purchased at: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-Democracy/dp/0691177503.
Prof. Matthias Thiemann discusses post-financial-crisis regulations in Europe and the U.S. He will introduce the shadow banking industry, explain the danger of “regulatory competition,” and provide some clarity for the future of the European Union.
Prof. Thiemann visited us at Princeton from Sciences Po, also known as the Paris Institute of Political Studies. He is both a political economist and a sociologist, and he primarily researches on post-crisis regulatory changes in the U.S. and Europe and the regulators’ attempts to control risk taking behaviors in the financial industry. Prof. Thiemann gave a lecture at Princeton titled “The Regulation of Finance in Europe after the Euro Crisis,” which will be presented in this episode as well.
Prof. Thiemann’s book "The Growth of Shadow Banking: A Comparative Institutional Analysis" was just released in May, 2018, which you may purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Growth-Shadow-Banking-Comparative-Institutional/dp/1107161983.
As the U.S. and China engage in a trade war, what’s future for the business interactions between the two countries? How have the financial industries in the two countries responded to the changes that took place in the past few months?
In this episode, Mr. David Willard will discuss the cross-border M&A activities in U.S. and China, the outlook and challenges ahead, and his take on the trade war.
David Willard is the Founder, CEO & Managing Partner of 52 Capital Partners. The firm is an independent advisory firm that provides strategic advisory services on matters of transactions and acquisitions, especially China-related cross-border Mergers & Acquisitions transactions.
Mr. Willard is responsible for all major aspects of the firm’s executive management, strategy, client development and investment process. During his career, Mr. Willard has executed and participated in landmark M&A transactions and other transformational corporate matters in the United States, Europe and Asia, including at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, closing 52 transactions totaling over $150 billion in aggregate deal value. An expert on strategic China matters, David is a member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.
For more information on 52 Capital Partners L.L.C., please visit: https://www.52capitalpartners.com/
Dr. Bill Janeway presents his book "Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation, and the State." He touches on topics such as venture capital investment, tech bubbles, government regulation, cryptocurrency & blockchain, and the future of AI…
Dr. Janeway is praised by many as a “theorist-practitioner.” He has been an active venture capital investor for more than 40 years. He built and led the technology investment team at private equity firm Warburg Pincus, and his team provided financial backing to a series of critical contributions to the internet economy.
On the theory and academia side, Dr. Janeway taught at various capacities across famous academic and research institutions like Princeton and Cambridge University. Dr. Janeway graduated from Princeton in 1965 as the Valedictorian of his class; he then received a Ph.D in Economics from Cambridge University where he was a Marshall Scholar.
Dr. Christopher Marks discusses the current investment outlook and political environment in Africa, as well as his experience supporting economic development in Africa as a public finance specialist and investment banker.
Dr. Marks is Managing Director, Head of Emerging Markets EMEA, at the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG). Prior to his current role, Dr. Marks served as Senior Advisor at the African Development Bank, responsible for the origination, structuring, and execution of synthetic structured finance and capital markets transactions for the AfDB’s balance sheet and African sovereign and quasi-sovereign clients. He was previously Global Head of Debt Capital Markets at BNP Paribas in London, and has worked for the World Bank, OECD, Price Waterhouse International Privatization Group, and as a three-year resident US Government Advisor to Poland's Ministry of Finance.
Dr. Christopher Marks of Mitsubishi Financial Group discusses how innovations in development finance such as new risk management tools are now “crowding in” private investments into emerging markets like Africa. As the flow of overseas development assistance shrinks, governments and development banks in emerging markets are increasingly seeking out new, private investors. In this context, risk management tools –– from balance sheet readjustment, to project cofinancing, and risk guarantees –– have become critical for attracting and retaining investment.
Dr. Marks is Managing Director, Head of Emerging Markets EMEA, at the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG). Prior to his current role, Dr. Marks served as Senior Advisor at the African Development Bank, responsible for the origination, structuring, and execution of synthetic structured finance and capital markets transactions for the AfDB’s balance sheet and African sovereign and quasi-sovereign clients. He was previously Global Head of Debt Capital Markets at BNP Paribas in London, and has worked for the World Bank, OECD, Price Waterhouse International Privatization Group, and as a three-year resident US Government Advisor to Poland's Ministry of Finance.
Dr. Marks holds a M.A. from Johns Hopkins SAIS, a D.E.A. from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School for Public Policy and International Affairs.
Dr. Marks gave a presentation in Princeton titled “Successful Risk Management in Development Finance: Cutting-Edge Case Studies from Africa” in November, 2018. For more information, please visit: https://jrc.princeton.edu/events/successful-risk-management-development-finance-cutting-edge-case-studies-africa.
To read the full transcript of the interview and access more information about “Policy Punchline,” please visit policypunchline.com.