Note: This conversation was recorded in January 2020.
Tyler credits Jason Furman’s intellectual breadth, real-world experience, and emphasis on policy for making him the best economist in the world. Furman, despite not initially being interested in public policy, ultimately served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama thanks to a call from Joe Stiglitz while still in grad school. His perspective is as idiosyncratic as his career trajectory, seeing the world of economic policy as a series of complex tradeoffs rather than something reducible to oversimplified political slogans.
Jason joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on how monopolies affect investment patterns, his top three recommendations to improve American productivity, why he’s skeptical of place-based development policies, what some pro-immigration arguments get wrong, why he’s more concerned about companies like Facebook and Google than he is Walmart and Amazon, the merits of a human rights approach to privacy, whether the EU treats tech companies fairly, having Matt Damon as a college roommate, the future of fintech, his highest objective when teaching economics, what he learned from coauthoring a paper with someone who disagrees with him, why he’s a prolific Goodreads reviewer, and more.
Follow us on Twitter and IG: @cowenconvos
Email: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Follow Jason on Twitter
Follow Tyler on Twitter
Newsletter
Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox
Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar
Ross Douthat on Decadence and Dynamism
Russ Roberts and Tyler on COVID-19
John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason)
Garett Jones on Democracy (More or Less)
Tim Harford on Persuasion and Popular Economics
Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized
Reid Hoffman on Systems, Levers, and Quixotic Quests
Slavoj Žižek on His Stubborn Attachment to Communism
Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India
Tyler Looks Back on 2019 (BONUS)
Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action
Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society
Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen on the Nature and Causes of Progress (Bonus)
Shaka Senghor on Incarceration, Identity, and the Gift of Literacy
Lunch with Fuchsia Dunlop at Mama Chang (Bonus)
Ted Gioia on Music as Cultural Cloud Storage
Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas
Ben Westhoff on Synthetic Drugs, Dive Bars, and the Evolution of Rap
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Navigating Life After 40
Teaching Learning Leading K-12
Regenerative Skills
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Mel Robbins Podcast