
Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods
About this episode
Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University and with Tyler Cowen a founder of the online education platform http://MRU.org.
I ask Alex Tabarrok about the Grand Innovation Prize, the Baumol effect, and Dominant Assurance Contracts.
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Episode website here.
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Alex Tabarrok's and Tyler Cowen's excellent blog: https://marginalrevolution.com/
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Timestamps:
(00:00) - Intro
(00:34) - Grand Innovation Prize
(08:45) - Prizes vs grants
(14:10) -Baumol effect
(27:50) - On Bryan Caplan's case against education
(31:35) - Scaling education online
(48:50) - Declining research productivity
(52:15) - Dominant Assurance Contracts
(58:40) - Future of governance
(1:04:05) - On Robin Hanson's Futarchy
(1:06:02) - Beating Adam Smith
(1:08:35) - Our Warfare-Welfare State
(1:19:30) - The Great Stagnation vs The Innovation Renaissance
(1:21:40) - Advice to 20 year olds
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