It’s always a pleasure to do a Podcast with a host who is thoughtful, understands the issues, and engages in meaningful dialogue instead of just mindlessly plowing through a list of prepared questions. Remarkably many fail to clear that bar. Alex Epstein clears it easily. My interview with him is here.
I watches this excellent Power Hour video instead of 60 Minutes and am so glad I did. The ideas discussed in the video were a million times more illuminating than the banalities uttered on TV.
Hey Steve, great interview as usual. Question about covid policy, in your response to Alex you only focused on harms the individuals are doing to themselves (the 0.1% chance of death) and not the externality that comes from spreading covid to others, which seems to not be priced. This seems especially pertinent given exponential spread etc.
How would you handle this aspect of the question, should we account for this externality in policy or would you say something like “when you drive a car you are also putting other people at risk without their permission”?
Typing this quickly on my phone so forgive the typos and conciseness, but I’m about at the 20 minute mark where you were just talking about parking lots be forests basically and that no one preference over the other is not “morally superior.”
I mean a lot of this resonates with me. But… and this a big but… I think it would likely be morally bad to rip up the entire Amazon rain forest because it is critical for our overall life on earth. Scale matters here. Broad management of forest matters. Look at Madagascar: it could/would be in a world of hurt if it doesn’t manage its island forests properly. If people just burn burn burn endlessly in an artificial way that nature is not used to … it’s not just about the random parking lot vs random piece of forest. There are bigger issues at play. I won’t admit to knowing how to think about these properly. Again… for the random acre of forest down the street, to turn it into a parking lot, sure. But… I guess my point is there has to be someone at a bigger government level watching that we aren’t going to ruin something critical with the earth at the *overall* rate that the forests are being turned into parking lots or furniture etc. and by the way, you can just replant the Amazon rain forest if you cut it down too fast.
I should have proof read that before sending but of course the last sentence should read you *cant* just always replant the Amazon rain forest, especially if it’s torn down too quickly.
Very enjoyable, I might be listening to this guy even when he ISN’T interviewing Professor Landsburg! It was interesting to view the California forests as an “environmental threat”. Only downside was having heard a lot of the ideas before…but I’m not going to unread those books to keep interviews fresh!
On the vaccine point about it being much more efficient through the price system: I agree that the price system is almost always the best system for allocating scarce resources with sufficient execution time, but I think the government opted for a vaccine distribution system (at least in the UK where I live) that was less efficient wholesale because it was (to them) simpler and likely to be rolled out more quickly to more people. In other words, they knew that there is a trade-off, and they reasoned that everyone will be vaccinated quicker with a simpler roll out than if they tried to roll out a more complex, politically contentious price system that would have taken more planning.