Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz joined Tyler for a discussion that weaves through Joe’s career and key contributions, including what he learned from giving an 8-hour lecture in Japan, how being a debater influenced his intellectual development, why he tried to abolish fraternities at Amherst, how studying Kenyan sharecropping led to one of his most influential papers, what he thinks today of Georgism and the YIMBY movement, why he was too right-wing for Cambridge, why he left Gary, Indiana, his current views on high trading volumes and liquidity, the biggest difference between him and Paul Krugman, what working in Washington, DC taught him about hierarchies, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: You were a debater, and when you were at Amherst, you were also head of student government, right?
STIGLITZ: That’s right.
COWEN: You voted to abolish fraternities. Isn’t there good evidence that fraternities raise wages?
STIGLITZ: [laughs] That was unions raise wages. Fraternities — I was opposed to fraternities because Amherst was a small college, a thousand boys, men, and they had the effect of dividing the community. The philosophy that I had was that we should be one community. The fraternities tended to interfere with that. Students from one fraternity would always sit at dinner at the same tables with the members of their fraternity. There were class aspects of fraternities.
They were just, I thought, very divisive in a small community, and it turned out that my perspective eventually prevailed. A number of years later, Amherst did abolish the fraternities. It’s an important lesson to me in my political life. Sometimes you begin a campaign knowing that in the next year, two years — while you’re actually there — you may not succeed, but sowing the seeds of discussion, debate, maybe in 5, sometimes 10, sometimes 15, 20 years, things turn out and you wind up winning the debate.
And this:
COWEN: Do you favor the deregulations of the current YIMBY movement — allow a lot more building?
STIGLITZ: No. That goes actually to one of the themes of my book. One of the themes in my book is, one person’s freedom is another person’s unfreedom. That means that what I can do . . . I talk about freedom as what somebody could do, his opportunity set, his choices that he could make. And when one person exerts an externality on another by exerting his freedom, he’s constraining the freedom of others.
If you have unfettered building — for instance, you don’t have any zoning — you can have a building as high as you want. The problem is that your high building deprives another building of light. There may be noise. You don’t want your children exposed to, say, a brothel that is created next door. In the book, I actually talk about one example. Houston is a city with relatively little zoning, and I have some quotes from people living there, describing some of the challenges that that results in.
And this;
COWEN: Your 1984 piece with Carl Shapiro on efficiency wage theory — looking back at that now, 40 years later, you think of that mainly as a contribution to understanding organizations, an explanation of unemployment, a claim about sticky wages? Or how do you frame that article? Because in the piece itself, the wage is actually flexible, at least the real wage is.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
