The following is a conversation with Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, professor at CUNY, and columnist at the New York Times. His academic work centers around international economics, economic geography, liquidity traps, and currency crises. But he also is an outspoken writer and commentator on the intersection of modern day politics and economics, which places him in the middle of the tense, divisive, modern day political discourse. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I do my best to stay away from politics of the day because political discourse is filled with a degree of emotion and self assured certainty that to me is not conducive to exploring questions that nobody knows the definitive right answer to. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| In this, I appreciate your patience and support. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Get Cash App from the App Store and Google Play and use the code LEXPODCAST. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I mean, somebody once once said that his ideal was slightly imaginary Sweden. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| What about competition? Do you see the value of competition? What may be its limits? Oh, competition is great when it can work. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Why does competition not work in healthcare? Oh, there's a long list. I mean, there's a famous paper by Kenneth Arrow from 1963, which still holds up very well, where he kind of runs down the list of things you need for competition to work well. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| My question for you is, how hard is it to be well informed about anything, whether it's healthcare, or any kind of purchasing decisions, or just life in general in this world? Oh, information, you know, it varies hugely. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And then some of it is just too hard to understand. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So speaking about news and not being able to trust certain sources of information, how much disagreement is there about, I mentioned utopia, perfection in the beginning, but how much disagreement is there about what utopia looks like? Or is most of the disagreement simply about the path to get there? Oh, I think there's two levels of disagreement. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And there's no objective way to choose between those. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| There's a range of legitimate dispute. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| What are some metrics you think about that you keep in mind, like the Gini coefficient, but really anything that measures how good we're doing, whatever we're trying to do? What are the metrics you keep an eye on? Well, I'm actually I'm not a fan of the Gini coefficient, not because what is the Gini coefficient? Yeah, the Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality, and it is commonly used because it's a single number. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It turns out that life satisfaction is a better measure than happiness. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| No, actually Denmark wins these days. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| But look, I think by and large, there's a bit of a pornography test. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| There are a lot of virtues to America, but there's a level of harshness, brutality, an ability for somebody who just has bad luck to fall off the edge, that is really, shouldn't be happening in a country as rich as ours. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| The United States is the only place where citizens can actually fail to get basic healthcare because they can't afford it. It's not hard to do. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Most countries have substantial safety... |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Long term care for the elderly is a very hit and miss thing. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Even in European countries with very generous safety nets, people work and innovate and do all of these things. And there's a lot of evidence now that lacking those basics is actually destructive, that children who grow up without adequate health care, without adequate nutrition, are developmentally challenged.

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