[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi it's Jeff producer of conversations with Tyler in the spirit of Thanksgiving we're bringing you another bonus episode this time it's Mark Zuckerberg interviewing Tyler Cowan and stripe CEO Patrick Collison about the need to better understand the nature and causes
of progress now this was the final interview in Mark's year-long series on technology and society and you can also find it on Mark's Facebook page so as you're sitting around the Thanksgiving table this week take a tip from Tyler and Patrick instead of politics talk about the paper
from du and benergy that found coaching improved the effectiveness of foreign aid or Marvel at how we built the Golden Gate and Bay Bridge simultaneously in 4 years how fast did you get your Thanksgiving feast ready [Music] enjoy conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George
Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at radis.org and for more conversations including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com [Music] hey everyone and welcome to the next in
our our series of discussions on the internet and technology and progress and some of the social issues that we face we've done a number of these this year focused on topics ranging from regulation to journalism to uh biomedical research and today we're going to focus on a discussion around
what progress is itself and how we might study it and what what academic work is already going on in this space and what we we might think about to look at examples from the past to uh determine how we can make more progress for Humanity going forward so today joining me is uh Tyler Cowan who is studies
economics at George Mason University and is also the co-author of the popular blog U marginal Revolution and uh Patrick Collison who's the co-founder and CEO of stripe uh which is a pretty amazing company that does a that basically does payments and economic infrastructure for the internet so you
know we've been talking about these topics for a while now um I mean this is something that that you guys have both studied um in a lot of depth and you know you recently wrote an oped together I think it was in the Atlantic about how we might have a a new or different
approach for studying the nature of progress and uh in order to kind of mine historical examples to figure out how we can we can make more progress in the future so I think it would probably be interesting just to start off by you know hearing how you're thinking about that and and um the basic summary and
what what feedback you've gotten on the the piece that you wrote sure uh so I think um one of the most important sort of facts uh you know in the world and sort of the history of civilization to date uh is that the rate of progress has not been constant right uh if you look
at sort of what happened in the world say between you know zero and you 1700 1800 thereabouts uh the rate of progress by of any major metric uh in terms of you know average income or uh average life expectancy or infant mortality you know any of these measures uh it was
either sort of constant or only very improving at a very slow rate right and then something happened something changed around of 1700 1750 you know the Industrial Revolution the enlightenment uh some sort of you know the sort of the Advent of kind of you know something approximating modern science um and uh
once that happened so many things started to get better together right uh uh again you know incomes improved life expectancies increased we started to discover really fundamental knowledge about the world we started to invent really important new technologies and these things have you know over the last
couple of centuries really diffused around the world right so that's you know very interesting and important and you know the the intuition I think and the the thing that sort of really struck um uh or you know has been sort of a focus of both of ours uh for the past
couple years is thinking about well um you know we sort of transitioned from this regime where we weren't making much progress to one where we you know have been making much more is is this the best we can do right uh or you know is there something that looks you know compared to the status quo today you
know so much better again that it it's sort of like the status quo exente you know before the Industrial Revolution and uh you know as you look around the world today uh you know on the one hand we see the tremendous importance of the progress that we are generating right
and that you know for example uh the number of people in you know extreme poverty is declined by you know more than a billion people since I was born but on the other hand uh there's a lot of suggestive evidence that maybe we aren't as effective um at generating progress today uh as uh as we have been
in the past and so you know for example if you look at the US uh sort of productivity growth at mid-century or say between you know 1920 1970 was maybe about sort of 1.9 % a year now most economists think it's much lower you know maybe around sort of you know 0 4%
a year something like that so we're we're at least by economic measures generating progress more slowly than we used to be now whatever the rate at which we're kind of making progress or or or sort of you know uh figuring out ways to do things better today whatever that absolute level is it would be much
better if we were you know doing it more effectively uh if we were able to solve the most important problems that face us today in you know 50 years and 100 years rather than 500 years or a thousand years right and so the meta question that you know we're really interested in
is how how does progress happen how do we discover useful knowledge how is that diffused and how can we do it better it's important to understand I think how much this is an invisible crisis so if you have a growth rate that is one percentage Point lower over the course
of a bit more than a century uh you could have been three times richer with the higher growth rate that would be something like the difference between the United States today and Mexico so by having a lower rate of productivity growth in no given year does it feel that bad but two three Generations later
you're much worse off it's harder to pay off your debts harder to solve climate change harder to address a whole host of problems yeah so before we we kind of dive into you know how we could improve this you know what do you say to the the people who question um whether all this
progress is is positive I mean certainly as we make progress in one area it creates issues in other areas I mean that's been a big topic that you know I focused on in my work at Facebook over the last few years um and a lot of these challenge discussions but how how does that fit into the overall framework of
of uh what you're studying and and in this discipline here you know I don't think economic growth is always a positive but the world in America has serious problems I would rather address those problems with more resources rather than fewer whether it is paying off our debts addressing climate change
fixing Global poverty and knowledge matters too so there's a recent paper by Esther Duo and Abit boner and they find if you give foreign aid combined with coaching the rate of return to that intervention is maybe 100 to 400% now that that may or may not be true but
what I would like to see as a world where everyone is obsessing over that claim over that debate working very hard to figure out that it's true that should be on the front page people should be talking about it you know calling up their siblings my goodness I just read this what are we going to do do you
agree or not yeah and and look while again I think it's sort of unequivocally the case that sort of certain kind of progress in certain places or you know to a certain extent you know can have harms and externalities and all the rest and you know a really important part of
progress is figuring out how do we mitigate those how do we solve them and so on you know I think climate change is probably kind of the foremost Global example today but I think it's really important or it is easy for sort of us sitting here in the Bay Area in California I think to
undervalue uh the prosperity and the kind of uh uh wealth that we've been able to generate over the past couple you know again uh hundred years uh and so you know since I was born for example global life expectancy has increased by about 6 years um infant mortality has has fallen by more than
50% uh uh again I I mentioned the statistic about you know the number of people who uh uh have left extreme poverty this is incredibly important right and so I think uh you know there there's a you we're not the first people to say it but there is a moral imperative to this kind of progress and
we shouldn't lose sight of that fact yeah I agree I I just I think it's important you know a lot of these things are not uniform and I mean you know from running a company that you know when you look at averages and anything it hides a lot of issues I your example on um the
rates of poverty going down I think is an interesting one in this because you know what a lot of people don't particularly want to talk about these days is that most of the uh benefit of of people coming out of poverty has happened in China and a lot of other places around the world some in some
places poverty is actually increased um so I generally agree with the premise and I think studying this stuff will will generally help us to make more progress in those places I mean that may be a good example because perhaps looking at some of the examples of what
has done well in China could be applied to other places where um where there have been issues but before we dive into the discussion on this I I just wanted to make sure that we didn't um You Know cover this in a way that that comes across as if like every step forward
comes without a cost um and I'm sure as we talk through the different the the different examples I mean that that'll come up as well yeah well and we should emphasize that uh you know when when we sort of talk about the phenomenon of progress I think GDP or GDP per capita is is a sort of um pretty good first
approximation measure of it and it correlates strongly with many of the things I think we care about but they're definitely not the same thing and I think uh an important you know question for anybody kind of you know interested in this area to think about is well how
should we Define progress right um and what are the you know better and worse kinds of it and again in GDP we we kind of have a you know relatively effective metric we can use across countries but you know there already is interesting work on what might better measures be and I think that's you know really
important to study let's say you want to improve the lot of people in West Virginia one growth enhancing way of doing that is to make it easier to build say in Washington DC in the Bay area right now to move from West Virginia say to Meno Park it's extraordinarily expensive you can't just pick up and
show up here and hope to get a job washing dishes the way one might have done in America 50 years ago so by having more building more economic growth also more GDP it would increase more opportunity so economic growth and opportunity they do tend to be correlated and sometimes the problem is
we don't have enough growth not that we have too much MH and and look not to hammer this point too strongly but you know you didn't invite the the two people who wrote the pece about progress here um uh yeah and I would most of the time actually talking about that I just want to make sure that we hit that up
front so so what are you when you're talking about you know there are a lot of people who already are studying this in different ways right there historians economists um when you're thinking about what the field is um when you're talking about um trying to create a new science
of of studying progress what more do you think needs to get done or what what do you envision on that I mean I know you have um a fund that you've put together emerging Ventures emerging Ventures and where you're you're basically finding um academics who who are studying uh
examples of of where there's of progress in the past to to start this field but I mean but what does this kind of add up to or how do you think what form does this take over time one view of mine is that not enough philanthropy is long-term oriented in this regard been influenced by your chance Zuckerberg
initiative and also in philanthropy there are too many choke points that can say no so foundations become their own bureaucracies they become very risk averse so emergent Ventures is a new kind of philanthropy there's one layer of yes or no people are encouraged to
apply if the payoff is 30 40 years down the road the attitude is great take a lot of chances uh worry about getting some winners and some risk and not expecting the median project to be something that necessarily looks good when taken to a board so that's one way that thinking in terms of progress helps
us restructure at the micro level particular decisions we're making yeah strongly agree that sort of there's a lot of really you know important work already happening across you know multiple disciplines that is relevant to these questions and you know part of what like the the the idea of there
being a new signs of progress uh that's not sort of quite you know that was the headline you know placed on the article but of not exactly what we were saying uh uh what we're arguing is that the work that's already happening should be receiving more attention and there
should be much more of it just to give a couple of quick examples uh so uh you know there's strongly suggest of evidence that we can teach management you know practices such that people can you know run firms more effectively right and so there's you know a couple of studies on this there's a good one
from some folks at Sanford they did sort of a randomized trial in India and there's a really neat one that came out I think last year from Michaela gorelli uh looking at firms in Italy and showing that like over 15 years uh after again a management training program with sort of
a a natural sort of some natural randomization that again those firms were employing more people paying more wages you know being more successful and another uh randomized trial uh in Mexico uh uh conduct over the past couple years again 600 firms and Sh that just
teaching better management practices actually makes those companies much better off if that's true that's amazing lwh hanging fruit right we should be investing much more in this area we should be figuring out which kinds of management training work better and worse than others does this generalized
to all countries how can we actually Implement and execute this in the world more broadly so that's kind to one second is uh you know if you take um you know Tyler mentioned this point about sort of uh you know Geographic Mobility right uh when you think about sort of how do we grow GDP or how do we generate
progress you know maybe kind of housing policy is not kind of the first thing we're naturally drawn to thinking about um however if if you look at the world in uh say the USA in in 19 you know 1980 about uh 40% of people when they took a new job moved somewhere else right you
know those things went together much more if you look last year about one in 10 people moved when they took a new job right and so within the US geog traffic Mobility have really declined that is in large part because uh uh the the costs of movement have have enormously
increased as housing costs have have uh uh increased especially in our most productive regions over the past couple of decades now if you look into that sort of more closely again there are sort of economists who've been studying the these questions you know quite closely over the past couple years uh
these two guys Shay and meredi published a paper um an updated version of previous paper uh this summer claiming or kind of putting forward a model showing that uh uh if if you um if if you look at the zoning restrictions that existed in the Bay Area and New York uh uh between 1964 and 2009 uh and you kind
of Imagine a counterfactual world where there was sort of much more Supply elasticity in these places we built way more homes uh here in the Bay Area and in New York in in that counterfactual world uh average US income would be in their model $3,700 per person higher again not just
for people in those places but across the country right that that's a huge effect size and so again we should be stud these questions much more closely and we should be figuring out okay well you know if that's true what are the what are the policy prescriptions you
know how do we actually go act upon that it's amazing low hang fruit and then just to give a third one you know I mean as those two examples show funding science is incredibly important um but there's surprisingly little work about how we should be funding science and how can we do that most effectively and
actually sort of beneath the surface uh it's been changing a tremendous amount you know here in the US over the past couple of decades uh and you know there are important you know policy questions is is that a good thing and so for example uh in 1980 uh 12x more dollars
uh uh or the NIH spent 12x more dollars on researchers under 40 than researchers over 50 so you know they they predominantly funded younger people today they spend 5x more dollars on people over 50 than under 40 and so it's really inverted it's kind of gone from you know primarily funding the these
these young investigators to this kind of gerontocracy where they're they're funding older scientists maybe that's good maybe that's bad you know I don't know but that seems like a very important question to answer and so you know part of our point in arguing for progress studies is when you really look
at the kind of the expansive version of this of all the different things that can sort of uh uh uh you know influence our ability to discover new useful knowledge to to generate economic growth the the set of questions is super Broad and we should be trying to kind of synthesize this effectively yeah so
let's go deep on medical research here for a second because I think this is an area that you you wrote this paper about before about how the progress of of in the field might be slowing and and like you mentioned I mean the Chan Zuckerberg initiative the the philanthropy that um
I I run with my wife and a big focus of it is on medical research and and trying to we have this aspirational goal that we want to help build tools that can help scientists cure prevent or manage all diseases by the end of this century and basically the math of how you get there is you know starting about a
hundred years ago call it um you know there was really this uptick in in in um medical research where you know we started doing randomized control experiments treating it more like an experiment irental science um since around that time the average life expectancy has increased by a quarter of
a year every year um relatively linearly um it's there's no guarantee of course that that continues but um if we were able to have that continue then that would imply that by the end of the century we will generally have had to have either cure prevent or or be able
to manage most um if not all of the diseases that um that that we're aware of now so there there's some Trend that suggests that this should be reasonable and the approach that we're taking in the work at czi is largely about building tools to help compound the rate
of of um of science so you know what we see is that um you know like you mentioned the the government is is the largest and most important funer of Science and you know it's it basically funds the the whole establishment of of um scientists across the the country but the grants tend to be very um very
spread out across a lot of people um they're not typically put into kind of big infrastructure Ure projects and that's the niche that we felt through czi that we can maybe help um to fill is you know investing instead of you know a million dollars in a lab um put a hundred million dollar or a couple
hundred million dollars over time into building up really important scientific assets for the community like helping to to to fund um scientists to go put together this human cell Atlas almost like the you kind of think about it as it's almost like the periodic table of elements but for biology of all the
different kinds of cells and um in the human body and the goal is just you know if if you look throughout the history of science at least you know most major scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new tools that help people look at things in different ways and so the theory is kind
of similar to what you're going at of how do you increase the compounding rate of progress but there are a couple of different directions that I think we we could go in here I mean one is I'm curious what you've seen in in in your studies in the space um that suggest to
you that the rate of progress is actually slowing and I'm also curious what are the examp that that you've seen overall of how the science studying progress would potentially lead to um a different approach or different portfolio of how um this kind of work gets done so I don't know where you want
to start with that but there's a lot here to do here's what worries me and it should worry you too so as you mentioned us life expectancy is basically going up in linear fashion but if you look at expenditures we used to spend a few percentage points of GDP on Healthcare
and now it's about 18% so we've gone up to 18% and we're not even boosting the rate I'm not saying it's the fault of any one group of people but something has gone wrong there's some kind of Last Mile problem you can turn to the newspapers and read all kinds of fantastic stories new research new ideas
new tools but when the rubber hits the road people living longer we're spending more and more and more for exactly the same returns so if that Trend continues and you see a similar Trend in many areas also crop yields feeding the world other areas the question becomes you
know where does all the progress go so the idea that you need to look at each structure and encourage more risk-taking better decisions with the money less bureaucratization maybe in some cases more centralization whatever it takes but that there is this invisible crisis
and people are distracted by the headlines about crisper whatever but actually what you get for the money performances so so I think yeah and so what we wrote in this article a year ago uh uh about sort of you know what's going on in science you know if if you look at it um uh by sort of the the most
kind of macroscopic measures right like the the number of phds in the US like kind active phds has grown by you know well actually you take all the microscopic measures they've all grown by that a factor of between a 50 and 100 right number of phds number of papers published every year just like actual
dollars instead of science funding and so on so uh if if you know in in a very stylized way if we look at of the first half of the 20th century as compared to the second half just like way more kind of input uh in the second half of of of the century um and uh and and again not
by not by kind of 50% but by kind of orders of magnitudes and so then I think the question for all of us would be well uh you know in which half of the century did we get you know more out in terms of kind of useful scientific knowledge you know and whichever we think kind of did
better you know to what degree right and you know again that's that's a very difficult question to answer you know how how do you weigh kind of scientific knowledge and so you have to kind of look at it I think in of various applied context like life expectancy or semiconductors or as Tyler mentioned
crop yields or you know whatever um and I think what's interesting and you know should be concerning is that for almost every conceivable s of Applied measure we seem to be getting you know at best constant returns but that's really bad because you know we we've exponentially
increasing inputs and we've you know constant return outputs uh like that that that is kind of almost by definition not a process that we can sustain now you know there's two I think broad possibilities there one is it's just getting intrinsically harder to to to generate progress and to kind of
discover these things and you know who knows maybe some significant amount of that is true but the other possibility is it's somehow more institutional right it's more kind of contingent it's more sociological um and again we do have suggestive evidence that you know our
institutions well they're certainly kind of older than they used to be uh and they're also kind of as in the kind of Ni funding example there were you know changes happening beneath the surface and so on that you know may or may not be good so I don't think we should write off the possibility that it's actually
you know it's not inevitable and that there is or there do exist alternate forms of of organization where things would work better and again if we sort of you know dig a little bit into the evidence there you know you see things like uh uh um there's there's a science funding program that obviously you're
familiar with called HGI uh uh the Howard H kind of Medical Institute um uh if they give grants sort of along the lines of sort of how CCI does where you know their longer term uh they're kind of more open-ended and so on uh Pier as at MIT wrote a paper a couple years ago
and uh trying to look at uh well if you take you know ostensibly identical scientists who you know some of whom receive HMI grants some of whom don't uh you know how much more successful are the HGI recipients uh and you know he concluded they're about twice as likely to produce a kind of top 1% paper by B
citation count again that that that's really suggestive they top 1% if they do what they're about twice as likely to to produce a top 1% paper by citation count if they oh sorry sorry if they receive an hhmi Grant um well that might be correlation not causation yeah so so so
he he tries to they do get a lot of the best people yeah yeah so so so he tries to control for that and you know he's a reasonable you know methodology for us but but some some of it could could totally be sort of that just you know selection effect but again I think it's
very suggestive that hm maybe there are things we could do uh that would uh you know better enable uh this kind of uh this kind of Discovery and you know this might seem like sort of a bit of a red herring but I think it is kind of uh uh you know again suggestive uh that in many other domains where we can
objectively assess progress It's very clear that our productivity has fallen off a cliff uh and for reasons that we can be pretty sure are not that it's it's getting intrinsically harder and so you know for example when New York decided to build a Subway in 1900 right
uh uh you know they decided to build it 4.7 years later they opened 23 subway stations and in 2019 they spent just over a billion dollars doing so right so 23 stations just over a billion dollars when New York decided to build a Second Avenue subway uh in you know year 2000 17 years later they opened three
stations uh and they spent $ and a half billion doll doing so right H and so kind of our productivity in um in in Subway construction has you know at least in New York you know decreased by a factor of 40 uh you know here in the Bay Area we decided to build the Golden Gate Bridge the Golden Gate Bridge and
the uh the Bay Bridge starting in you know 1933 both projects finished within four years and then to celebrate it we decided to build a man-made Island and we built that Island in 18 months um and I don't I haven't tried um uh but you know I would wager that if one tried to
build a new island in San Francisco it would be difficult to do so today you know in in in 18 months um and so we and I mean California you know you have highspeed rail where when when you know France decided to build uh you know the tgv it's it's it it's highspeed rail it
opened the first line after 5 years uh California started pursuing highspeed rail 11 years ago they forecast we forecast being finished in 2033 so we project a 25-year project but of course that's a projection it'll probably end up being much longer still right so um you know you know this is a domain where
it's hard to imagine that getting INF or excuse me the building infrastructure has gotten intrinsically harder right like the the atoms aren't physically heavier than they used to be right uh and so clearly there's something instit sociological going on with infrastructure you know Larry Summers
talks about the idea of the sort of sort of promiscuous distribution of the veto power uh and just you know how much harder it is to sort of get things done in as much as that's true then there's the question of well uh you know have other institutions have other sort of
progress generating mechanisms in our society have they also got less efficient uh and if so you know what can we do about it so as an aside um if if you're watching this Patrick collects these examples of um of of of project historical projects that went fast and that you can't imagine how they went
that fast so if you Google his website he has like a a whole a whole list of these that I think is is is pretty interesting and compelling when you when you go through all of them yeah I I think it's just important to understand uh how effectively we as a um as a species you know how effectively we can
do things when we're organized the right way humanity is pretty amazing uh and when you know possibilities are unlocked when you know efficacy is enabled we can do great things sometimes it is a matter of actual will so for the last 40 years getting around for almost all Americans
it is slower and before that we had a period from 1800 say in 1970 when it got quicker and quicker and quicker and now even flying in airplanes for most people is slower traffic is worse those are solvable problems Manhattan should have congestion pricing and a stiffer form of it than they're likely to opt for
so the notion that people have lost the ability to imagine a future much different and much better than what they know to me is one of the most worrying aspects of where we are now yeah and it shows up quantitatively I mean if you look at sort of the uh the percentage of
Americans who think that their kids' lives uh will be you know better than theirs that has been in sort of monotonic decline uh well not strictly monotonic but you know generally declining uh uh since World War II and so on an empirical basis Americans are getting less hopeful about you know
their Futures their kids' Futures and that's a really bad thing because it can be kind of an autoc cataliz process and a self-fulfilling prophecy and we're supposed to be the most optimistic forward-looking country the data on France how many people think their kids
will be worse off that's much more worrying yet and there may be a self-fulfilling prophecy to this if you think the future won't be so great you'll invest less you won't work as hard you'll contract you're risk-taking and you end up with the kind of Social and economic malaise and indeed you see
falling rates of economic growth in most of the western world so curious how you would think about going about and studying these kind of organizational changes so going back to biomedical science for example just because this is an area that we do a lot of work in um you know the the woman who runs our who
runs CCI science initiative Corey bargman she's a a very renowned scientist and she has this theory about that a lot of the granting process that NIH does but also hhmi it it it basically encourages very individualistic work right you give people grants um they work on their own
you're not incentivizing people to work together people actually want to work together they want to coordinate um and when I was talking about the human cell atas um you know a lot of the issue there that needed to get dealt with was um you know a lot of people were working
on cell atlases for different parts of the body okay the liver cell Atlas the you know whatever and but they were all in different data types and and formats so that way you couldn't compile a holistic thing so a lot of what she did and in the work of CCI was basically um helping to coordinate so that way
when these grants were given everything like the teams work together the data types were similar so that we all added up to a bigger thing and that certainly seems like one of many theories that one could have for how you could organize this stuff better but there's this
question of how much of progress whether that's something that one could have determined um just through historical data versus this the type of thing that you need people or or the government or foundations to go out and just run different experiments and see see how this works and I'm curious how you think
about in terms of studying this how much of this is like is history and and kind of History of Science um Based on data that's already out there versus we should just try different models of things and and encourage more creativity and and um in in more competition and
try different things it's striking to me if you look at American universities the list of the top places in 1920 and the list today it's completely the same except we've added on California otherwise no change top 50 universities if you look at it's very different companies in of course even from 1980
it's the decade over decade the list of the top 10 companies by market cap almost completely turns over procedures for tenure in the top 5050 research universities almost exactly the same whatever you think of those there's something gone wrong in the sector there's not enough experimentation with
how you reward people more schools should experiment with a different kind of tenure or reward people more on the basis of practical impact and again you might object to any particular solution but the extent to which experimentation has died at the institutional level to
me is striking and to S underscore that point uh if you look at the top 25 universities uh in the world uh today or you know the times is ranking you know there's lots of them and uh seven of the top 25 uh are American universities that were started in a single 30-year period
between 1861 and 1891 uh and if you look at well where are those universities come from and you know what were the people behind them thinking they were very deliberately sort of specifically reform minded uh you know and progress minded absolutely they thought well you know obviously academic institutions
exist you know Harvard Yale and so on were you know already around but they saw the success of the the German sort of research University model they saw kind of the possibilities of the US and they saw you know at least what they thought was kind of required for the
future and you know they very deliberately you know decided we will try something different uh and again that yielded what you know now seven of the top 25 universities today um so I think it kind of strongly you know kind of empirically underscores the value of the kind of experimentation you're
you're talking about and you know fully agree I think we should be historically informed But ultimately you know a certain amount of sort of commitment decision and just willingness to experiment is going to be required the other thing I think your your point about the teams gets set is there are
these really um uh thought-provoking examples of just like productive cultures through history right like if you look at Vienna uh 188 80 to you know 1940 or something you know you have in so many different fields uh you have you know people who did this sort of
incredibly formative work you know You' Clint and You' maler and you had Mack in physics and you had of course you know Austrian economics and you know fun mes and Hayek and all the rest and uh youd Freud and youd Vicken Stein you know like Vienna was sort of amazing in this period and you know when you kind of dig
into the specific stories you realize a lot of these people knew each other and and and they were sort of inspired by each other they kind of give credit to each other for for you know again across multiple disciplines uh sort of you know different parts of their thinking or if
you look at Edinburgh uh so during you know the Scottish uh uh Enlightenment uh you know again sort of a tiny place I mean Edinburgh at the time say you know 1780 was was like the size of Santa Cruz right uh and yet you get uh you know sort of modern economics uh from Smith
you know you you've Hume uh you have you know the birth of modern geology uh you know amazing literature poetry and so on uh and uh and so clearly there was something you know extent in Edinburgh in 1780 that was you know not there in Dublin in 1780 uh and I think you know obviously it's hard to pin down like
what was that but at the same time you know the difficulty in defining it doesn't mean it wasn't there or it's not important I would say this I'm sitting here with two University dropouts that's notable to me the Bay Area is our modern Vienna you know Bravo to the Bay Area
but we're not working nearly hard enough to build other new viennas and other places and I don't really think it's quiet Manhattan anymore it's a wonderful City amazing place to go but it is not a world leader for ideas in the way it was say the 1920s through the 1980s people study this right I mean so what I mean
what have been the main things that people have learned so far from studying Vienna or Edinburgh I don't think there's a rich literature of lessons from those places obviously Lots has been written about them uh that they're you great historical accounts I've I've
enjoyed reading them uh but I I mean well it's an intrinsically very difficult thing to do to figure out well you know which things causally mattered you know and and these things you know there's a certain degree to which they might be kind of um you know overdetermined uh and so I think it's
very hard to you you don't have counterfactuals obviously you can't run trials and so I think it is a very difficult question to answer uh and I think you know for understandable reasons people studying these questions are reluctant to you know take definitive stances that you know this is
What mattered uh in in 1900 Vienna but one lesson I would say the Scottish islands people move to Edinburgh right uh Vienna you have Jews coming in from the pal of settlement the Bay Area people coming from all over the world and indeed you're from Ireland so immigration immigration is not a
guarantee of things going well but the bringing together of different ideas and cultures and the new Clash of opposing perspectives has been correlated with a lot of these VI is in the the yeah world history very true although I'm pretty sure that in 1900s uh Paris had more foreigners than Vienna like I think it
was like 2% in Vienna so forer if you go from the Scottish islands to Edinburgh 1740 that's a huge difference it's a bigger difference maybe than you know Mexico to Los Angeles today if you're thinking about what kind of work to fund in terms of of studying historical progress what's your
framework for figuring out where to even begin studying cuz I mean what you're what you're talking about here is um is basically studying the economic and and scientific um result of immigration which is obviously a massively socially important debate that's you know the
center of a lot of political debates and has been for a long time so you know from one perspective it would be very it's it's sort of surprising that it wouldn't have been studied in in more detail to to understand um the the impact of it um but that's very different from kind of the biomedical
science type stuff that we were talking about a second ago do you have a framework in your head for how you um would would think about or prioritizing studying in different areas or is it mostly just about finding really sharp people who um have new ideas and and
funding them to do different kinds of work or how do you think about that overall people who are curious people who have bold Ambitions people who have what I call stamina they just don't ever stop uh people who are working in productive small groups that may be through WhatsApp in fact or it could be
their next to neighbors their colleagues at a university when those say four items come together then I think you have possibly what is a very good funding decision and I would take a lot of chances on those people not worry too much about the micromanaging and let Talent rip and let groups form and see
what happens got it so it's it's very much like entrepreneurship in that way you're betting on the person more than but also the vision right there has to be a vision and there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who are not curious so for intellectual progress to
to really put curiosity very highly as part of my philosophy yeah and um want to be kind of um careful here we you on the one hand uh not only sort of do we acknowledge that an immense amount of you know very important insightful work you know has already been created uh and
you know it's that work that to a large degree has I think inspired you know both both of our viewpoints um uh in that you know for example uh uh the paper sort of Tyler mentioned about um you know declining research productivity in in uh in semiconductors crop yields and you know a couple of other fields
that was done fairly close to here you know that is work squarely relevant to these questions that that I think is is you know really important and we may not be here in the same way without it on the other hand it is simultaneously true that major um sways of these questions
really are surprisingly underinvestigated and so again just to to return to biomedical funding and the NIH um as far as I can tell there there are no book BS uh assessing how well is the NIH working and I don't have a strong view on on the answer to that question but I I do have a strong view
on the importance of knowing uh and which parts of the NH are working better and worse and in as much as the NH is changed over the last couple of decades was the old NH better or the new one like this stuff is so important and so while it's the case that there's a huge amount of good research happening today
with you know fantastic researchers in a sense there aren't enough of them uh and a lot of the central questions are still unanswered yeah interesting do you think so you were talking a minute ago about the explosion and costs in healthare and and right now I think one of the
defining aspects of of the moment that we're in is a lot of the basic costs of living for a lot of people are have just increased a lot right where you know the the story that we tell about our society is that okay you have technology and you have competition it drives down prices
um so you know if you if you bought um a TV today if you if you bought a TV from you know a 10-year-old TV today it would cost you know 5% of what it cost 10 years ago um so clearly the value and and and efficiency has increased a lot uh there but then in things that matter so much like healthare um education uh
rent um those things have have generally just increased right and and in like the the normal dynamics that you would be hoping would play out um aren't and to some degree for the quality of life for a lot of people the increases in those costs um may even be dwarfing all the other advances and everything El
absolutely so do you think that that is that those things are all related or or do you think I mean I I think you used the phrase cost disease right when when um when referring to you know the the cost explosion of things like healthcare and education um student debt uh and and
rent um do you think that that's a different type of problem or do you think that that is fundament mentally related to um the rate of progress in um in biom medicine as an example I think there are common features to these problems though each one is different restrictions on Entry is one highly
bureaucratized institutions sometimes a lot of third-party payment which may be required in the case of catastrophic health care but it nonetheless has distorting effects areas where people are very strong moral feelings I think we often make worse decisions about uh
we're not analytical enough and you put all of those together but I would stress say Healthcare if you go to Singapore Healthcare there I think it's about 4% of GDP they have slightly higher life expectancy than we do their system is by no means perfect but we can see through
comparative analysis there are ways of doing this better the nimi problem cost of living getting an apartment in Japan it is mostly solved because building in Japan tends to be regulated at higher levels than the city or the county so more gets built living in Japan is cheaper the cost of renting an apartment
so often we kind of know the answers we we shy away from really focusing on a concerted effort to get to doing them in this country agree with all of that and I would just underscore the the entry costs aspect and the entry costs aren't always or or they I think take different
forms right and that sort of empirically the entry cost of forming a new University uh are really high but that that's not because you know there there's a kind of formal toll you have to pay it's it's it's not it's not like zoning where there are kind of deliberate specific uh kind of legal
restrictions that you know prohibit you from doing so um but but just as a practical matter you know sociologically institutionally accreditation Dynamics who knows it it's apparently almost impossibly difficult to create a a successful new University today and so I well I think answering
the cost disease question is uh one of the most important sort of subcomponents in in in this broader question of you know what is it that enables our progress and at an overarching level it's just surprising to me that we don't have sort of more definitive um and uh and clear answers there Alex tabac a
colleague of Tyler wrote a long paper on exactly last summer um and you know there are other papers H uh you know analyzing the also analyzing the question but it's a surprisingly sparse literature uh you know Alex's list of citations was not that long uh and you know he had some suggestions a you know
what the underlying ideology might be um maybe he's right maybe he's wrong but again that that's it's to your point it's one of the most pressing questions uh you know for American Society for Global Society in 2019 um we really have to know what's happening and and you
know to return to something Tyler said earlier part of our hope you know it's not to kind of promote any specific solution any specific um I don't know aspect of it but rather that you know even though this is not what's kind of focally Central in the headlines today it should be and as we think of what the
world is going to look like in 50 years or 100 years it plausibly more than anything else is going to determine the shape of that as an entrepreneur what is it you find most striking about America's dysfunctional economic sectors because you intersect with them all the
time right yeah I mean I I would want to see this get studied more but um so there were just so many different factors and I think part of what is is a little bit confusing is that the things that are making Healthcare so expensive they may have some fundamental link to
the things that make um College tuition so expensive but um but on its surface it seems like there there are also more approximate causes that are quite different you know I mean so with with college tuition the fact that okay it's really expensive so then we do more um to subsidize the cost of it and then by
doing so we're not providing any pressure on colleges to uh to make it more efficient and then the cost just goes up further is a pretty different Dynamic than um than what's going on with Healthcare where um where basically Americans want to know that if someone in their family gets sick they're going
to be able to get every treatment possible um in order which which ends up you know I mean I'm sure you've seen all the stats on this that you know half of the health care cost that someone incurs or in the last 6 months of their life um and that's I guess part of what you're
saying is an American moral value which is that um you know we believe that you should do everything you can to to help Sonu sick whereas in a lot of other countries um I don't know what Singapore's situation is but a lot of the ones that are often cited as more efficient Health Care Systems um don't
have that approach they they say okay okay if if if someone in your family has um this form of cancer um we'll do these two treatments and then we're done and you know part of that is because they may not be able to incur the level of um of debt as a country that the US can so
they may just have to make that trade-off but it it creates all these Downstream Dynamics where okay now if if you as a society are willing to say um okay we're going to have two treatments for for this kind of cancer not do not try all seven things then now you know France can go for example negotiate with
the drug companies and say all right I'm only going to support the two that are the most cost effective and the other ones are out to dry whereas in the American system um you you don't have that kind of negotiating leverage so it seems like they're very different things
but I kind of intuitively it seems like at their root there should be some commonalities and I would be very interested to to kind of to understand that in more detail I'm I'm curious why you know from from what you're saying about so that the literature is sparse um on C disease in particular yeah why
do you think more people aren't studying this I mean given that this is just such a central thing in the lives of most people right it's I mean the cost of living in cities um has gone up so much we have a whole generation of students I think the the total student debt is now
um almost $2 trillion right I think it was 1.7 the last stat that I saw and of course Healthcare is is um you know the number of people in the country who are within one issue of being bankrupt um is is just kind of Staggering so well Economist what's preventing people from
studying this I wouldn't say anything's preventing them the incentive is to build a brick and to build a brick that can survive scrutiny by referees the incentive is not to build a building in most cases biomedicine actually is often different uh but in the social sciences so there's so many bricks out there and
so people want to say oh we're already studying this it's correct the bricks are there and the millions but the bricks and the buildings are a different thing but I have a question for you if I may be allowed go for it what is it you would most like to see from academics
and I I don't mean research on social media I mean America the world what do you want although I would like more research abely that's fine no look I I think that the these issues on exploding costs and why these systems aren't aren't working the way that they're supposed to for people is probably one
of the most pressing questions I when I think about you know our work over the next decade and it's like what are we going to do that's going to fundamentally make people's lives better um there's a lot that we can do but it's it but if these problems continue at the
rate that they're going at it's actually quite hard for me to imagine how we could do enough good to overcome the increase in costs that people are incurring at things that are so fundamental um so you know we're working on them in in in kind of in somewhat different ways right I think healthcare
is difficult because it is so inherently political for the because it touches on moral values right if if you want to have a difference in approach of how we treat the last six months of people's lives that's something that's more of a democratic question than a than a
technocratic one I think um people need to be able to support that um so I I I don't personally feel like that's an area that that I'm going to have a huge impact a lot of people are focused on that but the area that I do think we can make a big impact is on long-term science research so if you can just make
it more efficient to cure prevent or manage diseases then that over the long term should really be the answer for bringing healthc care costs in line not in the next 10 years but maybe um you over the next 50 years um I'd like to see a solution before that so I'd love
to see more studying of of the healthcare part of this but on the science side I'm I'm quite optimistic about that on housing I don't know I mean it's you know there's always the question of of what which forces in technology end up being stronger than you like which Trends end up being
stronger so on the one hand you have um this giant mismatch of opportunity where people feel compelled to move to cities uh because that's kind of where a lot of the jobs are but then there's not enough building of supply of housing so rent just increases and then that means that
even though people are going and doing higher value things their lives actually aren't benefiting as much from that because so much of their costs are just of of the value that they're generating is just going to housing because rent is is getting so high so I mean what historically what have people done I
mean we invented cars right and and um freeways that way people could live further out you know I mean maybe um you know maybe something like the hyperloop could extend suburbs like five times as far so you know that could make it so someone could live quite further away and that that that that would good right
if you can increase the effective radius of a city um that's one way to alleviate constraints political constraints or or um concerns about people building things so that way you can get more Supply bring the cost down but you know I I I happen to have a more I happen to think
a different thing is probably the right solution um you know in 2019 it's a lot easier to move bits around than it is atoms so rather than people moving inventing a new hyperloop or or cars um I tend to think that the set of Technologies um around whether it's augmented reality or virtual reality or
video presence that just let people be where they want to be physically and feel present with other people wherever they they need to be to to do their job to um connect with the people they they care about um that feels to me like the better long-term solution don't make
everyone move to cities um make it so people can choose where they want to be and can get access to all the opportunities they want everyone so those are kind of it's hard for me to imagine um more important problems at least over the next pressing problems for the next decade I think over the
longer term um you know potentially climate change is is is more of an existential issue but but in terms of people's lives today I think the exploding costs from um from these areas is such a profound issue and the trend is so of control just three Qui three quick
points on that um one is um uh I think these questions are are often a little bit like the disase question I think one of the reasons that it's kind of difficult to study is because you sort of have to take this very macroscopic and potentially this very microscopic
view and so say for example in science uh if it were the case that the administrative burden on scientists had increased by say 2/3 over the last 40 years not saying it has and not and not saying that even if it has that is in fact the cause of any kind of slowdown but you know if it had that might be
quite difficult to observe because it you know it could come in the form of well that you know that um it takes you know twice as long on average for things to be approved and the forms are kind of longer and you're interrupted more and so like actually specifically diagnosing
the kind of causal Pathways I think can can really be quite tricky and I think that generalizes a lot of the fields um secondly uh to your point about sort of Technology potentially solving the adamation kind of imperative of cities I think that could be true although you know here we are in person you
know uh watching the people are watching or everywhere else very fair um uh but you know even if technology solves that I guess my wor would be that the uh sort of the socio institutional dynamics that have uh kind of ruined cities or or made them less effective or whatever um uh
probably also uh generalize and apply to other domains uh and and so we're going to suffer the cost of those same phenomena uh uh elsewhere um oh yeah yeah and what do you want to ask Mark H um well um I guess what have you learned from doing CCI uh in that I mean you launched it 5 years ago um four years
ago okay yeah um how will the next four years be different to the first four well so one of the things that we struggle with here is um these are such long-term projects right so we we talked a lot about the scientific research you we're also doing a bunch of work with
education to build um tools for teachers to do more um Project based learning more personalized learning for for kids but um basically make it so that um teachers have have tools to do the work that they want to do Mentor students and and not you know just have to have to lecture and have everyone learn at the
same Pace um so this stuff it's we're making progress in all of these areas and I think one of the meta questions in running CCI is um at what point to check in and consider evolving the direction I mean obviously there's there's minor execution things that you try to improve
along the way but I want to make sure that we have an awareness that these are fundamentally problems that we're going to be working on for 10 or 20 years um and not I think a lot of these things just kind of a consistency of approach and um in building trust is is kind of um you know more important than
constantly evaluating or potentially thrashing in science we've had the benefit of um of taking on a number of different projects right so the human cell outlas was one of the original ones now one of the next areas that we're really excited to work on is Imaging um now there's a lot of advances in
microscopy um but there are a lot of things that we still can't see um you know and and as engineers I think one of the things that um you you can probably appreciate is you know just when you're trying to debug a system you really want to like get into the code and see step through it and see
where the thing is breaking down but you know we don't really have a way today to see um a white blood cell eat a a you know a virus right it's like to like to like in in Vivo right like in in in the body um to see proteins folding live um and I think that you know there's
certain Optical levels Optical thresholds on the physics that you might not be able to get Beyond but um but between that and the advances in AI I I do think that it's possible to um give scientists new Imaging capacity um that hasn't been possible before so a lot of what we're trying to do is it's the
human cell Atlas we took an approach it was kind of very Broad and um and and collaborative and um and somewhat chaotic even in in in a way and I think we were able to learn some of the lessons from that as we're now thinking about how we organize the the Imaging project about okay maybe it would be
helpful to have more clearly established leadership um around it uh up front um you know maybe there are things that uh you know that rather than having just one one big project there are going to be areas where we can just build tools that that go into every lab um there's
one software package called napari that that um you know a lot of scientists it's like like a lot like right now there's the actual technology of microscopes is um is kind of uh a head of scientists ability to process the data so there's this weird mismatch because that kind of makes sense if
you're you know the NIH funding supports people to to H um to basically have a lab yeah tool building is not really you know subsidized or supported that well yeah but I mean if you want to have a team of ongoing software Engineers that's like okay you're going to want an
effort that's going on for a while um that's more than a couple of people um so that kind of thing I think there's a real Niche that no one is is is doing that stuff at the scale that it needs to get done so um so just pushing on both of those yeah and and there's uniform
agreement on on that particular point from almost every biomedical scientist that I speak with like two buildings under supported yeah so so I don't know I'm from a meta point I'm I'm a little wary of concluding whether that things have like which things have worked and not worked well yet um I mean certainly
not everything we're going to do is going to work that's like four years it's too early to say yeah but like but it's certainly interesting and I mean what I try to push the teams to do is make sure that the work that we're doing are things that clearly would not have happened otherwise right I think
especially in a lot of these fields and in philanthropy I think that there are a lot of potential issues with this where it's easy to um to give money to something and feel like you're doing good because you probably are doing some good but then lack the discipline to to
say okay am I doing the most good that I can right and and I think um we kind of have a responsibility to to to do that um so that's the thing that I push our team to do is develop really different theories um I'm quite confident that in education um the work that we're doing
is just stuff that that if we weren't trying it um I I don't it's not clear that like anyone else would be doing a an effort like this at scale um I feel really good about that I think in imaging um something like that is going to be similar even in in Social advocacy um we're doing a lot of work in Criminal
Justice Reform that's you know a combination of um advocacy and building tools for accountability and and working with um reform-minded prosecutors that they can be more data driven about who they try to bring charges against because I me they want to be fair you know or at least a lot of folks want to
be fair and they don't have um the data to either optimize how they they run their office or to hold um the people in there accountable so building those kind of tools can be um super helpful and I'm quite confident that if we weren't pushing on that I'm not um I I feel good
that that's like a good theory to to at least try to push on so that's what we try to do in in in in the work in the work say like the criminal justice work education biomedical what's the underlying view or Insight or experience of yours that's the common element behind those areas like how do we boil
down Mark Zuckerberg philanthropy to a smaller number of Dimensions well first of all it's not just me I do it with my wife so she actually well no well she's an important element of this because she was a teacher um actually she is a teach bu she's building a school I mean she
she spends a lot of time over there she um is a doctor so um so if you so if you're looking at the education and and and health aspects um The Domain expertise is more hers than mine um and and and and she is quite I think compelling and and insightful on on um on on some of the things that need to
get done there in terms of the approach um that may be more inspired by me in some ways where where you know it's the very long-term Focus which I think it comes from a lot of the lessons I've learned from Facebook um it's the tool building which um comes from um having
the experience building engineering teams um and it's some of the the some of what we've learned just in in kind of managing and and partnering with folks through through building the company is that it's it's a lot of what you said it's like you want to bet on the best individuals um in in different spaces
and and and give them room to run um and in managing complex projects you need to know when um something needs to be a little more directive versus when you want it to um just be an open thing that can make progress in a more chaotic way and that might be more art than science or at
least until your your field gets um fully solves all these questions but it's a um but yeah it's uh I don't know it's an interesting set of of of questions and you know I certainly the um you know I guess one one animating theme certainly is you know as our kids
grow up we want to make sure that they live better lives so it's um so these aren't things that are primarily going to benefit us if you were trying to benefit us we wouldn't be working on education I think the the um the the health um work is uh very long-term oriented if we were focused on kind of
our own health you know you'd be we'd probably be doing more um disease specific work rather than fundamental science to try to or tool building for fundamental science which might even be a level um more abstract than fundamental science to try to compound the rate of progress in science um and
then a lot of work on equality and making sure you know the the criminal justice work I think is I mean a lot of you know the way that our our country handles the stuff is just such an unfortunate outlier compared to um other countries and the amount of human capital that is locked away um is um you
know is it it's its own thing that that I think deserves I mean a lot more than studying but I mean certainly I think just improving that would be would be a big um a big advance um but I don't know it's interesting I mean this conversation is interesting because it's I think it highlights
somewhat of a of a distinction in in um I guess my approach to learning or studying these things is more the um try different things and experiment and kind of and then play it forward generate new data that doesn't exist and and see how that goes um and you know talking to you
and and and seeing the work that that you do and I guess this is probably intrinsic to being an academic too um where more of the work is is is about um you know looking at data sets that can exist and and studying what is already there rather than trying to kind of create the new data sets or approaches
um it's I mean there are two approaches that I think complement each other but are um but are actually quite different in terms of of how you you kind of approach learning about how to how to do the best work going forward well I think um uh I think there was a very important
emphasize sort of complimentarity uh where you know for any of these kind of really important questions about sort of you know how should science be organized or which kinds of policies generate the most economic growth or how one should support the diffusion of innovation or
whatever I don't think there exists kind of definitive data on that question I don't think by sort of you know just going deep in the literature you're going to come up with sort of clear answers that you know one can feel confident in in going and executing or implementing I I think of the the data
such as it exists and um and the existing findings as as kind of you know uh food for hypothesis generation uh and you know for example you know to kind of return to the the management training one like I would probably not have guessed the effect sizes would be that
large right uh and so kind if those studies hadn't been conducted I don't think you know I would have um uh you know ascribed sort of particular you know sufficient expectation value uh to the effort of maybe you know stripe going and doing something there but now because of those stud studies I think
well know perhaps there are on the margins things we could do maybe there are things that end up being sort of quite materially valuable over time I think being able to sort of Marshal those you know potentially being able to sort of encourage people to dig more sort of in in sort of particular
directions and then to you know uh combine that with a willingness to experiment uh and a willingness to you know frankly just be wrong um uh I I think kind of the synth synthesis of that um is is really power and again if you you go back and you look at the um the foundations that I think have have
you know really had uh significant impact uh uh over the you know the past 100 200 years I think it's that kind of combination uh in that you know if you look at um Warren Weaver who was the guy who is that Rockefeller who who funded Norman borlock right uh he he'd worked
with vavar bush at osrd during World War II uh he um uh I think he'd he he was famili amiliar with um a lot of the data and just kind of empirical realities of you know how different kinds of scientific and you know technological Ventures were likely to work but he was also willing to just place a bold's bet
and that you know pursue the hypothesis that Agronomy could be radically improved but you know there was no particularly strong basis you know Exane to to really have conviction in that and so I think it's all in the combination yeah interesting so I mean I'm curious
to push further on one one question I was me you asked me what I would what I would want people to be studying why don't you think people are studying the the um the cost questions as much as um as it seems like they should be or it seems like it's if these are as big of questions for society and
it certainly seems like they're issues that most people have um what what are the structural barriers that are preventing the top people in these fields from um from deciding to go study it is is it that the fields don't line up with it is that there's not funding for it is it too hard in certain ways
like what what are what are the Dynamics that are that are going on here there are many big questions it's hard to study them so at the end you have quite a speculative answer or set of hypotheses so the world as a whole isn't sure what to make of that is it a real contribution so the private return to
you as a researcher maybe is unclear so you tend to get very famous people who are quite well established looking at really big Ideas maybe a bit later and career and I'm not saying that's bad work but it's not necessarily Cutting Edge either and they've spent their
whole lives being famous and they're not necessarily in a position to actually make the Breakthrough and then younger people their incentive is to first get established and do something that is quite defensible so I think in general big questions are understudied uh the tenure system I think increasingly is
broken a lot of academics do work pretty hard but that so much of your audience is a narrowly defined set of peers who write you reference and tenure letters I think we need to change and the incentive for academics to integrate with practitioners and learn from them
and actually try doing things uh we need more of that I've often suggested for graduate school instead of taking a class everyone should be sent to a not so high income Village for two weeks they can do whatever they want just go for two weeks think about things uh no one wants to do this no one wants to
experiment with it people who do development often do it on their own but the notion that every Economist should have studied the East Asian economic Miracle the Industrial Revolution and spent two weeks or more in a poor Village it's just not how things are and I'd like to change that so how do how
does one go about changing that so if you're trying to create a network of people who who feel like they have an incentive to study this because it's going to be good for their career right and it's not and and they're going to they have a network of supportive people
who um might be reviewing the the grants or or the work that they're doing and and also think that this is important work to be done how do you how do you go about establishing that I can selfishly cite that at George Mason virtually all of our students have very directly
studied these questions and we funded a lot of them to go live other distant strange possibly poor places other departments may have more money than we do it can be done because we've done it at George Mason so I think again it's a question of the will and just the ability and desire to imagine that
things could be quite different in a sense that I think was more common in the America say of 1958 or JFK's decision to put a man on the moon than you see actually in 2019 all right is that a good place to to wrap F by me all right well thank you guys this has been a great conversation thank you thank you
Mark patri all right thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show