hello everyone today i'm honored to be chatting with nick bloom who is professor of economics at stanford i sometimes put it this way if i read a new and interesting article whether it be on productivity in science uh the productivity affirms how effective it is to work from home
the effect of uncertainty on economic output and then i think well who's the most likely economist to be a co-author or author of this article that one person is nick bloom uh nick welcome thanks very much for having me on tyler it's great to be here let's start with your piece with
co-authors on whether progress in science has slowed down and you argue that it has i would ask which are the areas where progress in science has not slowed down ooh that's a good that's a good question um wow that's not what i'm normally asked about um where has it not slowed down
i mean i guess in some senses i mean i'm not drawing in any deep personal insight here but just looking at the valuations of firms and exciting areas but there's going to be things like ai i mean i guess social media um genetic medicine if i think of what's going on at stanford
i know there's a huge explosion of work in stanford several of my friends and colleagues on campus are working on genetic medicine i mean all kinds of amazing things there actually uh wearables so one of my friends here is actually working with apple on getting devices like in the
apple watcher can check your heart rate and tell you in advance if there's complications in your heart and basically pre-warn you so i don't want to be super pessimistic that all science is dying and you're right you're exactly right in the research we looked at it we
showed for example progress on cancer had uh an acceleration in the 80s and 90s it's just it seems that field after field eventually starts to decline and there aren't enough new fields that are growing to offset the bulk of the current fields that are declining
so if progress in moore's law is slowing down progress in crop yields is slowing down cross-sectionally what is different about the areas where progress in science is speeding up i mean in some senses they're new it's just so the you know it seems pretty obvious uh you know this is why it's useful to
have economists to look seriously at the data in the sense it seems pretty obvious that individual areas are going to slow down so you know the wheel the wheel was a fantastic innovation but at some point you know progress slows down and you know the horse and car and you know core needles
and you can just go through innovation after innovation are incredibly important but at some point of course progress in those areas slows down and you mentioned moore's law so the number of transistors you can pack onto a silicon chip has been roughly doubling
every two years and that was kinda moore's law and that's been roughly hell constant actually for about 50 years it's just we've been pouring in way more scientists into that so we estimate since the 70s are 18 times more scientists just to hold that constant so in that
sense if you're putting in a lot more scientists to generate the same increase in compute power you'd say that progress is slowing down now that all seems obvious that each field is slowing down the question is are there enough new fields that the that are coming into being to offset
that and it just appears that at least since the 1950s in the us the answer is no there are new fields coming on board but just not fast enough to offset the decline so right now yeah go ahead how do we know what counts as a new field so you mentioned progress in genetics but mendel was some time ago you
mentioned the wheel but tesla now has a phenomenal valuation that's the wheel plus electricity electricity is another old sector right so aren't some of the old sectors currently the most dynamic well tesla is the electric motor i mean you're right the electric motor i think
the first cars again it's not my expertise but i think the first cars were in fact electric cars back in like 1900 um well whether you call that a new field or an old i mean a part of that is driven the progress is driven on batteries so batteries we looked at this actually
one of the there are several areas you looked at in our paper we never act so i had a paper with um chad jones john van rinder and michael webb uh looking at whether innovation productivity is slowing down and we looked at several sectors to try and evaluate this and some of them
lacked complete data on either inputs or outputs but one of them is batteries and batteries have made slow but steady progress and recently you know for example lithium-ion batteries are much more effective um but recently batteries have got to the stage where electric cars are feasible because
you need to obviously store enough energy so it's not so much the electric motor is a new idea it's that batteries make it possible if you want to ask what areas in you i would you know practically look at say patents so there's an enormous amount of debt or
stock you know new new companies floating on on the stock market uh patents are a very simple way to look at what technologies are new uh in the sense that they add new fields and you look at patterns that doesn't don't seem to patent or cite much that's gone before them
they're truly radical and there's a huge research literature on exactly this now if i understand your estimates correctly efficacy per researcher as as you measure it is falling by about five percent a year that seems phenomenally high what's the mechanism that could account for such a
rapid decline yeah so the big picture just to make sure uh everyone's on the same page is if you look in the u.s productivity growth in fact i could go back a lot further it's an interesting you go but much further and you kind of think of european and north american history so
you know in the uk that has better data there was very very little productivity growth until the industrial revolution so you know literally from the time the romans left and whatever you know roughly kind of 100 a.d until 1750 um technological progress was very slow so
sure the the british were you know more advanced at that point but not dramatically so the estimates are like point one percent a year so very low and then so the industrial revolution starts and it starts to speed up and speed up and speed up and you know technological progress in
terms of productivity growth peaks in the 1950s at something like three to four percent a year and then has been falling ever since and then you ask you know that that rate of fall uh it's five percent roughly it would have fallen if we held inputs constant but the one
thing that's been offsetting that fall in the rate of progress is we've put more more resources into it so again if you think of the u.s the number of research universities has exploded the number of firms having researched labs now thomas edison for example is the first lab
about 100 years ago but post-world war two most large american companies have been pushing huge amounts of cash into r d but despite all of that increase in inputs actually productivity growth has been slowing over the last 50 years so that's the sense in which it's harder
and harder to find ideas we're putting more inputs into labs but actually productivity growth is falling but let's say paperwork for researchers is increasing bureaucratization is increasing how do we get that to be negative five percent a year as an effect isn't it that we're throwing kryptonite
at our top people your productivity is not declining five percent a year or is it i'll hold it aside right cover it aside you know i don't yeah it's hard to tell it's hard to tell your own productivity i mean right it always feels like it i mean oddly enough there's a you know i always feel
like oh you know the stuff that i did before was better research ideas and then you know something comes up i'd say personally it's a bit it's very stochastic i find it very hard to predict it uh um increasingly comes from working with basically great and often younger
co-authors um why is it happening at the aggregate level i think there are three reasons going on so one is actually come back to ben jones uh who had a important paper which is called i think believe renaissance man so ah i mean this came out like 15 years ago or something it was
the the idea was it takes longer and longer for us to train so just in economics when i first started in economics it was standard to do a four-year phd it's now a six-year phd plus many of the phd students have done a pre-doc so they've they've done an extra two years so we're
taking three or four years longer just to get to the research frontier so there's so much more knowledge before us it just takes longer to train up so that's one story a second story i've heard is um research is getting more complicated so i remember i sat down with the former
ceo of sri stanford research institute which is a big research lab out here that's done many things for example siri came out of sri and he said increasingly it's like interdisciplinary teams now so it used to be you'd have you know one or two scientists could come up with great ideas
and now you're having to combine i can't remember what he said for siri but he said you know there are three or four different research groups in sri that have been pulled together to do it and that of course makes it more expensive and or you think of you know biogenetics you're kind of combining
biology or genetics or bioengineering there's many more cross-field areas and then finally as you say i suspect you know regulation costs various other factors are making it harder to to make you know to undertake research a lot of that's probably good so it's
less obvious i mean i'd have to look at individual regulations but health and safety for example is probably a good idea but in the same way that is almost certainly making it more expensive to run labs and in fact covid is a huge pushback from talking you know i was talking just before the
the shutdown to a good friend of mine and she said there's a big lab that has a number of animals and longer running experiments going on and in fact the shutdown has been extremely expensive and when we reopen with social distancing of course the costs are going to go up again
so these are all factors pushing on you know your point of regulation is just expensive running research but what if i argued none of those are the central factors because if those were true as the central factors you would expect the wages of scientists especially in the private
sector to be declining say by five percent a year but they're not declining they're mostly going up so doesn't the explanation have to be that scientific efforts used to be devoted to public goods much more and now they're being devoted to private goods and that's the only explanation that's
consistent with rising wages for science but a declining social output from her research for scientific productivity okay so great question there are two responses before i lose track in it so first is you know i'm about to say i forgot the fourth reason so you're right
uh a fourth factor on this could be just as a just as a simple empirical fact the share of r d in the us uh and you know europe which we have best figures on this funded by the government has been declining over time so in fact in the us uh when our data when you go back to the 60s roughly
two-thirds of it is funded by the government and one-third by private firms and now it's the reverse in fact it always made me wonder when i first pulled out this data six seven years ago it made me wonder about the story of stanford because when i arrived at
stanford i was told that stanford pre-war really was like a finishing university it wasn't really a big deal and post-war stanford got its big break because of lots of research from nasa dollars and i was kind of thinking well you know government r d is not such a big
factor anymore it's mainly private firms and that's because post war it was the big driver and the government's pulled back from r d and private firms have taken over and the reason that's you know the fourth possible driver of the decline in productivity as you point out is
government r d tends to be more focused on the r the research and private r d more on the d the development and the r you may have think has more spillovers longer-run benefits uh and is what's going to drive longer and growth so yes that's that would be another role for policy in
fact you know i'm embarrassed i left it out but a big driver would be i mean it feels hard to be saying this being in a university but the government should fund more public r d i can come back and answer this month's wages question if you want but i i i can see you have a question because
we're looking at each other on uh zoom but if you assign the blame to government ideas are a global public good isn't it true that global governmental expenditure on r d in absolute terms is up even if it may be down as a percentage of budgets or total r d and thus say scientific progress in the
united states which can draw upon governmental support in china japan india uk switzerland should still be going up and it has to be within private scientific progress that there's a diversion of effort away from public goods and toward more private goods or no
no it's a good question i it's certainly true our paper only focused on the us the puzzle gets much harder if you include global r d so uh you see that productivity per researcher or a research dollar is falling in the sense of the rate of progress per dollar we're
spending i mean you've looked at i mean just to be clear this is not a new thesis you know you have your book the great stagnation and uh patrick collison for example has worked on this more recently and you know there's jesus is that book the death of science i'm embarrassed i've
forgotten who the author was but john horrigan yeah that's it and so the puzzle gets even more extreme if you look globally because of course now i'm sure you know it's it's tricky because europe has become slightly less of a powerhouse but obviously asia has completely taken off and the amount of r
d being spent in say india and china has exploded um has that offset the reduction in u.s publicly funded r d certainly it's a share of gdp it's not obvious one reason is there's plenty of evidence on uh knowledge spillovers being localized so there's a lot of evidence for example
that you're more likely to co-author with your colleagues and your own university or in the same for i mean i guess the same firm's more obvious but if that was true you may think the transmission of ideas from china to the u.s is less effective than within the us i
also don't know if the increase in chinese and indian r d by their government sectors is enough to offset the reduction by the us and whether it's in the right areas it may be that a lot of developing countries r d is more say defense and national security focus
which i suspect has lower trade-offs and the nice thing about the us and things like the the national science foundation the ni national institute for health is they would put huge amounts of funding on very basic research to have broad value i mean i mean you know mit
researcher goes to the nsf gets funding for research they tend to be focused on very basic things that have interest abroad science and that has i suspect the largest value added apart from possibly giving them more money how should we improve the nsf in the nih you know how can we raise their
productivity i mean the more money seems the most obvious part of it um there's obviously secondly how you distribute it and you know again i i remember seeing a couple of papers on how exactly you evaluate research uh proposals and it's hard and you know do you get
insiders within the field to evaluate who tend to have be more informed but tend to be you know more based towards their own field or outsiders i think the broad issue is i mean i'm not aware of any huge criticisms of how the research agencies hand out their money i'm sure there's
lots of quibbling around the edges i've been involved in refereeing for the nsf for example i've always been very impressed the way they've run it and the esrc for example in the uk um i think the big issue is just their budgets their budgets sure are growing but they're not growing
nearly as fast as gdp and so as a result government is basically pulling back from r d it's being at some extent replaced by universities so if you think of these elite universities their enormous endowments are partly being funneled into early stage r d and in fact it's why
you know another fascinating observation on the us is increasingly growth is being driven by uh kind of knowledge flows out of elite research universities so just even in the stock market the stock market over the last 10 15 years has almost entirely been driven by high tech
and you know high tech in many ways you can think of it as clustering around elite u.s research universities so they are stepping into some extent to fill the gap left by government how much of the measured productivity edge of american multinationals is just tax arbitrage and where profits
get assigned to um i you know i i never really thought a huge amount of it was that my personal view i guess this is again biased by my research is american firms in particular just fantastically well managed so i've done a lot of work for many years looking at management practices
trying to collect data in cross-country surveys and to explain what i mean management practices you know the basics around you collect information and use it to improve yourself so think of you know lean collecting information all the time and having improvement processes and secondly
do you train and promote employees try to provide the best people trying to avoid things like you know promoting family friends or long-serving employees so meritocratic hr systems and i don't say american firms are perfect they're definitely not perfect there are many
management scandals but on average american firms are much better managed and they take that with them abroad and there's this whole literature this has been sometimes called dark matter or you know explaining why we seem to have this endless uh negative balance of trade but positive balance on
investments abroad american companies seem to make huge profits abroad and one big explanation is they're just exploiting lots of this intangible capital which we think of as good management so american multinationals around the world are well managed and they make a lot of profits where they're
located in the uk in france in ghana you know in uh thailand wherever they are and that's helping keep us the u.s economy afloat that return profits so i don't see that as being related to transaction cut transaction pricing it sorry transfer pricing and offshore
tax manipulation that is a factor but i think american firms are primarily driven actually by better innovation and better management why hasn't information technology boosted productivity more right so productivity is sluggish it's been taking off like crazy
companies big business is what uses i.t how do we fit the whole picture together yes so you know this was the uh another kind of uh age-old debate goes back to robert solo's quip about we in the new york times he wrote it i think in 86 you see computers everywhere except in the productivity figures
so you're right um you know paul david and tim bresnan at stanford my colleagues have had various you know this again as an old literature about general purpose technologies these technologies that change society and at least two previous ones with the steam engine the electric motor and the
big question is why haven't computers done that they seem as transformational as the previous two but we i mean as we discussed productivity growth rates in the us have been declining since the 50s and don't seem to have picked up much anyway with computers i
think um the primary reason people make you know argue for this is you need to change society in order to exploit this and in fact in an odd way covid the pandemic and working from home is one example of this so all the technology necessary for working from home so just to be clear the email you know
internet and email are cheap personal computers and video calls have all been around since the late 2000s so the last piece skype came out in 2003 but it isn't until the pandemic that we actually massively embraced working from home why is that i think it's just social
norms and firm organizational practices were slow to change so i think something holding back the impact of ict is firms and society doesn't change that rapidly and you know and a good example paul david mentions about um electricity that when electricity came in
which i believe is like the 1910 1920s factories were slow to adopt it and the reason was in the older factories where you had a big steam engine or even water wheel it made sense to have the building very vertical so you'd have four stories around this one central shaft which belts would connect
to which drove all your mechanical power with electricity instead you can have lots of little localized electric motors which is a large flat building so you know that explains if you look at really old-fashioned factories and like the center of you know manhattan and
places where they were built 200 years ago they're very tall buildings modern factories are low slung massive sheds but of course when electricity came in it's very hard to reshape all those buildings and it takes decades and it's kind of like that with reshaping
the management organizational structures of society i think that's one reason why it's taken so long for it to you know affect productivity so italy has had almost no per capita income growth for about 20 years now is that because of the deficiencies of italian firms
italy hasn't changed enough i mean italy is just a you know a productivity basket case when i talk to you know rafaela siddin for example my you know long-term co-author when i talk to her about italian productivity i mean a lot of the issues you hear about are regulations you know political instability
um challenges of the education system migration i mean you know another thing for italy it's even more so for greece actually is that a lot of southern europe has suffered from a large negative brain drain i know lots of you know highly able italians but they basically tend to you know
many of them i know that are in the us and the uk and they've left the country because it's poor economic prospects so you know italy is almost the laundry list of what's gone wrong and what not to do um but i think a lot of it comes down to poor government
you know that then feeds through into all these policies that make it hard for firms to innovate italy's r d performance isn't great uh it's very uncertain it drives a lot of people abroad the education systems poor what exactly is the value of management consultants
because to many outsiders it appears absurd that these not so well-trained young people come in they tell companies what to do sometimes it's even called fraudulent if they command high returns how does this work what's the value added you know i i i don't know if everyone knows but i worked at mckinsey
for uh about a year and a half so you know i should state that i no longer work for them i don't take any money for them anymore i mean that was a long time ago that's almost 20 years ago but just from that and from my research you know there's two or three things they do i mean it is
true on the negatives to start the negative side the critique that's often thrown at them is they either take the obvious you know they ask to borrow your watch and tell you the time or uh they tell you things that the ceo normally knew but she or he basically didn't want
to fess up to tell the workers and it is true that i thought there was some element of that that you know there was a one project in particular and i was involved in i remember it seemed to us to be reasonably clear what to do i think it seemed to be reasonably clear
to the division ahead what to do but it was hard for her to tell the whole group and you know mckinsey came in you know the project was highly successful the division improved dramatically but it was partly we were there to bolster evidence the third element i think is generally useful and i've seen this in
you know when i think of the randomized control trial and did that in india very hard accenture to work in a number of firms is a lot of uh management improvements aren't that obvious to people on the ground so just to give you one example then back in history after world war ii the big movement in
the us was what's called mass uh production so henry ford had you know the the production line and the idea is you just scale up get bigger and bigger and bigger and make more and more you know forwards and roll it off in a massive factory set up uh toyota and the japanese
uh car manufacturing sector at that time in the 1950s because they're obviously so devastated by the war didn't have access to capital and had to produce things on a small scale and they went for an alternative system called lean and the whole idea of lean is that you
try and spot mistakes and immediately you know stop the line it's very painful in the slow run if you stop see a problem in the car you stop it you go through it you figure out and then you restart and it takes time to start off and it's a slow burn but by the 1980s the uh the
japanese car factories were clearly starting to dominate they had lower costs and higher quality in fact there's a great mit book called the machine that changed the world that documents that now if you think of the way consultants are operating in the 90s 2000s
it isn't obvious to many firms that lean was a far better way to run your factory that you really want to introduce you know these kaizen production processes etc and consultants come in and help you adopt them and it's not just factories healthcare so there's been a huge transformation
and lean health whereby when you go and see a doctor you really really don't want them to be process mistakes and lean is actually very good at reducing quality defects improving productivity so that's the area where consultants are great i remember when i was at
mckinsey in one of the projects i did with a retailer we had someone that used to work at toyota and this toyota guy had been there for three four years and was just fantastic he went round the retailer and said you know here's the kind of tools we used in toyota and just applied them and
it was extremely valuable so that's the positive side of managing consulting highlighting things that maybe exposed after the event are obvious why it works but in advance you know just aren't given the high returns to management advice to india and other emerging economies
what's the main constraint that prevents that from being scaled up much more why don't those consultants just transform those management practices and productivity levels it's a great question i've long thought about this i think the biggest well one of the
major constraints india and nova scotia has been out there a lot um and one of the huge constraints so is the legal system so it sounds but i'll just go through it so in india you know the actual law as it's written down in the statute book is you know but it is good there's no obvious issues
with it at least as you know people i talk to but the big constraint is processing cases through the courts so the courts are dramatically undersupplied in terms of judges and so what happens is it's very slow to process cases through court as a result when you talk
to indian firms they're very skeptical of taking any issues through the court system so just to be clear if you're in the u.s and you're a manager and you discover somebody stealing stuff from me you're pretty likely to report it to the police uh and then it goes to the court system
that manager faces you know potential prison they clearly lose their job they have a big loss of career earning states so in the first place they probably won't do it and india but if the court if the courts are the binding constraint why doesn't that make all management
advice for india worthless why is that particularly an issue with respect to scaling because they all live under that court system oh okay i was going to say well one solution you'd think for you know i i mean i use india but it's basically all developing countries
and including honestly large parts of southern europe is private equity so look you see all these badly run firms why doesn't pe come in buy up firms and turn them around the problem is the legal environment is not great so i remember talking to someone that said uh it was blackstone came in a big pe
firm bought a large retailer sorry a large apparel manufacturer in india and really struggled because sure they could improve management practices but profit wasn't going up and it was you know there's a lot of money basically illegally leaking out of the company because the legal system was
weak it was hard to turn this around so then you're right the alternative look even if private equity doesn't come in why can't they do organically and they are so to be clear you know management practices in india which i know best have been improving over time there are some very
successful indian multinationals like tartar alliance the issue is that isn't scaling is it if you think of it the frontier of management practices is improving every year we're getting better at managing firms in the u.s and below that frontier there are
countries that are closer say northern europe that are further say southern europe and even further below the developing world and they're improving too it's just there's a big gap and it takes time for it's like innovation it takes time for it to defuse and a better legal system would
accelerate that if you could have you know ruthless private equity backed by you know tough laws i think it would be you know that would be it would be painful uh economically and socially but the growth rate would improve because you'd have much more transfer of management practices
you mentioned the machine that changed the world also a favorite book of mine what's another book on management you find especially rewarding uh another book on management you know i'm not a huge book reader having said that i've recently been recently reading hillbilly elegy
which is fantastic but i tend to you know it's oddly enough i tend to be a huge reader of news like you know the times the wall street journal the economist the ft uh i think management books i'm sure as soon as the interview's over i'll kick myself and think there was some
fantastic book let me repoint the question why are management books so bad if i ask myself if i had to go into a big barnes and noble and had to read all the books in one section management might be the last section i would pick even though i'm an economist and to a more modest extent to manager
why is there so much junk in that area it's endogenous that you don't read more of it correct yeah i mean there are great books i'm sure i don't mean to imply they're all terrible i'm sure they're i'm gonna you know as soon as this is over entertainment yeah you go to the history
section most of the books are at least pretty good yeah i you know one issue that struck me when i got into management in the first place so just to explain what i've been doing for years i've been working with a huge coalition of people so i mentioned rafaela sadin
uh john van rin and henata limos danielska eric quinn jose and lucha foster there's a huge group of us scott olmacher that have been trying to measure management practices across firms and countries just very methodically in some ways very boringly running and we must have surveyed
several million organizations by now to create a big data set and we take populations of firms run these surveys collect data and compare them now that was just you know most of the books that i read that are popular good to great and built to last and things like this are generally based on
individual anecdotes and case studies and i think that's quite i mean it's great for teaching i use case studies and have a business called case studies all the time to teach because it's very inspirational but you know they're always positive stories of how you know
mrs you know x or mr white turned the firm around but they're not great for research and the reason is i know from personal experience having to write one case study i wrote a case study on a firm that i'd uh was owned by uh someone that was in my stanford mba course uh called
curtis and it's called the challenge of change and the problem was we wrote this case that it was a fascinating company that actually eventually got taken over by private equity in india and they were huge very successful apparel firm um but we had to get legal sign off from
everyone involved so we interviewed six or seven people and they all had to legally sign off and say they were fine with using the material you can imagine what that does for selection effects it means that basically these books are only you know it's very hard for them to get proper information on firms
that do badly because they refuse you know they threaten lawsuits so i think a lot of management research is correct you know most of these books are probably saying the right thing the problem is but every story you want to come up with every theory there's a book supporting
it so it's kind of hard to know where to look what we really need ideally is you know what we're trying to build i wouldn't say it's our research but more our data that hopefully people will use because it's publicly available data is to you know say look here are five
hypotheses and management is this supported in large-scale data i think that would put more discipline on it and then therefore put more credibility on these books if teaching management techniques to companies are so effective can we expect similarly large gains to
teaching personal productivity techniques to individuals who if anything should absorb it more rapidly right no collective action problem but it seems overall self-help books life coaching they seem pretty ineffective how do we square that larger picture i'm not sure they're pretty i don't know
how i'd evaluate it there is a large you know i can flip it around i take the economist take i'm going to kind of take your line on this which is there is an enormous volume of like self-help books and podcasts and newsreels etc and the fact that they exist means people are spending a lot of
time reading them and i presume if you assume that people are rational means they get value out of it i actually find these things quite useful i'm not sure i absorb most of the tips but you know i guess my mental model is like i listen to some i mean i don't
tend to listen to self-help podcasts but i read a lot and i read something there maybe 10 tips in there in fact before the podcast was uh you know started i was talking to dallas your you know your producer and she was she'd sent me this whole list of things on what to do with your
microphone and video and i had read it all in fact she concluded the link that i went onto that i found a couple of them really useful i'd say 90 of them i'd seen or maybe it wasn't applicable but 10 were great so i actually think they potentially are quite helpful um the issue is maybe on the evidence base
again to you know as an economist ideally you'd have an rct how you'd execute it's not obvious but you know you may take a thousand you know americans or you know a thousand spanish spaniards or something some sample and then give 500 of them intensive self-help
coaching for a month and see what happens i mean quite possibly somebody's done this i don't you know you know may exist but that would be my way to evaluate these kind of interventions then you must think people are remarkably productive and effective because self-help books are very cheap
the advice to alice sent you that was for free so if you think of it in terms of marginal value given the low price the marginal gains to being more productive personally well you must be very close to the frontier right but that strikes me as counter-intuitive i see people
sort of screwing up all the time not realizing their potential i think the market for talent is remarkably inefficient and that people don't do their very best well i this there's two issues i think one is you gotta consider what would be like without it so uh you know humanity is dramatically
more productive than it was and some of it could be self-help the other issue is i think this uh you know unknown unknowns the problem is you don't know what you don't know and just again as a personal anecdote um i always thought i was reasonably given energy you know
kind of energy efficiency in my brother came round you know before covid and point there was a couple of years ago and pointed out look i should be using led bulbs throughout the entire house rather than the old halogen or cfl fluorescent ones and you know my brother's an engineer and i kind
of sat down and went through the numbers and it paid off within two to three years and that's clearly a fantastic rate of return and so pretty rapidly i switched out every single bulb in my house to led but you know i didn't know it until someone had pointed it out x post it
seems kind of obvious i could have easily gone to you know amazon and worked out the cost of it worked that electricity uses and done the calculation i just never thought of it so a lot of this just is like dallas's recommendations i can't remember what she said
there's various things that's it she said you're using this microphone turn the gain thing down to zero i didn't realize that and there was a knob at the back of the microphone i'd never even looked at i then looked at it and thought oh yeah there is that you know turned it down to
zero and hopefully it sounds okay but i think a lot of it is honestly see this in firms all the time when we were out in india or when i was in mckinsey you'd often give pieces of advice and exposed it was really useful so for example just as another concrete piece of you know analysis when i was
out in india a big issue and a lot of modern management is quality defects so we went these companies or large companies making say fabric that goes into making shirts and trousers and you know upholstery coverings and a lot of the learnings from coming
out originally from japan is you should you know zero in and quality defects and fix them instantly so essentially said look your factory over 100 loom so we're going to take you know six looms at the back row and have a quality defect index and have a quality control process a kaizen process
and after two to four weeks it was so effective in spotting repeated issues that the factory owner said this is great it's worth the effort setting up this qdi index and this committee we're just going to roll it out to the whole factory but in advance they were skeptical so i think that's you know
there was so many things in life unfortunately we just don't know what we don't know and so we're skeptical on advice how about this are you on chinese management chinese management has in you know i don't have fantastic recent data so i'll give you my best data we surveyed them
last on you know at scale in 2005 at that point they were roughly in line with gdp they were okay they weren't fantastic i've had some other surveys that are not internationally comparable more recently they're pretty good i have to say manufacturing um a lot of what drives good management
practices is being large being being around for a while being open to competition i know china has and having educated employees and china has those inputs so a lot of their manufacturing firms in particular are big they're competing ferociously with other
companies they actually china's education systems churning out vast numbers of engineers um and they've been operating enough quite a while i suspect at this point now chinese manufacturing management is pretty good actually it's harder to tell in other sectors particularly those are not
internationally comparable you know the financial services who knows it's much that's harder to evaluate but typically if you want to look for well-run companies you know its size com levels high levels of competition open to trade educated employees no family firms
where it's handed down by promo janitor you know the eldest son inherits it uh if you you know go into the sectors that don't have these issues then you tend to see very good management and china typically tick most of those boxes manufacturing over 20 years ago your stanford colleague
frank fukuyama wrote a book on trust and he basically said well china will never have successful large firms in the way that japan does because there's not enough trust in chinese society that seemed plausible at the time yet obviously it's turned out to be wrong i mean what did we miss about china
since you emphasized trust and corruption and ability to delegate authority without too many bureaucratic checks and balances and exxonte china seemed bad on all those things and yet chinese big business has done pretty phenomenally well a lot of trust i think derives from rule
of law and so in china the again i mean this is getting sensitive into politics but there's law around rule of law ram political system which i really don't want to comment on but there's rule of law around things like contractual enforcement um which turns out to be important for
trust between firms so you know if you tyler and set up a company and give me a contract for three years from providing ball bearings i'm going to go and put a bit of money into r d and improving them set up a process if you then you know say after six months i've changed my mind can i see
you and get the money back and if i can effectively do it through the court system i can trust you so that's maybe a kind of odd concept of trust it's not an it's not based on some you know cultural religious thing it's based on the fact that the legal system works and
if you look in for example the world value server which measures interpersonal trust trust measured there is highly correlated with um the effectiveness of the legal system so some of the lowest countries in the world in terms of trust are some of the you know the african
countries whereby the legal systems in chaos because they're undergoing civil war and the highest countries are like norway sweden north america so i you know currently in china the rule of law is applied to commercial contracts i think is reasonable i'm not an expert but
you don't hear endless stories of you know scandals and corruption at least those commercial contracts go and i think that's what enables these large firms to grow when we've collected survey evidence you know in reverse we definitely don't hear endless stories of managers ripping off firms and stealing
ideas which is a big problem so just to reverse it around what happens in countries with very weak legal systems where you can't trust anyone is you hire your family members so if i want to set up a company and i can't trust any outsiders i start to stuff it full of
you know sons daughters brothers brothers-in-laws sisters sisters aunts uncles etc now that's good because i can trust them but the problem is you know these people aren't actually the best managers to run the place and of course as i get bigger and bigger
i'm i'm running out of good family members so do i appoint a second cousin or that pretty incompetent you know younger son of mine and you know you can imagine the trade-offs are going on but it means that unless you have a proper legal system and prop you know which in generates trust it's
very hard to grow large firms without professional managers how do you think about trust and management in england versus trust and management in scotland oh my you know i don't know my wife is a scot yeah of course my mom is scottish so i don't think they're that different
actually i mean having now lived in the us even the us uk difference i don't think is enormous having you know increasing that travel around the world you realize that there are huge differences there are huge differences between northern and southern europe that strikes me as quite
striking actually um you know england and scotland are very similar we effectively have the same legal system you know the same educational standards my mother-in-law who's in glasgow i should send you this podcast will probably kill me for saying that but you know
uh the scots i should point out i've had some of the most successful you know members of uh british you know the kind of british government like gordon brown and various prime ministers they've overrepresented but i i don't think they're very different i think in fact
in reverse they're really pretty similar but the scots have done much better fighting against the pandemic in the public sector if you look at globally known brands i know england has a greater population but it seems to do disproportionately better than scotland does
so it seems to me the two cultures are not that similar across critical margins maybe there are small differences in an absolute sense but those compound into large differences in final outcomes it's an interesting point the scots also voted what i would say is the right way on brexit
they're against brexit i mean i'm going to let you know be very open here i was against brexit because britain leaving the european union i think is bad economically for the uk and i think it's kind of this whole concept of being a little england and looking in
inwards scotland voted against brexit quite resoundingly and it's true that they've handled the pandemic much better why that is is not clear i mean i regularly talk to my mother-in-law in scotland um they in some ways they seem to be more educated and at least as far as i'd sit in the way they vote
their oecd measured levels of education are not higher i'm not aware of you know any other striking differences um i think i like nicola sturgeon who is the uh i think is what's called the first minister she's effectively the prime minister of scotland um she's done a very good job she locked
down faster in scotland i think that's why they dealt with the pandemic sooner again on the pandemic i'm not enough up to the news on england versus scotland living in the u.s to give to give more of an answer but i am aware the scots have done better on that and
they certainly did better on brexit does scotland have a different cultural notion of hooliganism uh i mean if you've you know about the famous old firm rivalry celtic rangers uh you probably think no uh you know the two region teams again i you know i i know in scotland i really
spent the vast amount of my time in glasgow uh i don't think it's cut i wasn't expecting a tyler i think to be asked about scott the scottish football hooliganism but as far as i'm aware no i mean the interesting thing by the way on technology um one of the issues that afflicted the
uk was hooliganism and you know there's kind of various elements of it but one was just uh you know fighting and violence but another one was racism and both of them technology has been fantastic at combating just on you know on both them cameras in the ground id cards online
there was an instant just over the weekend i was looking just this morning about the racial comments made against a crystal palace football player that they the police checked through online and turned out to be a 12 year old boy in the west of midlands making this stuff but just in
terms of the ground technology has improved uh attendance at sports games because of this we can stamp it out and that's something that doesn't show up in productivity figures so another concern you could have and there's being a big debate in terms of productivity is that the
case that the quality of life has risen in ways that we're not measuring it i could get into that debate i think the answer is primarily no but you could make that claim and you know hooliganism has been pushed back a lot by technology if policy uncertainty is so important
for the macro economy precovid why was the reign of donald trump just fine for the american economy because there was high uncertainty i woke up every morning not knowing what would happen or what would be said i'm not sure exposed that uncertainty was realized until covered but in fact it was
realized on a massive scale yet exante the uncertainty didn't seem to have much of a negative drag yeah donald trump in terms of political sorry in terms of economic performance how would you assess it before kovid he you know it was fine you could some ways be slightly
i mean again i'm not a trump supporter so definitely wrong you could be mildly positive on it and saying look he took the obama boom and continued it and as expansions go on maybe you think it's harder and harder to keep that expansion going growth didn't pick up but it also didn't
slow down under trump so that would be a passing grade it wouldn't be fantastic wouldn't be terrible either um one thing that aided growth under trump was the corporate tax cuts um you know there's another political uncertainty in changing his mind all the time and honestly a lot of
bad policy with you know reduced growth under trump now it seems to netted out to about zero it was no higher or no lower than in obama's second term um so the policy uncertainty was a negative but there are other things he did that were positive it's also true that um under obama
there was considerable policy uncertainty because things like the debt ceiling debate in the fiscal cliff and who you blame is less obvious there so congress was fighting you know the president obama wanted to pass various pieces of legislation couldn't the same thing is true now of
course so we have a mixed control of congress um i think trump made it a lot worse you know default him quite explicitly he just changed his mind and he also didn't listen to advisers so when he talked to firms it's very hard to predict which rate policy was going to go
because a lot of decisions didn't seem entirely thought out rational predictable i don't know what words you use but uh firms who complain about we didn't see this coming and you know he changed his mind and tweets and that by the way us physical investment even before covert was not great
so the intangibles right yeah and in the stock market is doing well yes but the stock market does not re reflect the u.s economy um the stock market for example right now is 30 high tech which is only 7 of us jobs and also when interest rates drop because the economy
slows it makes the stock market go up because it's suddenly a relatively better investment so i think the stock market and the state the us economy are only weakly linked uh say we take the 1960s which is one of the golden areas for of macroeconomic growth uh many wonderful things about it it
seems policy uncertainty was quite high there was the cold war there was the vietnam war it was the civil rights movement not clear how it would turn out there were riots in cities all the time we were on the verge of major changes in regulatory policy right like the environmental movement
so anecdotally very high policy uncertainty uh things proceed just great it seems or now you know this is why uh long run measures are actually useful it's very hard when you talk to people they often raise different errors as particularly more or less uncertain and often it's
driven by you know their own personal experiences and there's actually a phenomena i mean it's interesting you raised the 60s it's actually phenomenal to think the past was more certain than the present because you see the past having happened you forget all
the alternative scenarios that could have been so just on data um the 60s in terms of stock market volatility were quite low in terms of macro volatility were moderately low there was the whole great moderation and the 8 1780s were very volatile macro growth but the 60s were reasonably
calm in terms of our index economic policy uncertainty index very straight newspapers it didn't appear to be particularly high levels of uncertainty so you could argue newspapers uh you know in that era it wasn't clear how completely open they were um watergate was kind of opening the
floodgates of being more transparent but i don't see in the evidence i've seen the 60s as a period of particularly high policy uncertainty so you're right those incidents happened but in other areas like domestic economic policy uh again i'm going off newspapers but on
average in stock market reactions it doesn't seem to be pretty particularly high i mean the two great spikes in the stock market volatility by the way in the 60s with the cuban missile crisis and the assassination of jfk we're speaking in july 2020 given that there's so much
working at home going on right now how long will it take before tech company productivity declines as people grow frustrated or disconnected or they become too restless it's too hard to bring on board new hires how much time do we have before things really start to fray it's a a
great question just to be clear my thoughts on working fine in the short run uh working from home for those of us that can't just to be clear only something like 40 of americans can work from home but for those and that but that accounts for something like 56 of gdp because they
tend to be higher earning uh individuals so for those of us that can work from home the evidence looks like in the short run that increases productivity as long as you've got reasonable conditions like you know proper internet and a room your own exclusive room to work in um
the big question you know that that's research i've been you know that i had no paper looking in china and we showed very large increases in what i call short-run productivity from people working in call centers the big unknown in which there's little evidence i'm working and i know
other people are looking at this too which is what's the impact on longer-run productivity which the concept will come back to the beginning of the podcast is about kind of creation and innovation so lots of claims including you know steve jobs before he passed away made
several comments about uh he wanted people to be in the office you know you have to be there for the new ideas come up from water cooler discussions and meetings and one-on-one stuff and obviously undercover that's all stooled so none of that will really show up right
now you know you can get away for with three to six maybe even nine months probably if not radically creating new things but in the long run i fear there'll be a drop in say patenting in 2021 2022 because of this and the question is how firms respond my guess is from talking to a lot of u.s
companies is they will return partly to the office so i think in the long run working from home will be fine because we'll be in the office three days a week and two days a week at home so that's kind of the best of both worlds i don't think you need to be in
the office five days a week to be creative but you do need some time each week with colleagues so i'm not too worried now what i think will be problematic is if we're in late 2021 we were still all 100 working from home then i would really worry about impacts and productivity
so your long-term co-authors should be those who are at stanford or berkeley but your short-term co-authors can be anywhere i know my co-authors are just all over the place i uh i was going to say one of the things i really miss about working home is going to seminars
and conferences and particularly kind of you know the two the two last conferences i went to before lockdown one was in mexico itam and one was in melbourne at monash university they're both fantastic because they were small and i got to basically talk to everyone there and that's the kind of thing that
generates for me co-authors is talking to someone of the quirky idea that comes up with something so oddly enough most of my co-authors are not at stanford uh which seems to disobey my own rule i don't know why that is mostly i have overlapped with them
physically at one point or another their former students or former colleagues like when i was at the ucl or lse steve davis i worked with a lot in us at chicago i never physically overlapped with him uh you know two are they like ivana faraz algie lin i met them ohio state university
i um so if you can do it if you can do it why can't tech companies do the same okay so let's take i ivan and zaji lim from ohio state university i first met them physically i went to give her a seminar at ohio state university i sat in zaji's office for half an hour
we kind of got excited about a research idea um that was the critical meeting point i'm not sure would have happened if we'd done done it remotely and after talking to him i thought this you know this guy seems great it's a really interesting idea he continued to communicate by email
so my thought is and it kind of matches roughly what a lot of silicon valley types say is the initial spark or idea is much more effectively generated in person often it's over lunch or over coffee so this is the sense in which productivity now is i've been running masses of surveys
under working from home to try and get the sense of how people are feeling and both firms and workers are overwhelmingly positive about working from home but that's now i mean again to be clear that's july and we're kind of three to four months into the lockdown my theory is if it were full time
working for him five days a week for another six to nine months it's going to be much more discontentment in fact i saw that in china when we did the sea trip study people were working from home for nine months and towards the end of it it started to really grind and drag
on that was more about loneliness but there's the other issue is in terms of being productive and being creative for our final section of the conversation i have a number of questions about your own productivity this is called the nick bloom production function are you ready
yes go ahead thank you now most people at top five schools in economics as you know also have phds from other top five schools but nathan nunn has a phd from university of toronto and your phd is from university college london what have made you an outlier in this
regard and what do you think have been its advantages and disadvantages for you i you know for me doing my phd at ucl was extremely fortunate oddly enough i've had this discussion with a lot of people that are applying to stanford's phd genes i'm not sure if i yeah effectively sales or undersell
stanford but there's trade-offs when thinking about grad school it's true if you go to an elite grad school um you're surrounded by a fantastic cohort and have great faculty on the other hand it's hard to work often with faculty because there's so many other good students
around at the time i was at ucl i was doing my pitch in the late 90s the number of other phd students was very thin they were just not it wasn't a big program um mostly very you know there's a mix many of them were not interested in ultimately going into academia so i was one of the few students that
was focused i mean there are a few others don't get me wrong they're like five or six in my year but there's a much smaller cohort say compared to stanford but there's 25 a year as a result it was much easier for me to work with faculty so you know folks not just faculty at ucl but others
through the ifs so people like you know richard blundell john van rena and rachel griffis frank winmar steve bond these guys were uh sitting around you know lucy channels i remember she was sitting right on the other side of the desk from me i'd speak to lucy as a graduate
fantastic this was something i've been out or rachel for you know five ten years having that exposure was great if i'd been in an enormous cohort of 25 of us per year over six years i never would have got that so so are the top five schools overrated for economics graduate study i think the
question to ask is what's the value added so remember the top five schools recruit by far the best students they just i know stanford ranks the students and we tend to get those to we offer make offers to those at the top of the list and we do pretty well out of that we
typically get you know pipped by mit um so the question is what's the value added and it's never been obvious to me what that is i suspect it's positive but i'm not certain and it's definitely not uniformly positive for me almost certainly it was a better off having gone to ucl was a fantastic
outcome for me versus anywhere else and because i got to work with all these people early on i was also i'd just say very lucky because the ifs of that era was big into what they called microeconometrics which is basically using panel data which turned out to be exactly the way
to go so i was kind of fortunate i mean i was clearly fortunate i just happened to be in a university was on the rise at the time and you began your career at the british institute for fiscal studies how did that shape your subsequent research and how you think was that a
mistake was that a a wonderful start to have it's again highly unusual yes yeah the ifs was great i when i finished my i did a master's at oxford um i wasn't intending to go into research at all actually i applied for a lot of investment banks and i applied for it jobs i mean i
remember getting an offer from bzw now kind of long closed british investment bank to go work in the i.t department and thought it very seriously i so you know all over the place i took this job at the rfs turned out to be fantastic one is it really inspired me to get interested in
economics they answered you know what i would call pub economics questions so what i mean is in the british sense they're questions you can talk to your friends in the pub about which are the same ones frankly that you know the the new york times or anyone they're
kind of not obstructing things like what happens in this model when alpha goes to seven but more like how would you know increase growth rates so the rfs was very much about inspiring me to do this stuff and it's also entirely empirically focused so again that was in an era where empirical
economics wasn't so dominant it is much more dominant now but so i just basically focused on data and i was lucky at the rfs i could do a part-time phd just to be clear when i started i was not a phd student and i had a program encouraging people to go do part-time phds at ucl
so from there i then went to start my phd about nine months after joining the rfs at ucl so i was oddly kind of an accidental phd student it's not something i ever had in mind and what do you think it is in either your personality or your background that led you to take these unusual paths
because again they're somewhat atypical as you know uh yeah i mean i at the office at some point i left and went to work in mckinsey and i went to the uk so atypical right yeah just go straight through research research research i i was clearly very lucky so i wouldn't
advise probably my certainly going to work in mckinsey uh as in leaving your phd and going to a non-academic job is probably you know on average is not a good uh path i was just extremely fortunate that i managed to get back into academia afterwards i wasn't there for that long
for you know under two years and um i was fortunate the people i worked before were running a research center so john van reen in particular the cp took me back as like what's called a research officer i mean i was i was like a kind of souped-up ra and then
i started working on two errors one is management one was uncertainty and the management one turned out to be a fertile error to look and just because there's not much data and uncertainty i honestly was again fortunate on timing because when i started to look in it was
during the period of the great moderation so when i was working on uncertainty i was looking at things like 9 11 as an enormous uncertainty shock started to get into the topic but you know business cycles were kind of quiet people weren't working on that that much and then suddenly of course
0809 happened and then covet um so in hindsight i i wouldn't advise that path uh the issue is you know it's like first and second order stochastic dominance it's on average the path i took was probably a less you know good path to take it turned out for me individually due to
circumstance and good luck it worked out well now your dissertation was on the topic of adjustment costs is there a lens through which i can read a lot of your subsequent major topics as actually all being about adjustment costs speeding up progress and science copying management productivity
techniques and why it's so hard uh the effects of uncertainty it's hard to adjust to it are you still working on adjustment costs yeah you know this kind of it's like my first academic love was adjustment cost it find it seems strange to say that i remember bob hall saying he went to
some mbr event and saying there's a huge shouting match about adjustment cost and he said how can anyone get so excited about you know bob who was some famous folks and justin cosby it's kind of funny how can anyone get so animated and excited about something so boring
um and you know bob and i many others have worked in it i got really interesting i realized halfway through my phd it was hard to excite other people about adjusting costs i'd honestly start talking to people again coming back to the pub economics thing my friends in particular about it and
their eyes would start eyelids was like drooping they were just pouring into tears and that's how i kind of ended up morphing to look at uncertainty so i realized if you have high adjustment costs as in it's expensive to hire someone and far invest and disinvest uncertainty is
really costly because you can't change your mind um but yeah it has colored my thinking a lot i was trying to think of there's some i'm flanking what it was but the other day i was talking to someone about something to do with management and talking about
how it's a big issue of adjustment because that's right i think about working from home so just to be clear under covid with social distancing working from home i think this is going to last for another you know let's say a year it's hard to know if after a year more we are still social
distancing working from home we've been in that regime for up to 18 months and the a lot of firms are going to have adjusted individuals to that process and you know you can call it inertia you can also think of it as adjustment costs but this is what i think a lot of what's
happening now is going to stick because of that and yes in some senses that has colored my thinking and just you personally relative to your level of talent are you a person of high or low adjustment costs when you need to adjust uh you know as as we get older and older it
feels like our adjustment costs become higher and higher you know i have these three areas i'm working on i guess innovation i started working on management and uncertainty the two i guess i started working more recently i mean innovation just again this is a random thing years i mean
i don't know how long ago it was i had a summer internship an unpaid internship there it's a ministry long gone in the uk called the department of trading industry uh to do a project looking at patents i mean this was like 30 years ago and i remember pulling up all the data on
patents and that kind of interest innovation stuck i tend to think i built up so much knowledge and interest in particularly managing uncertainty innovation i tend to mostly focus on that although recently through you know fortuitous luck as working with another couple of
co-authors again i've never overlapped with fatty giving and sergio salgado looking at you know inequality and firms and skewness and other topics um i mean for me i really like to read broadly rather than deeply it sounds an odd thing to say but you know every monday for
example or sunday night the national bureau of economic research has their this vast email of all the recent papers i tend to try and scan every title and abstract i read the papers a lot i like the economist in the economist magazine it's good it's kind of often been a source of ideas
actually of you know at least we're talking before the court i listen to your podcast actually listen to a lot of podcasts because i try and go out for a walk or a run for about an hour every day and mostly listen to podcasts i'd say well if i'm getting too tired i have to switch onto music
um but yeah i think for me that's been helpful for uh coming up with new research ideas and what do you think will be the next different thing that you do it's not just an extension of current work geez that's hard to say i my best guess is as you said the other thing that's
really helpful for me is working with with co-authors will be some you know bright sparky co-author grad student would suggest we should look at x and you know maybe they they're not that interested in i said no that's a great idea and you know maybe at some point it turns into a
collaboration often or i'm giving a seminar a lot of great ideas come from just you know just for those that don't go on the academic seminar the way that academic seminars work is you know because at gmu uh not that long ago but you go and give a talk and then normally you get
meetings in the morning in the afternoon so a classic day would be you turn up at 10 a.m you have half hour meetings and then the lunch and there's a talk in the afternoon and then dinner and what i really like is those one-on-one meetings because you're talking to lots of people for half an
hour and i find them mentally really tiring because you're like fully on and i actually whenever i meet people i go to their website look them up for half an hour 20 minutes beforehand and really try and learn about what they work on it takes a lot of time but it's i find it really valuable and
that's the great source of ideas so i'm personally also suffering in the sense of productivity as i mentioned i think the us economy is from working at home full time because those one-on-one meetings have stopped and my own production function in some ways of
continuing current projects is fine i can do that but i do feel that if this carries on for another year i i feel like the u.s economy are going to suffer a little bit in terms of struggling to come up with new ideas because there's not so much one-on-one discussion i'm not randomly
meeting people so i'm you know i can easily zoom in current people i know on or but it's much harder to come up with random people that seminars you would you know you you would have gone to but clearly on nick boom thank you very much tyler thanks very much for having me that was great