This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcast? God daddy these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan's unsupervised learning.
Hey everybody. This is Razib with the unsupervised learning podcast. And today I am here with Timothy B. Lee, of full stack economics, a new newsletter that I have really been enjoying. And you guys should really try it out. But I will let Tim introduce himself now.
Hi, there, Razib. First of all, I'm a big fan of the podcast I've been listening for, I guess, maybe about a year now. And I really enjoy the diversity of the guests. And you - I learn about a lot of topics that I wouldn't otherwise realize I might be interested in. So I'm thrilled to be on. Yeah, so like you said, I recently started a podcast called Full Stack economics that focuses on economics, obviously, public policy, and technology. My background is I actually studied computer science in school, and... but I've always been interested in policy topics as well. And so about a decade ago, I got into journalism. And before that I was working in the think tank world. I worked at the Cato Institute, which was a libertarian think tank. And then I got into journalism, I worked at The Washington Post for a while I worked at Fox for a while. Then more, most recently, I was at Ars Technica, which is a tech news site. And then I decided to quit about four months ago and launch my own podcast. And I was really thrilled. I talked to Alan Cole, who is a economist, who most recently worked in Congress on the Joint Economic Committee. So he's a real expert on economic policy, particularly fiscal issues. And so I bring, I think, some of the journalistic background to you to write about topics in a rigorous way. And he really brings deep policy expertise.
Yeah, so I will admit that I didn't know who you were, Tim. So my first memory of you is, I think there was some discussion in the 2000s, about liberal terianism. And you wrote about being a libertarian, and how, in general, libertarians are aligned, or we're, I mean, I think they still are more with the political right. But culturally, interpersonally, there are some issues with being aligned with a social conservatives, as opposed to liberals. I mean, am I remembering that correctly?
Yes, absolutely. That was about about 10 years ago, I did some writing about that.
Yeah. And so um, you know, I don't want to say your politics are heterodox, but definitely you're outside of the usual boxes, I feel. And that's generally why I follow you. Because, you know, there are some people out there, I hope I'm not one of them, where you basically know every single response to every single question, because they never, you know, leave their movement approved beliefs and thoughts. And I really appreciate that you don't do that. And so that's, that's probably why I follow your work. And I read your work in economics, because I'm not really sure what you're necessarily going to say, I have a general idea. I think I mean, everyone comes with comes to things with priors, but I'm not really sure. So that's why I like to read things outside of say, my core competency in genetics, I want to learn new things. If I wanted to read the same thing, I would go read heritage, you know, think pieces, or, you know, whatever the left wing equivalent now is, you know, you know exactly what they're gonna say, and a lot of issues. And it's just the details of how they would interpret it. The first thing I want to say, and I want to talk about is you know, you have a lot of you have a lot - you guys have a lot of posts that are I don't want to say US News, you can use type things, but they're really relevant to people in their everyday lives. So yeah, you could write about monetary policy and other things, if that's relevant. But that's kind of a macro level thing. But you have a post title, for example, there's a simple way to expand access to health care, or another post, how California plans to turn the screws on NIMBY cities. I want to talk about that second post right now, mostly because I have some personal experience a little bit with this. You know, I lived in California about a decade. And now I obviously live in Texas, and I am definitely one of those, you know, middle class or maybe a little above whatever, like somewhere not rich, but not poor person that left California. And it was largely due to you know, the opportunities in Austin aren't that different than the opportunities in California but it was a lot cheaper. I lived in a house at one point in Berkeley due to differential tax rates, where the landlord, my landlord at my house in Berkeley did tell me that he checked the property tax assessments and He was paying 1/20, the tax of his neighbor. And that was because he, he inherited the house from his grandparents who built it in 1960, it was the oldest house on the block. In fact, it was originally almost the only house on the block, the hills of Berkeley, in the 1950s, apparently, and his neighbor had bought her house, I mean, now was 2005. So who knows what the differences would be now and he was musician, the only way he could live where he lived and own the house that he did, is because he inherited the property taxes. So anyone who lives in California who's not from there, they have encountered this tendency, this pattern, where there's almost a landed gentry, where people who are going to inherit houses, they make very different life choices than people who are going to have to spend money on a million dollar mortgage. So I knew people who went into less lucrative fields of science, and I was a little curious. And they told me, Oh, I'm going to inherit my parents house, you know, in the Sunset District of San Francisco. So I'm not going to have the, you know, housing issues, the housing costs, because a lot of these areas, the cost of living differentials are driven by housing. And so how does California plan to fix this? I mean, for for the listeners who don't understand what's going on in California, can you give a general overview of the problems which I think those of us who live there will know more viscerally?
Sure, absolutely. So I mean, this, I think this is a case where my basic like libertarian viewpoint continues to hold, which is that if you restrict the supply of something, the price is going to go up. And so for the last 40-50 years, there's been more and more regulations about where you can build housing, and what kind of building housing you can build, and how many units per acre you can have, etc, that has really limited the amount of housing that you can have in San Francisco and in other big cities like Boston, or Seattle, or Washington, DC. And so the solution is to build more housing. And that like, sounds simple in the abstract, but the problem is that people have very strong emotional attachments to the way their neighborhoods are now. And so if you ask them, you know, do you think there's should be more housing in general? They'll say, yes, but if you say, Do you think there should be an apartment building down the block from you, they will , say no. And the problem is that in a built out city, like the Bay Area, any house apartment building you want to build is going to be next to somebody, and that somebody is going to come to their local city council meeting and, and try to shut it down. And so what California has really been trying to do in several ways, is to shift the locus of decision making up from the city council level, up to the state level. And rather than saying every city gets to decide what gets built, we're going to have some statewide rules that have a minimum amount of housing that developers are allowed to build in every part of the state. And there's been several I mean, I can get into the various efforts to do that. But that's the big picture. And the thing about this is that local governments have a lot of ways they can interfere with things with with housing projects that they don't like. And so it's been this cat and mouse game, where the state will pass a law saying, Hey, you have to allow more housing, and the cities will kind of comply, but they'll find, you know, they add a bunch of red tape or they'll, you know, attach conditions that make it unaffordable state comes back and does it again, this has been going on for several years. But I think you've seen there's a growing movement of people that call themselves YIMBY's, yes, in my backyard, who are just growing in I think support, and are really holding the city's feet to the fire, at least, it looks to me like they're starting to do that. We'll see what happens in the next couple years.
Yeah, you know, so a lot of this, as people in California know, is driven by local control. It's driven by rhetorical arguments about the character of the community. But I mean, some of it, so for example, like if you live in Palo Alto or Mountain View, and you are an incumbent, and you have seen appreciation of your your home value, are you really going to want there to be more construction, more housing, so that, you know, the supply crunch that's increasing the prices on your assessed value is going to be abated. So I think there are major issues here between people with different interests, the people who have a lot to lose, voting a particular way. And I'm not very sympathetic to people who don't want more housing, but I can totally understand their position, if they made decisions based on the fact that there's been the status quo in California since the 1970s. If they invested in real estate and their own real estate, as opposed to stocks and bonds, you know, and I know people that have done things like that. And so there's gonna be a lot of resistance. And I think people need to be aware of this that the past history of policy has an impact. And so, Tim, you think, do you think that we're actually turning the corner because, you know, I've been observing this. I've been observing since 2000s. And, you know, the logic is there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that change will be affected.
Well, this is why I think that the level of political organization really matters. I went out to the Bay Area in 2015, to write a story about the what was the kind of emerging YIMBY movement. And it was really just a handful of people who would go to city council meetings and, you know, complain about or, you know, try to counter the the NIMBYs, but there are always many more people opposing housing than supporting it. And just the number of people who engaged in this has gone up a lot. And I think that means that that every year the legislature is going to face pressure to do more if this problem isn't fixed. So I don't think it's going to be fixed in the next year or two, maybe even the next five or 10 years. Completely, but I think you're going to see steady progress. If if there continues to be support from voters and from activists to keep up the pressure.
Yeah, um, so one of your other pieces, you know, that you wrote, or, actually, I, to be honest, I'm not always clear whether you are Alan or writing because I don't pay attention to the byline.
Housing ones are mostly me.
Okay, so, um, how luxury apartment buildings help low income renters? Yeah, that was me. That was, I mean, it makes sense. I totally agree that I will tell you, it's really it was really strange when I moved to Austin, because a lot of people that I think would be living in, you know, ranch homes, really, really expensive ranch homes in the Bay Area. They live in high rise condominium complexes, you know, these, like, these, you know, skyscrapers that are going up that are super expensive or not. So I mean, depends on your perspective, if they're super expensive, but you know, we're talking like five to $10,000 a month in rent. And, you know, they might have a ranch outside outside of town. So, I mean, why is this good for someone like me? Well, because they're not living in the regular homes here in Austin. That's for regular people. And I think that that's a really, really concrete difference in outcomes due to building that I've seen with my own eyes compared to the Bay Area.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, think about most families only have one home. And so and the richest people are going to get first choice of what homes they get, because they have the most money so outbid other people. And so if you don't build enough housing for the rich people, what happens is not that the rich people move to a different city or the rich people become homeless, they outbid you know you for some other house that you wanted. And so I think it's that the logic of that, like, makes sense, if you just kind of think about it. But um, what was really interesting about about those, those studies I wrote about in that piece was that somebody went in Helsinki and the other another study looked at some some cities in the US looked on a actual like unit by unit basis and tracked exactly, you know, when this when somebody moved in this house, what apartment they move out of which has to that person, and they could really trace that the houses that get vacated when somebody moved into the luxury apartment, often were in lower income neighborhoods, which suggests that building luxury house really loosens up the housing mark of everybody, not just other rich people.
Yeah. I mean, a lot of this is very, very straightforward and very easy to understand. And, you know, it's frustrating when people kind of dodge it, or they say, do you want us to look like Singapore? And, you know, look, I understand that San Francisco and LA have a particular aesthetic. But if they look like Singapore, it wouldn't affect the excerbs. So I actually had, I don't know, if you saw this on Twitter, I've been starting to get a little frustrated with some of my friends on the right. Where it seems like they're promoting, you know, suburbs are great, excerbs are great. We need to argue against these changes to the, you know, against single family zoning. And I mean, okay, I understand if you're trying to stoke up fear of crime, maybe you're trying to re reignite the white flight issue, which was huge, the 70s and 80s and into the 90s. But do you actually believe that housing in cities is going to cause problems for suburbs and experts like, to me as a non economist, that just doesn't make any sense? Like that would reduce the pressure on suburbs and excerpts? Correct?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. So I mean, so a lot of it is is emotive, or maybe people are using other things. They're actually concerned about other things. And they're using these arguments in a, you know, not not totally honest way. I also think there's a generational impact. You know, I'm Gen X, but I know some millennials and younger millennials. Their perspective on housing is so jaded that I don't think baby boomers and older Gen X can even like comprehend how different the generational perspectives are.
Yeah, I think one of the issues here is that a lot of politics these days is very identity based. And Republicans are just going to find a way to talk themselves into being against whatever Democrats do and vice versa. But something that's actually really interesting, I mean, as you noted, like you moved to Austin, because the housing market is better. One reason for that is that Texas actually has a pretty free market housing market. You know, Houston famously has no zoning or close to no zoning and their housing is very affordable. And so while I think that the recent YIMBY movement has had a little bit of a left wing flavor, because it's focused in these big blue cities where the there's the biggest housing costs I think the actual policy position, which is that, you know, property rights, free markets, like let businesses do what they want to do, that is actually I think, not a left wing position, particularly it is a traditionally conservative position that many right of center states have adopted, it's just that, because those states have adopted those policies, and because the biggest cities tend to be left of center, it's just not where the place where the problem is, and hence, where the activism is, is places where it's almost all Democrats. And so the pro development faction is going to have a lot of Democrats because kind of everybody is in those places.
Yeah, here in Austin, there's there is actually some explicit awareness of people in the startup startup world, that there are some advantages of being in a blue city in a red state, because Austin, periodically tries to do things that are more traditionally left wing. And you know, the state does have a say, I mean, it is the Capitol. And so the legislators who are mostly Republican, state legislatures do live around Austin. So they're here, their presence, their presence. And so that balance, that dialectic is actually useful in some ways. And I think that's kept Austin from being overwhelmed by an anti development, you know, small is beautiful sentiment, which for some reason, is just like very, very powerful in, in a lot of left wing cities, I lived in Davis, California for a while. And if you go to the, quote, Davis wiki, you can actually read about the anti development faction that was ascendant in the 70s, to the 90s. In Davis, they have limits on how tall buildings can be, they have a really strict urban growth boundary. And so that just means that a lot of students in Davis live to two and three, to a single bedroom, I mean, they'll take a three bedroom, and then 12 Students will live in there, and they'll split it up with shades and curtains and other things. That's actually not the whole plan for why they did that. But it doesn't matter because UC Davis is outside of the city limits. And they can admit as many students as they want, and those students need housing. So they'll figure out a way. Another thing that you will see in Davis is, there is a freeway that goes through, but there's no exits on the freeway into like the middle of the town. And they did that consciously, because they wanted people to just drive through that didn't change the fact that they could build exits on the edge of town. And so basically, they failed, but they made the city more dysfunctional than it would be otherwise. So you know, these sorts of policy battles have consequences, you see them in your in your real life. And so it's important, in my opinion, to pay attention to them. So I want to like pivot and ask you a question. So you originally started something related to journalism, and then you kind of switch to full stack economics. Can you talk about your thinking in the spring and why you changed, just just so the listeners know?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think I'm a little bit unusual among journalists is that in that I'm very interested in entrepreneurship, I've long thought it'd be interesting to start a news organization. And when the kind of substack revolution happened, I started paying a lot more attention decided I wanted to do it myself. And I had a few different ideas for the kind of news organization that would make sense to build. I was trying to convince my now partner, Alan to join me. And so I started a what I thought it was kind of a pop up newsletter, about the media business, partly as a way to just get some ideas about what's going on with the media business, down into the newsletter, partly to have, you know, just a place to hang my shingle while I figure out what the permanent thing was gonna be. And one of the things I was thinking about is whether there was an appetite for more of a general news site, that was a little bit so I was at Vox before, and I think Vox does a lot of good things. I think their their politics have gotten a little more left wing than I would ideally like. But I was thinking about doing something a little broader like that. And the other thing I was considering is doing something like what I did, and so part of it was just to kind of gauge the interest in people's interest in you know, those two approaches. Yeah, so I guess that was what I was what I was doing there.
Yes. So it seems like there's a lot of there's a lot of journalism, about journalism. And I get a sense that, you know, like, there used to be the magazine like 20 years ago called Brill's content, I think, and then they started a whole spin off website like content Ville. And that was all about the media. And I think the problem that they always said is the meet there was a lot of media buzz about it, because the media interested in the media, right? You couldn't get people outside the media to be entirely interested in it. And so you know, I always I always wonder about that, because it would be like, you know, a science magazine about scientists and their lives. It'd be super interesting to scientist. Yeah. I'm really not sure it'd be interesting to regular people that like, so you know, this is how you write a grant really fast, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So so those are those publications exist, as you would expect. They get pretty small audiences. And so I was I guess what I was the the. Yeah. So I think that's what I basically discovered was that there wasn't a big audience for kind of trying to bootstrap a general news organization based on starting it, right writing articles about the media. So I mean, the good thing about entrepreneurship is you can try something. And if it fails, you can pivot quickly. And so after a couple of months, it seemed pretty clear, it wasn't working. And Alan was interested in doing this. And so I think this is a more promising kind of permanent thing for me to be focusing on.
Yeah, I mean, you know, like words, like, pivot, like, they're super familiar to me, you know, I'm in the startup space. So, you know, it's great, this sort of nimbleness. And I think something like, like a newsletter, these new sites, like substack, and you're on Ghost, are really, really changing the landscape in some ways. And so I'm curious about your opinion, like not to get into media criticism, but let's get into a little bit of it, or like a commentary on what's going on here. Sure. So, you know, I still subscribed to The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times. It's a little bit redundant. I mean, honestly, I might drop into Washington Post, because they were just covering Trump for a while. And now I don't know what they do. But I have friends that work there. So whatever. But you know, I subscribed to a fair number of sub stacks, and newsletters and check websites. And, uh, you know, we had blogs, we had blogs, like, it was the age of the blogosphere. You remember, you're old enough to remember right? Yeah. And then blogs kind of disappeared, they were absorbed by these news organizations. And now though, blogs are basically coming back, because these are what what it is they're a little bit more polished, there's monetization. So that's a big difference. I'm, you know, I was making $0. And now I'm definitely not making $0. I'll tell you that. So what, what, as an observer, what do you think changed? Like, what what happened? Like, why is there an opportunity for something like substack? Because remember, you know, like, vola conspiracy, all these blogs, they were like, brought in house. So why aren't they providing the content? But that's what I wonder about? Yeah, so I'm not
sure exactly what change that made this business model viable. Like, I don't know, if if somebody had started substack in 2005, or 2010, if it would have succeeded, and just nobody thought about it, probably something's changed. I think part of it is probably just that, as the internet media ecosystem, particularly the ad supported Internet ecosystem has matured, the downsides of having all your media supported by advertising have really become more obvious the way it encourages people to do superficial kind of click-batey pieces. And I think as the audience has gotten more aware of that, a non trivial proportion of them are like, this sucks, like, we want something different. And then they became more receptive to, I think, the pitch is that, you know, there have always been media organizations that are trying to be subscription based. A few of them succeeded, like the Wall Street Journal and The Economist have always been successful. But it was really hard to break into that, because I think most people thought, well, I can get my news for free, you know, on, you know, just on the internet for from ad supported sites. And as it became clear just how bad some of those sources are, I think people became more receptive that like, actually, you know, if you pay, you can get a better product. And I also think that the, the email oriented nature of the newsletter is really key, because the thing that's hard about running a blog is that you really need to have content every day, because if somebody comes to your blog, and there's nothing there, they get disappointed, there may be less motivated to come back the next day. And so it's this, this really treadmill you have to be on, we have to be on there every day. Whereas with a newsletter, if you have, you know, some number, a 1000 people, who have committed to getting your content in their inbox, whenever you happen to send it out, you can do it once a week, once a month, you know, obviously people are more likely to pay if it's more frequent. But there's a much wider range of viable frequencies viable links, that can still add up to a viable business.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's such a huge variance on offer right now in terms of how polished they are, how long they are, how frequent they are. If - I feel like the possibilities that we imagined 20 years ago, are finally coming to fruition now, and it's great to just see that happening with many different people. Do you have any comments on kind of like the... Just, you know, the gossipy, like the media freakout that periodically seems to be happening about substack. And, you know, how it's giving refuge to these extremely right wing reactionary people like Matt Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald?
Um, yeah, I mean, I think that partly just people in the media like to freak out about things like it, you know, the getting people freaked out about things is the the business model of some of these publications. Um, but I think it's really interesting. If you look at the people who have succeeded on substack, a huge fraction of them are people who, in one way or another were didn't quite fit in with their kind of side of the political spectrum. So let's select Matt, you know, as a friend of mine, he's clearly on the left, but he has enough heterodox heterodox views. I think he didn't feel totally comfortable at a kind of Orthodox leftist center publication like Vox and then you got publications like The Dispatch and The Bulwark that we're, you know, kind of anti Trump conservative organizations. I think that the - that's a approach that there's enough people out there that want , that agree with that perspective to make a very lucrative living for some writers, but not so many people that you can build, you know, attrack the millions of people you need for an ad supported. So I think that's a big part of what's happening. Um, I mean, I don't know, I think I think Matt's word his work is great. I think a lot of Glenn Greenwald stuff is good. So I think that the freakout part, I don't agree with the freakout, it seems, it seems fine. It seems like we're getting a type of intellectual diversity that I think is important, and that you weren't necessarily getting at traditional publications.
Yeah, I mean, it seems to me that we're having, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, what a way I would think about it, we're having a levels of selection problem where, like an organization, a publication that has a diverse array of voices, is more attractive, I think, as a consumer personally. Because again, like if they all say the same thing, why are you paying for all these people saying the same thing? You know, just like there's a different name at the byline, but they say the same thing. But internally, yeah, there seems to be a really, really strong pressure to conformity. And if you're the Bret Stevens or the erstwhile Barry Weiss, that's a difficult position for you internally, even though, externally, you're probably really helping out a lot because you're the outlier, somebody,
I think it's hard to say like, I do think that a lot of the pressures on a publication, like the New York Times does come from the subscribers, because I suspect if you looked at the like distribution of ideologies, the people that pay for the New York Times, I bet it's very left of center. And I bet there are a significant number of people who read a Bret Stevens column, they don't like and send an email saying, Hey, I'm canceling my subscription, because this is outrageous. Um, no, I think there probably are some readers on the other side, like you who, you know, like the diversity and like signing up. But I think when you have a media market as crowded as the one we have, there really is room for a publication, like what the times is becoming that just like, you know, mostly on the opinion page, like mostly just, you know, tells people liberals in this case, like what they want to hear. And I think it's, it's really hard to hold together a publication with, you know, people who, you know, who really have like, sincere disagreements, because people have just gotten so emotionally invested in these issues, that it's hard for them to kind of keep some critical distance and say, I don't agree with that. But I'm like, appreciate hearing from I'm glad there's people like that you Who, who do appreciate that, because I do too. But I don't think that's necessarily that the attitude of the average subscriber to a publication like the New York Times,
yeah, I mean, that's true. I had a discussion with a scientist friend of mine, and I, you know, I mentioned I do listen to conservative podcasts. Do that I might, you know, I'm more conservative, obviously. But I don't really read conservative publications, my explanation to him is like, well, I already know what they're gonna say, cuz I've heard that. And I think some of the same thing, so why do I want to hear what I think in somebody else's voice? So they're, you know, they were super confused. I don't get it. Maybe I'm just psychologically weird that way.
Well that's what's good about the internet, though, right? It's like, like, 50 years ago, you had your local paper, and they were super careful to be balanced, because they might be, you know, in many towns, it was just one paper. And so if you pissed off either liberals or conservatives, then you lose some subscribers, and that was bad. But now you can read 10 or 50, or 100 Publications if you want to. And so, I mean, that has downsides because some people just read, you know, entirely one perspective. And then, you know, I think that has negative effects. But for people who are looking for diversity, it's easier than it's ever been to read a mix of people from a wide range of perspectives.
Well so you had a, you had a post, about, like, reader feedback. And, you know, I checked my traffic. I'm not like totally driven by traffic, obviously. But I like to see what people are interested in what type of things people are interested in how that varies by person. And so you know, I, you know, I'm pivoting I'm iterating. That's just like an ongoing process, like, what have you seen, like, what's been the feedback, what's really taken off and what's kind of not taking off.
So people are very interested in housing, I think you'll see more of me writing about housing. I so so my background is more. in tech, I've written a lot about self driving cars and some cryptocurrency and stuff like that. And Alan's, my partner's, background is more in a traditional economics and policy background. And so far, we found I think we got more of the policy people and so people are really interested in that, um, but we've only been doing this for about a month. So I think we're... we'll see. I mean, like, one thing we'll definitely be covering, you know, coming up, there's this big budget fight, there might be a government shutdown or a debt ceiling crisis or something like that. We'll be covering that very thoroughly. But we also, as you said before, we're very interested in making sure that the coverage is relevant to people's lives. So we also want to write about kind of day to day aspects of people's lives. So I like one of my first pieces was looking at Amazon has a new no checkout technology where you can just pull items off the shelf And there's cameras to see what you take and send you an email a bit later, I want to do more things like that one of the things I'd love to do is just like drive for Uber or Lyft for a week, and then write about kind of what I experience. What I learned from that experience, because I think you learn a lot about economic policy by kind of going out in the world and seeing what consumers real lives are like, it's I think that's a good way of getting the kind of abstract arguments grounded in, you know, in the real world.
Yeah, I really enjoyed them. I was very interested in the piece about the checkout. You know, and all that I, I'm not one of those people that enjoys the normal grocery shopping experience, I guess. And so I'm super curious about that. Although right now, I do do a lot of the delivery thing, because I guess I don't care to like squeeze my fruit or whatever people like to do. Sure. And so technology is - technology is going to change our lives. You talked about self driving cars, I talked to talk about that with our team, Antonio Martinez Garcia, he's he's really, really bullish on Tesla self driving options, and then I see other people that are not so bullish. So I wonder about what your perspective and I know, you have a tech background actually knew that. And so your perspective on technology in the 2020s, like we have the smartphone at the end of the 2000s. And I think, now we don't know what the world would be like without that, like, what are you seeing that you think is going to be transformative? I talked to my friend Ramez Naam, about energy a couple months ago, and you know, the solar is just... solar and this like clean or green energy, whatever is just so much cheaper. It's shocking. So it seems like things are happening. And yet people are just taking it for granted. .
-Yeah, absolutely So I think those the two you mentioned are definitely big categories. I , self driving has advanced slower than a lot of people expected maybe five years ago, but I think people have now swung too far in the opposite direction of you know, this is never going to happen, or it's going to be decades away. I think they are continue to the companies working on self driving technology are continuing to make steady progress. And I certainly think by the end of the decade, you're going to start seeing pretty large scale commercialization of that. And I think that'll be I think people underestimate like how long it takes for a new technology to really have an effect on people. If you go back to like electrification in the early 20th century, it took 20 or 30 years from the invention of the first kind of practical electric motors to until you started to see factories really reorganized around that. So I think you'll see the same kind of thing. I think the self driving technology will become increasingly common over the next 10 years, but then it'll take another 10 or 20 years to really reorganize supply chains and delivery services, etc. Around self driving. And then yeah, energy, absolutely. Solar panels are getting cheap, rapidly, batteries are getting cheap, rapidly wind power is getting cheaper. And so I think that will be an area where there's just going to be a lot of I mean, I think we might have some big spending bills, and you know, government incentives or mandates to shift over. But even if that doesn't happen, we're getting pretty close to the point where electric cars just straight up cheaper than a gas powered car. I think that'll happen in the next five, five years or so. At which point, a lot of people I think will switch over just because it's you know, I have an electric car, it's convenient to never have to go to the gas station. Then a third third category I don't know as much about but I'm sure it'll be important is biotech. I mean, obviously, the pandemic has increased interest in this. And I know some people think that, that the RNA vaccine that helped with COVID could be applied to other things. So I don't pretend to be an expert on that. I don't know exactly what's going to happen. But it certainly seems like it's an area I'm optimistic about over the next decade.
Yeah. So you know, I do know a little bit about this. And well, I'll say, you know, privately, what people believe is that stem cells are really going to make a huge difference within the next 10 years, in terms of, you know, just, you know, generating tissue and organ donations and things like that, but also in a it's it's synthetic, synthetically, using it with CRISPR technology and genetic engineering. You know, I think, for example, just for the listeners out there, I think a lot of listeners know this, but I mean, I do I do think like certain Mendelian diseases like cystic fibrosis, will end malaria, or like sickle cell resistance, or sickle cell disease will probably be cured within the next 10 years. For adults, now, people will not be able to run marathons, if they have, if they were born with cystic fibrosis, their lungs will be at a, you know, non standard functioning, but it they will function well enough that they can probably live a reasonable long life, and the life expectancy will not be decreased in any way. I think. So I think that's gonna be a big change. I think people of genetics are excited about it. Some people are still skeptical about it, but I think that's definitely going to be here. And you know, you know, I think that's gonna be transformative when it comes to health care.
Yeah, that would be amazing. Let me actually ask you about a another technology I've heard about that sounds amazing to me, but doesn't seem to be rolling out that quickly. The the Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes and the efforts to like eradicate mosquitoes through genetic techniques is That's something that's, like, realistic and can we imagine a future in like, 2040, where like, mosquitoes don't exist anymore.
Um, so basically, if not crazy, the problem from what I've heard from evolutionary biologists is, you know, evolutions... So basically biology and evolutionary biology is not like physical science nature actually adapts. Sure, and so we, you know, we create, we create these gene drives, so the gene drive that sweeps through the population and makes them sterile. That's the theory but like that, the assumption is the mosquitoes genome that there's not like some variant out there, that figures out a way to block the gene drive. Once it once there's a variant that figures out a way to block the gene drive, that's gonna sweep to fixation that's gonna dominate and then all of a sudden, you have to create another one. So I think in theory, if we got good enough, if we got fast enough, we could we could crush, you'd have to crush, so it's like crush and contain right, like with Coronavirus. But nature, nature is good at evolving around things. So unfortunately, and I'm gonna say unfortunate, cuz I'm not a big mosquito fan. I'm actually like, bearish on that now compared to say five years ago, partly from talking to people theoretically, and it seems like some of that's borne out in terms of adaptation. And gene drive is, it's an obscure issue, partly just because it's hard to observe in nature, because it happens so fast. So people say, Oh, well, we don't observe gene drive. But if it just happens really fast, you're not going to catch too many instances of it, you know, being present, because it just like takes over a population really quickly. So and just for the listener, gene drive is basically a situation where you're violating Mendel's Law of Segregation, instead of a one out of two probability of A given allele copy gene copy going to the offspring, it like distorts it, there's a segregation disorder, it'll go to 90 to 100%. And once that happens, you're increasing its fitness by two times over the general population, that's just an incredible fitness increase, a 10%. Fitness increases very high actually, in an evolutionary contrast to a 2x is just crazy. And so I mean, yeah, so I think that that is something I'm bearish about. I think in terms of biotech, I'm optimistic about these Mendelian diseases, I also think, pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis, which some listeners will know associated with a company named Genomic Prediction. And I know people there, I'm friendly with a lot of people there, they have just announced the first child who was born using this technology to select for I think Polygenic characteristics, that's the key difference. And there's another company named Orchid in California and another one called Myome. So when you have multiple companies in a space, you know that investors think that there's possibilities here. And I think pre Implantation Genetic Diagnosis will be like in vitro fertilization, people are going to live in terror of it until they don't.
And so and so this would be like, like, how would this work? Concretely, if I'm like, trying to have a kid? This would be somebody who conceived naturally, and then after, after the conception, they be able to see if I have like, genetic diseases?
No, cuz we already do that. Okay, so we already Yeah, so. Yeah. So pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis. And it's weird, like I've been talking about this for 15 years. And now it's like actually happening. Like, I remember doing an interview with the BBC, like in 2011. About this, in any case, so what it is basically in vitro fertilization, right, you normally do the test tube babies, quote, unquote, like that's the thing that's done. So they have developed ways to be able to screen the embryos, for quantitative characteristics. Now, normally, you might want to do this, let's say that you're Jewish, and you guys are both carriers. And you don't believe in abortion, your carriers for Tay-Sachs? Well, you could do this by picking an embryo that doesn't exhibit Tay Sachs disease, or whatever, you know, for obvious reasons. Well, what some of these new companies are doing, like, let's select someone that's tall, let's select someone that's smart, like all those things. Now, they're not doing that yet. And they might do it eventually. And there's some technical reasons why this is, there's going to be a problem with multiple selection of the different dimensions. But what I think will happen concretely, if you want to ask me, there are going to be people who have autism that runs in the family, schizophrenia that runs in the family, these are actually highly heritable characteristics in terms of the heritability, like 60% 80%. So 60 to 80% of genetic variation is due, or the phenotypic variation is due to genes. And so you know, that it runs off and like people will be like, Okay, two out of my three sons have autism, and back in, like, you know, back in the 50s, people would be like, Well, it's because you're a frigid mom. Well, actually, we just know that there's a genetic disposition that run in some families, but it's not it's not like 100% there's variation from from child to child in large part based on their genes. And so the goal would be okay, you have like 2020 embryos, you know, 20 eggs, and you want to pick the combinations that will reduce to hopefully zero, your chance of the child exhibiting and manifesting autism and schizophrenia like this is what's something that I think is very likely to happen within the next 10 years. And you know, you know, scientists or a lot of scientists are freaking out, they're saying this is eugenics, blah, blah, blah. My issue with scientists like that is I'm 100% sure a lot of these scientists are doing non invasive prenatal testing, because, you know, you know, life schedule of upper middle class professionals is delayed, and pretty much everybody, over 35, every woman over 35, in the US is now doing non invasive prenatal testing. I mean, like everybody, like 90%, whatever, you know, it's a really high fraction, it's free, pretty much free. And you know, what happens when they get a positive test? Right? For something? So when we what is that? I mean, it's the exact same thing, except you're waiting until pregnancy, and it's a different characteristic. So I think a lot of the objection to the, to some of these screenings that are pre Implantation Genetic Diagnosis, is just unfamiliarity, or, you know, geneticists, to some extent, they want to separate themselves from GATACA because it's bad optics. But I mean, what are they doing?
Yeah, another another technology that I don't know as much about, but sounds like it could have big social implications is the artificial meats, you needed the plant based meats or the, like lab grown ones. It seems like if that became good enough, it could have big social implications, because, you know, vegetarianism could be much more popular. And we can start having debates about whether, you know, everybody should be required to have that kind of meat. But again, I don't I don't know enough about that technology to know if that's, you know, it's likely to get good enough that, you know, it'll be hard to distinguish or, or not.
Yeah, I mean, I've heard that there might be issues with scale, I think. But I do think that like, these are like the Impossible Foods type stuff. I'm imagining that stuff like burgers, like ground beef, will probably not be produced in the regular way in 10 years, because the structure, the biophysical structures a lot simpler for ground beef, because it's mushed than something like a ribeye, like ribeye is gonna be hard to create from like vegetables, obviously, because you need to create that structure. And that creates the verisimilitude. But with with with a hamburger patty, I think Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, I think they're coming close. I mean, they're still not. They're not like a $15 or $20 burger at like a nice restaurant. But I mean, they're definitely competitive, if not, frankly, even superior to a fast food burger. Yeah. And so I think I think what, I think we're there with that, so I mean, there's a lot of technology, there's a lot of stuff that's going on, there's a lot of stuff that you you're covering, so a year from now, let's project like, where do you see Full Stack Economics being like, I mean, what what is your ambition? Like? Are you gonna? What are the things that some of these substack newsletters and you're not substack I think your on Ghost, but these newsletters or ended up end up doing is? They're hiring people? And so it's almost like they're reproducing the media? Do you want to do that? Or do you want to stay different? You want to separate yourself? I'm just curious what your ambition because I know you're early. So you're learning as we're going along?
Yeah, so absolutely. I mean, one of the reasons I was excited to have a co-author is I do think there's an opportunity for, for the newsletter business model to support larger groups of reporters, I've always found that I learned from having colleagues and the kind of back and forth that happens in the newsroom. But I think that the there's a lot of value in having the subscription based business model. And what I would really like to do in the long run is, rather than covering a lot more content, I'm trying to go deeper. So I don't think it's gonna happen a year, but maybe in three to five years, have a team of half a dozen people where one person is 100%, on on housing, 1 person is maybe 100%, clean energy, one person, maybe 100% on this kind of tech stuff I write about. And rather than, and, you know, maybe each one only publishes every couple of weeks, but they put a ton of research into their posts. And when their topic is the main story on the news, they're able to do really, really in depth, thoughtful kind of analysis. And I think to some extent, there's there's other publications like that do this. I mean, one publication that I'm, I'm really impressed by is The Information which is a news organization focused on Silicon Valley. Now they do more scoops rather than explanatory stuff. So we wouldn't be directly competing with them. But they have a pretty big team. But their reporters don't publish very often, but when they do, they often have big scoops about things that are happening in Silicon Valley that nobody else has. And so that's what I would really like to do is have content you won't find any anywhere else. And as we grow, be able to have the pieces be more ambitious, and more deeply researched, and more original, but not necessarily flood people. I've subscribed to a few of these multiple ones where they have like two or three pieces a day, it is just like, I just don't have time to read all that content. And, you know, it's not necessarily all that good.
Yeah, yeah, I totally I totally agree with you. You know, yeah, I you know, there is a there's a quality content, quality quantity trade off. It's just that's just natural and, you know, I'm - I'm kind of in the same business and so I kind of I see myself and I feel it. And so I guess like there's different avenues, different strategies you can take, you can like flood zone and cover everything and kind of aim for really, really broad but I have to be honest, like more shallow net with some of these, you know, some of these publications, or you could focus and like drill down, like you're talking about into a few specific areas. And if you want to know that topic, that's where you go. And they develop credibility that way. And I think that's I think that that's the way to go forward in the future. I would say in terms of publications, you know, I still, I tend to trust bylines more than the publication today. Because I see like a huge variance in journalism, in my experience, and I don't know, what do you think about that perception? And I don't know if this is different than it was 20 years ago, 20 years ago, if it was in the New York Times, I would just read it. And now I make sure I see who it is. And I calibrate my priors, accordingly.
Sure, I think I think there's a couple things going on there. I mean, for one thing, I suspect when you're trusting bylines, probably more in like politically, either politically oriented topics or topics, you know well, you're more likely to check the byline. I mean, if you have a topic that's not super political, and you don't know anything about, like, reading, whoever the New York Times has, is probably as good a choice as anybody else. Now, obviously, if in an expert in an area, you know, like genetics, there's gonna be people that are, you know, better than the best people at the Times or the Wall Street Journal, but if you're not an expert yourself, you don't necessarily know which you know, which blog or whatever to go to. So I think that in, you know, big mainstream publications, you get 60th or 70th or 80th percentile content on average, which for real experts, is kind of not good enough. But for the general public, it's fine. And then I also think that there's other kinds of publications. So the more ad supported publications, there are some, I think it's getting better. But you know, over the last decades, certainly, there's some publications that really, were just focused on putting stuff out and had very low quality standards. And in those cases, absolutely, like the, the, the brand means almost nothing. And it really there's this, you know, often a few people at a publication that are really good, and a lot of people that aren't good. And I think a lot of publications really underestimated how much that would damage their brand. And I think some of them are now course correcting and saying, Oh, we actually do need to focus on quality control. And this is, this is one of the reasons you were saying what you would do in a year, why you I'm not gonna say I want five or 10 people in a year, because I mean, number one, I don't want to like take outside investors, I wanted to stay independent. So I just don't have the financial ability. But also, I think, you want to have a very high quality bar. And so I don't think there's very many people that I would like enough to kind of want to be working with them full time. And so I think when you grow, slowly add, you know, writer a year or less, you really have time to only take people you're really excited about and to kind of bring them on board and make sure everybody is on the same page about what you're trying to do. And I think in the long run, you can build a really good publication. One of the other things I've been thinking about, as like a strategy for having high high quality is that I think a challenge publications have is often hard to get anybody more prominent or, you know, higher quality than the founders, because why would you like work for somebody else, and something I might, I would love to do is kind of keep Full Stack Economics as a writer owned organization, where when we bring somebody somebody on board, we have have them on a path to become co-owners of the publication. And I think that might be appealing to people who otherwise you know, if you have a kind of stable job at a major publication, that might be an inducement to get really good people to come aboard. I haven't... you know, not in a position to make any offers like that to anybody, but I would love it. If it's successful. That's something I would love to experiment with.
Yeah, I mean, you know, giving equity, that's how startups work, right. And that's how they get really good people to leave their I mean, frankly, often cushy jobs at very large organization, where they don't have equity, but they have a large salary. And that's just a trade off. That's not that's how it works. So that that makes sense. So I guess, like, you know, I'm trying to, I try to keep the podcast like, you know, not relevant to stuff in the news. But I gotta ask you, as we're recording, we're having issues with the debt ceiling the United States is printing money like crazy a friend of mine, in the startup sector, actually, I had a discussion with him the other day, and he said, basically, all this money printing, it's like UBI for rich people, they need to invest it somewhere. So you know, all of this stuff is going on in economics right now. How do you balance - like, you know, timeliness versus going deep into say, like something like California's housing issue? That's not about now it's about past in the past and the future, it's going to be around. And then there's other things like the debt limit that people are kind of interested in for a week, and then they're not interested in, like, are you going to focus on any of this? You know, current events, news type stuff, are you going to focus more on deeper structural issues?
We definitely do both. I think the way we think about it is, is we try to focus on Play where we can add value. And so the debt ceiling is a good example. So my colleague, Alan Cole, his main thing is fiscal policy. And so this is like really in his wheelhouse. So I did actually talk to him today he's working on a piece about, you know, that it looks like there's likely to be a government shutdown on Friday, I would like us to have a piece on that, because that's something where he really has deeper insight into that issue, it happens to be the big story of the news. But it's also a topic where he really can provide insight more than I think most other people writing about it. Um, you know, if something big happened with Tesla, or in the housing market, like what like the California bill, I was actually about a week late to that California story. But like when California passed, the legislature passed a suite of housing bills, I covered that. And so that's I think that's our strategy is, is we try to specialize on a few topics within the broad umbrella of economics. And then when those topics are in the news, we'll write about them. Also, when there's like really big a really interesting thing. So like, earlier this year, I think if we'd been running, you know, there was all this craziness around Game Stop stock, I think we would have had to write something about that. Not necessarily like a day to day, like, here's what happened yesterday, but exploring the larger structural forces, what it says about the nature of the stock market, or the you know, or like you said that the, you know, fed policies or whatever that might be driving that. And we'll try to start with a new story and pivot to talk about some larger structural issue that helps explain, you know, what they see in the headlines.
So, um, you know, as we close this out, you know, I want to ask you, like, kind of a big picture, high level, prediction perception, you know, this 2021, as we're recording, you know, we're deep into the 21st century. Now, it's a lot different than it was when you were in the think tank world, you know, more than a decade ago. Are you bearish or bullish on this country? When it comes to the economics? I mean, how are you feeling? Just your general sense? Are you unsure? You know, or do you think our best times are to come or not?
I think the economics I'm pretty bullish about. I mean, the I think two of the biggest issues are the ones we talked about the housing. And I also think that a big mistake that policymakers made in the 2010s, was not doing enough to support the growth of the economy through easy money. And I think that the policymakers have really gotten religion on that. And so I think you're likely to see faster growth in the 2020s than we did in the 2010s. And I think overall, like the, you know, the US economy is not growing as fast as people want, but we are still one of the wealthiest countries in the world. And, you know, we're, I think we're likely to continue to be if not the wealthiest one of the wealthiest for much of the century, I do worry about the political system and the media ecosystem and the increasing polarization. You know, it's, I still think it's like a low probability. It's like 10, or 20%, that there's some kind of really serious constitutional crisis. But, um, you know, I would have said, that was like, like, less than 5%, a decade ago, people just seem really angry. And I think the system has gotten more and more resistant to reform. I mean, there just is more and more like structures, the way government work are just frozen into place. And I'm not I don't have any specific prediction about how that's going to end. But it seems like the level of anger and the level of rigidity is going to lead to some kind of problem. But but but I think that being a wealthy country means you have a lot of kind of cushion, because even if there's some kind of political crisis, we do have some of the most innovative countries in the world, we have a lot of wealth and a lot of infrastructure. And so I think overall, we'll be in good shape.
Yeah, I mean, you're just a follow up. This will be my last follow up. I mean, I would define you as like, say, a centrist libertarian. What do you say about that?
Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. Um, yeah, I would, I would say, my, my politics are pretty centrist. In general, I definitely have - I feel like I learned a lot in my, my years in the, you know, as a more of like, an explicit libertarian. But I think as I've gotten older, I've just become more aware that the world is complicated. And so I'm less less inclined to take kind of absolutist policy stances that, you know, this should be illegal, or, you know, this law is ridiculous, like, I think most, most aspects of the way government works has at least some logic to it. And while it's- there's often your for reform, you want to kind of understand why the structure is in place, and how to preserve the good parts while you try to, you know, fix the bad parts. So I guess in that sense, it's, it's like a little boring, because it's like not, you know, you don't get to write like sweeping, you know, statements about like, you know, how you should like, change everything. But like, I guess, going back to the previous question, like, I think for the most part, like American society and American economy of work pretty well. And I think this is like one of the big things like both kind of both ends of the political spectrum get wrong is I think there's really a sense of crisis. And I think that crisis is mostly a function of like people being mad at each other and yelling at each other. And I think the underlying Like, state of people's day to day lives is pretty good. And keeping that in mind, I think maybe it can be helpful to keep that in mind. Because while the stakes of political arguments are pretty high, I think they're often not as high as as people imagined them to be.
Yeah, I think I think that's a good place to stop. I do want to remind the listeners Full Stack Economics, just Google it, it'll show up. It's really great. And by the way, it's a it's a very aesthetically pleasing website. I do have to say,
Thank you. Yeah, we we got a graphic designer in Pakistan, who is very affordable and put a ton of work and came up with a great logo for us. So we're really happy with how that turned out. So I appreciate that.
Well, Mashallah. Mashallah, I guess? It was nice to have - I was nice to talk to you, Tim. I will be getting your emails as per usual, super interested. I learned a lot. And you know, it's not an area that I know. But it's an area that I want to know more about. I think anyone listening out there should want to know more about economics because unfortunately, we can't just outsource this stuff anymore. To other people. As you said, our economic possibilities might be bright, but our governmental or social or institutional frameworks are a little brittle. And we got to be involved in where citizens at this point, I feel.
Absolutely thanks so much for having me on. I'm a big fan of the podcast and of the newsletter.
