"BLOOM: Yeah, with benefit of hindsight, it was a mistake in particular to have massive tax cuts over the last two, three years, because we’re actually growing very fast. What would have been much better is to push down the government debt so that right now when we really need it, we could spend money. Normally, you want to have big blowouts in recessions to support the economy, and earn your savings back in the booms. And instead, we’re in the hangover from spending in a boom and suddenly you’re hit with a recession with very little money left in the bank. So the fiscal position, I think, is much more worrying because there we should have been generating a surplus, and instead there’s a big deficit...
DUBNER: As a finance person who’s seen a few of these rises and falls now over the past few decades, do you have any general advice for people?
MOSKOWITZ: Yes, I have very specific advice. Don’t touch it.
BLOOM: One of the basic findings from economics is, you can’t outthink the market
MOSKOWITZ: Any time people try to time the market, they end up doing far more damage than they help themselves. It’s very difficult to do. As one example, I had many colleagues — these are famous economists — who said last week, “I’m buying, I’m buying like crazy. This will be a blip.” They’re all sorry they did.
BLOOM: And you’re swimming with the sharks, because the other side of that trade is guys on Wall Street that eat for lunch retail investors like us, that don’t really know what we’re doing.
MOSKOWITZ: So what I’ve always done — and I’m not the only financial economist that would tell you this — many of us would — is, you have a long-term strategy. You stick to it. And you can’t be blindsided or emotional about these short-term blips because you can’t really do much about them. So the best advice is actually not to look...
BLOOM: Employees working from home — so these were people, I should say, were booking telephone calls and making— processing data on computers. So they were kind of individual working jobs. They were 13 percent more productive. I mean, 13 percent is a huge increase. And the reasons they told us was, you know, A, it’s quieter at home, so they could concentrate more. But B, actually, they just tended to work their full shift rather than spending as much time at lunch or arriving late or taking long toilet breaks. Secondly, their quit rates halved. Many of them much preferred working from home and didn’t want to leave their job. And thirdly, once you controlled for performance, since they were performing better, they actually weren’t getting promoted any faster — so there is some sting in the tail, that being at home seemed to reduce your ability to get promoted... it’s really not a team job. So that’s why you can be at home four out of five days a week.
The second point was that after the end of the study, they then ask employees to re-decide whether they wanted to work from home or come back into the office. And half of the employees said after spending nine months at home, they didn’t like it. They felt isolated and lonely and they volunteered to come back into the office. So for me, the warnings from the Covid experiment is A, the type of working from home we’re talking about now is very extreme. It’s full-time, five days a week. I should note that less than five percent of Americans currently do that. Lots of people work from home a day a week, but very few people work from home full-time. It’s kind of like comparing going to the gym sporadically with marathon training, so it’s pretty extreme...
I really worry about a big tick up in people getting depressed, mental- health issues, which leads to health issues, more generally, because of the isolation it could lead to. My prediction is, we will find that people that do routine jobs may perform okay at home but for the majority of us, I think it’s going to be pretty painful personally, with all the loneliness. And I suspect will be pretty damaging for productivity, particularly as time goes on. So I think if there’s one or two weeks, it wouldn’t be so bad. But if it stretches on to three to six months, I think it’s going to be hugely damaging economically... I think another thing that’s going to be damaged in the long run, actually, is: if everyone’s working from home, there’s not going to be that kind of workplace discussions, coffee-table discussions, lunchtime talk. And most of that, it turns out, is important for long-run innovation...
MOSKOWITZ: Nobody likes commuting. It’s actually the number one thing on surveys that people say they hate the most. And I think the longer this goes, you’ll have more requests for, “Hey, look, I could do this commute three days a week. But not five.”...
BLOOM: I’m not that optimistic that remote learning is going to be that successful. The reason is from personal experience, I feel a lot of my value-added is what I’ll call the personal-trainer effect — you know, giving students motivation. You’re forcing people to focus for an hour and a half. For example, probably the biggest single improvement in my teaching was the year that I banned laptops and cell phones from being used in the class. And it was miraculous. Suddenly everyone pays attention. Whereas when it’s offline, it’s so easy to get distracted by watching the football or seeing the news or watching the stock market...
MOSKOWITZ: Here’s my view on this. And just from 25 years of teaching, myself. I find if you’re just teaching facts and methods, that can be done almost as well online as it can live. You could even argue maybe even better online because you can supplement it with video materials, and you can record it, right, and get it perfect. If you’re trying to teach someone how to think and you’re trying to teach them, let’s say, how to do research or how to ask an interesting question and get a scientific answer, that’s much more hands-on. So, you know, if I’m teaching basic investments — what’s a stock, what’s a bond — I think I can do that just as well online as I probably can in the classroom.But if you’re talking about training students how to think, right, and how to really, you know, whether it’s writing an English essay or writing a poem or coming up with a computer program that does X or, you know, thinking about how to price some obscure private-equity firm — that, I think, requires a lot more back and forth, a lot more interaction. And I suspect that the reason that we still have the university model, is that’s what they’re trying to do. What I tell my students is, I’m trying to teach you how to think, because what I teach you today may not be relevant 5, 10, 20 years from now. But if you know how to think about it, you’ll be able to figure it out. When LeBron James— very terrible analogy. But, you know, there’s a reason that basketball players want to play in front of fans... when you’re teaching, you’re reacting to your students. You see their faces, you see their questions, you see confusion. Sometimes you see a light go on. That’s very difficult to do. Even though you see their faces on the flat screen, it’s not quite the same...
BLOOM: I think socialization is actually really important. It’s also interesting that the American system has been criticized heavily for doing not that well in international comparable maths tests and science tests and reading tests, but Americans are very good at socializing, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. There’s lots of American startups and successful C.E.O.s and entrepreneurs. It’s part of this socialization process. From an early age, American kids are taught to argue, to speak up. And I think that will be lost if we move entirely to online home-based teaching...
DUBNER: Can you talk for a second about your past research on the association between climate change and violence?
BURKE: So one thing we have done is assemble historical data from around the world on violent outcomes. And what we find is a very strong linkage between changes in temperature and increases in various types of violence. So temperatures go up, you actually see more homicides in the U.S. You see more civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa. So this is not a new finding. It comes through very clearly in many different datasets... psychologists have shown for a long time that if you just put people in a room and turn up the temperature, you can piss them off even if there’s no one else in the room. But patterns of social engagement also change. So a warm evening, many more people are out on the street and maybe there are enough different social interactions that lead to an increase in crimes. And these larger scale-changes, declines in economic productivity or other outcomes, is the standard explanation for why you would see things like civil war, civil conflict, increase when temperatures go up...
DUBNER: I mean, I’m old enough now to remember when computing started to become pretty widely available and a lot of smart people said, “Well, that is the end of cities. It’s the end of in-person work, period. Everybody’s going to live in, you know, Fiji or wherever they want.” And it just didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened. This propinquity turned out to be incredibly valuable, and urbanization has risen and risen and risen. So I’m curious about what curiosities you may have to — what kind of lasting effects you may want to look for as an economist."
The American obsession about taxes (despite them being relatively low) where they keep bitching about paying too much in taxes and that it's better for them to keep their money instead of funding social programs cannot solely be explained by how dysfunctional their government is (i.e. their not getting much back). Perhaps it's linked to the mythology about taxes and their Revolution - even if they get representation now they still don't like taxes
