Operation Warp Speed and the Triumph of Governance | Alex Tabarrok & Richard Hanania
Operation Warp Speed and the Triumph of Governance | Alex Tabarrok & Richard Hanania
Developing a covid vaccine, rising costs in health care and education, and the stupidity of "defund the police"
Appears in this episode
Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He joins the podcast to talk about his involvement in Operation Warp Speed, a uniquely successful federal government project. Richard asks how broadly applicable its lessons are, whether or not we could do something similar for cancer, and why economists and public health officials had such divergent opinions on the need to speed up the process of approving and distributing a vaccine.
Alex also discusses the Baumol effect, which he argues can explain much about rising costs in healthcare and education. Richard pushes back on the theory as a sufficient explanation, and asks whether a simple libertarian story better fits the facts, arguing that government support for these industries also plays a major role.
They then go on to talk about the rise of crypto, why America is severely under-policed, and how recent years have seen the collapse of challenges to liberal democracy.
This podcast was originally released by the Salem Center.
Listen in podcast form or watch on YouTube.
Links:
Paul Mango, Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds.
Eric Helland and Alex Tabarrok, “Why Are the Prices So Damn High?”
Richard Hanania, “The Year of Fukuyama.”
Operation Warp Speed and the Triumph of Governance | Alex Tabarrok & Richard Hanania
"Operation Warp Speed, a uniquely successful federal government project..." Uniquely successful at what exactly? Skipping all the safety studies in order to rush to market a vaccine that doesn't work and has the highest rate of adverse side effects of any vaccine in the past seventy years?
On Tabarrok's claims about the "underpolicing" of America's cities, has he ever responded to the objections from Graham?
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/earl-warrens-greatest-mistake
Graham argues that European police are more effective than American police because they don't have the post-Warren-Court Bill of Rights. His assertion is that Europe (even the UK) doesn't have concepts like "inadmissible evidence" or "the right to remain silent", which makes it much easier to secure convictions, which therefore means that sentences don't have to be as long to achieve the same deterrent effect.