Dialogue with David Leonhardt

It's about how to spur innovation, read it here.  Here is one excerpt:

I would also like to see more of our elite institutions of higher education take the explicitly meritocratic and indeed arguably anti-egalitarian approaches of Caltech and also University of Chicago. Those two institutions are big successes – M.I.T. too – yet they are not always so easy to copy. We should be trying harder. In terms of respect for intelligence, achievement, and science, we should be more like Singapore.

The question did not come up, but I also favor reduced liability standards for major new innovations.  Take the various plans for robot-driven cars.  They will kill some people, as do human-driven cars.  We run the risk of having the status quo so locked into place, so grandfathered, and so implicitly favored by the realities of regulation and lawsuits, that such an idea might never get off the ground.  That in turn affects the incentives of innovators ex ante.

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