John H. Cochrane on Empty Skies

John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He spent thirty years as a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He writes The Grumpy Economist (over 34,000 subscribers).

Cochrane is a pilot, and the empty skies are his example of what permission costs when it compounds for fifty years.

We cover three things. Why compound growth dwarfs everything else on the policy agenda and still moves almost no voters. What happens to the scaling of an economy when the default answer is that you must ask permission. And what has become of universities and peer review, where Cochrane says nobody reads the papers and the profession rewards where you published rather than whether you convinced anyone. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

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Mentioned in this episode

• John Cochrane, "Economic Growth" (2016), in John Norton Moore (ed.), The Presidential Debates, Carolina Academic Press, pp. 65-90. A shorter version appeared as "The Election's Most Important Issue": https://www.hoover.org/research/elections-most-important-issue
• John Cochrane, "Finance: Function Matters, Not Size," Journal of Economic Perspectives 27(2), 2013: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.2.29
• John Cochrane, "The Rule of Law in the Regulatory State" (2015), prepared for the Hoover Institution Magna Carta conference: https://www.johnhcochrane.com/news-op-eds-all/rule-of-law-regulation
• John Cochrane, "Refine," The Grumpy Economist: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/refine
• John Cochrane, "Writing Tips for PhD Students": https://www.johnhcochrane.com/writing-group
• John Cochrane, "Conti on the Future of Universities," The Grumpy Economist: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/conti-on-the-future-of-universities
• Gregory Conti, "The Rise of the Sectarian University," Compact: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-rise-of-the-sectarian-university/
• The Grumpy Economist, John Cochrane's Substack: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/
• Thibault Schrepel, "The Matthew Effect at Scale: Attention Scarcity and the AI Output Explosion," Network Law Review: https://www.networklawreview.org/matthew-effect/
• Robert E. Lucas Jr., "Expectations and the Neutrality of Money," Journal of Economic Theory 4(2), 1972, pp. 103-124.