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John Friedman

John Friedman

Economist

Aug 20, 2026

13:51
I mean, it's what, five and a half months? It's doubling itself? There's absolutely no way as a professor you can keep up with that.
13:57
No, no.
13:58
I mean, these changes are happening and no doubt.
14:01
And I guess I want to sort of address two of the things you said is and one, how can managers be doing this on the one hand? And on the other hand, you know, look at what they're doing.
14:11
Well, in terms of what they're doing.
14:14
I mean, the cutting out of the humanities and the social sciences is essentially an attack on critical thinking and sort of human thinking skills, right? Which we learn through the humanities and through, you know, the social sciences where we learn to ask questions.
14:32
you know, really big questions and think through them very critically.

16 MINS LATER

30:47
you
60:26
Now I wanna compare that to firms that we think are likely to be above the threshold for eligibility, firms with about 1,300 employees on average.
60:37
And you can see here, if you compare the purple to the green, that the trends are basically indistinguishable

9 MINS LATER

69:50
Do you have any bigger insights on universal basic income on that? Can you draw lessons that we should have a more guaranteed income or universal basic income? Or is this going too far? We're just drawing this conclusions for UBI.
70:08
So I mean, obviously, the debate over UBI, there's an enormous literature here.
70:12
And there are a lot of concerns that we can't address.
70:16
I think the stimulus payments that Rod showed those graphs of are perhaps the most similar, not quite universal basic income.
70:23
And, you know, certainly those payments, I think, did a lot of work in supporting many households with declining incomes in April.
70:31
You know, whether we want to continue to have that type of very broad support going forward or we more want to focus on more targeted supports, either for households that have lost income or for households and businesses in particular areas where the shock has been particularly large.

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