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- [Narrator] Welcome to
Nobel conversations.
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In this episode, Josh Angrist
and Guido Imbens,
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sit down with Isaiah Andrews
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to discuss how the research
was initially received
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and how they responded
to criticism.
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At the time, did you feel like
you are on to something,
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you felt like this was
the beginning of a whole line of work
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that you felt like was going to be important or...?
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Not so much that it was
a whole line of work,
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but certainly I felt like, "Wow, this--"
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We proved something be proved up
that people didn't know before,
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that it was worth knowing.
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Yeah, going back compared to my
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job market papers having--
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I felt this was actually a very clear crisp result.
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But there were definitely
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was mixed reception and I don't
think anybody said that,
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"Oh, wow, this is already,
something."
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No, which is the nightmare scenario for a researcher
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where you think you've discovered
something and then somebody else,
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says, "Oh, I knew that."
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But there were definitely was a need to
convince people that this was worth knowing,
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that instrumental variables estimates
a causal effect for compliers.
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Yeah, but even though it
took a long time to convince
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a bigger audience,
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sometimes even fairly quickly, the
reception was pretty good
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among a small group of people.
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Gary, clearly liked it a lot from the beginning
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and I remember, because at that point Josh had left for Israel,
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but I remember explaining it to Don Ruben
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and he was like, "Yeah, this really is something here."
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Not right away though.
Don took some convincing.
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By the time you got to Don,
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there have been some back
and forth with him
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and in correspondence actually.
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But I remember at some
point getting a call or email from him
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saying that he was sitting at the
airport in Rome
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and looking at the paper and thinking,
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"Yeah, no actually, you guys are onto something."
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We were happy about but that
took longer than I think you remember.
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Yeah, it wasn't right away
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[laughter]
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because I know that I was back in
Israel by the time that happened.
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I'd left for Israel in the summer--
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I was only at Harvard for two years.
We had that one year.
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It is remarkable, I mean, that
one year was so fateful for us.
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- [Guido] Yes.
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I think we understood there was
something good happening,
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but maybe we didn't think it was
life-changing, only in retrospect.
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♪ [music] ♪
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- [Isaiah] As you said, it sounds like a small group
of people were initially quite receptive,
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perhaps took some time for
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a broader group of people to come
around to
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seeing the LATE framework
as a valuable way to look at the world.
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I guess, in over the
course of that, did you
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were their periods
where you thought,
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maybe the people
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saying this wasn't a useful way to
look at the world were right?
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Did you get discouraged?
How did you think about?
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I don't think I was discouraged
but the people who were saying
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that we're smart people, well informed metricians,
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sophisticated readers
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and I think the substance
of the comment was,
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this is not what econometrics is about.
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Econometrics was being transmitted at that time was about structure.
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There was this idea that
there's structure in the economy
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and it's our job to discover it
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and what makes it structure
is it's essentially invariant
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and so we're saying, in the late theorem,
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that every instrument produces
its own causal effect,
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which is in contradiction to that
to some extent
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and so that was where the tension was.
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People didn't want to give up that idea.
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Yeah, I remember
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once people were started
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arguing more more vocally against that,
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that never really bothered me that much.
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It seems clear that we had a result there
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and it was somewhat controversial,
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but controversial in a good way.
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It was clear that people felt
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they had to come out against it because--
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Well, I think what we think it's good now
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we might not have loved it at the time.
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I remember being somewhat,
the more upset--
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there was some dinner where someone said,
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"No, no, that paper with Josh,
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that was doing a disservice
to the profession."
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We definitely had reactions like that.
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At some level, that may be indicative of the culture
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in general in economics at the time.
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I thought back later, what if that'd happened now,
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if I was a senior person sitting
in that conversation,
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I would call that out because it
really was not appropriate--
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- [Josh] But it wasn't so bad.
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I think the criticism is--
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It wasn't completely
misguided, it was maybe wrong.
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No, no, but you can
say the paper is wrong
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but it's saying that it's a disservice to
the profession, that's not really--
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Personal.
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Yes, and doing that, not to me,
but in front of my senior colleagues.
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But nobody was saying the result was wrong
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and I remember also,
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some of the comments were thought-provoking
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so we had some negative reviews,
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I think on the average causal response paper.
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Somebody said, "These compliers
you can't figure out who they are."
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Right.
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It's one thing to say
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you're estimating the effect of
treatment on the treated or something like that.
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You can tell me who's treated,
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people in the CPS,
you can't tell me who's a complier.
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So that was a legitimate challenge.
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That's certainly fair and I can see why
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that part made people
a little uneasy and uncomfortable.
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Yeah.
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But it's a at the same time
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because it showed that you couldn't
really go beyond that,
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it was very useful thing to realize.
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I remember on the day,
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we got to the key result that I was thinking,
"Wow, this is as good as it gets.
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Here we actually have an insight
but clearly--"
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And we had to sell it.
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For quite a few years, we had to sell
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and it's proven to be quite useful.
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I don't think we understood that it
would be so useful at the time.
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No, I did feel early on this was
a substantial insight.
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- [Josh] Yeah we [learned] something.
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But I did not think goals were there.
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I don't think we were aiming for the Nobel.
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[laughter]
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We were very happy to get
that note in Econometrica.
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♪ [music] ♪
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- [Isaiah] Are there factors or are ways of approaching
problems that lead people to be better at
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recognizing the good stuff and taking the
time to do it as opposed to dismissing it?
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- [Josh] Sometimes I think it's helpful.
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If you're trying to convince somebody
that you have something useful to say
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and maybe they don't speak your language,
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you might need to learn their language.
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Yes. Yes, exactly.
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That's what we did with Don,
we figured out how to--
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I remember we had a very hard time explaining
the exclusion restriction to Don,
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maybe rightfully so,
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I think Guido and I eventually figured out
that it wasn't formulated very clearly,
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and we came up with a way to do that in
the potential outcomes framework
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that I think worked
for the three of us.
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Yeah, well, it worked for
the bigger literature
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but I think what you're saying there
is exactly right,
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you need to figure out how not just say, okay well, I've got this language
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and this this works great
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and I've got to convince someone
else to use the language.
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You could first figure out what language they're using
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and then only then, can you try to say,
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"Wow, but here you thinking of it this way,"
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but that's actually a pretty hard thing to do,
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get someone from a different discipline,
convincing them,
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two junior faculty in a different department
actually have something to say to you,
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that's that takes a fair amount of effort.
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Yeah, I wrote on a number of times, in fairly long letters.
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I remember thinking this is worth doing,
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that if I could convince Don
that would validate the framework to some extent.
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I think both you and Don were a little
bit more confident that you were right.
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Well, we used to argue a lot and
you would sometimes referee those.
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[laughter]
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That was fun.
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It wasn't hurtful.
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I remember getting a little testy once,
we had lunch in The Faculty Club
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and we're talking about the draft lottery paper.
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we were talking about never takes
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as people wounded serve in
the military irrespective of
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whether they were getting drafted
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and you and Don said something
about shooting yourself in the foot,
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as a way of getting out of the military
and that may be the exclusion restriction
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for never takes wasn't working
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and then the other one would say,
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"Well, yes you could do that
but why would you want to shoot yourself in the foot?"
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[laughter]
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It got a little [inaudible] there.
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I usually go for moving to Canada for my example
when I'm teaching that.
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But he thinks it's tricky,
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I get students coming
from computer science and they want to do
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things on causal inference
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and it takes a huge amount of
effort to figure out how
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they actually thinking about problem
and whether there's something there
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and so, now over the years,
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I've got a little more
appreciation for the fact that Don
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was actually willing to--
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It took him a while, but he did
engage first with Josh
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and then with both of us
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and rather than dismissing
and say,
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"Well, okay I can't figure out what these guys are
doing and it's probably just not really that
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that interesting."
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Everybody always wants to
figure out quickly,
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you want to save time and you want to save
your brain cells for other things.
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The fastest route to that is to figure
out why you should dismiss something.
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Yes.
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I don't need to spend time on this.
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♪ [music] ♪
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- [Narrator] If you'd like to watch more
Nobel conversations click here,
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or if you'd like to learn
more about econometrics,
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check out Josh's "Mastering
Econometrics" series.
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If you'd like to learn more
about Guido, Josh, and Isaiah
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check out the links in the description.
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♪ [music] ♪