Oren Cass
speaker
818 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 3 Jun
Oren Cass’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Let me tell you about the Mott and Bailey.
The Mont Bailey is the configuration of a medieval village that had – I might get them backwards.
But I believe the Mont was the small fortress on top of the hill and then the Bailey was the sort of open village area that everybody preferred to live in.
So you lived out in the Bailey and then if the barbarians were attacking, you could retreat into the Mont.
Solid move.
Well designed.
There you go.
And so the Mott and Bailey form of argument is you sort of spread out and make these very expansive claims and sort of have a great time.
And then when you actually get attacked, you retreat to this much narrower thing that you can defend.
That's right, like the Monty Python.
Yes.
And then, but as importantly, as soon as the attackers have gone, all right, fine, and moved on, you spread right back out again into your bailey.
So this is a constant feature of the economics debates that I think is very important is that, yes, there is an important valuable discipline of economics that has useful insights that uses both analysis and data and so forth to make useful points that we should consider when we are making public policy.
And then there is the actual policymaking process.
Economists have gotten very comfortable asserting that their narrowly useful technical insights dictate what policy should be.
Our model shows that free trade is efficient— That's right.
If you only followed the— Right.
Therefore, anybody who questions our prescription of free trade is an idiot.
It's like, well, actually, I understand your model of free trade.
Here are 10 reasons why in the real world, first of all, maybe I just have values for optimizing around other things.
Showing 441–460 of 818 · page 23 of 41
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