Steve Levitt
speaker
962 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 31 Jul
Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Now, are there specific situations you can remember where, by thinking like an economist, you were able to score huge wins for NASA?
I'd love to hear about a few of those.
So it's given here that space exploration and government funding of it is a sensible thing to do.
But I've never quite understood what the government thinks it's optimizing in the space program.
What do you think motivates politicians to fund these programs?
I was surprised to hear that early on in the space race, John F. Kennedy offered to Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, the chance to work collaboratively to reach the moon.
And if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated and Khrushchev wasn't so suspicious of Lyndon Johnson, maybe getting to the moon would have been a joint U.S.-Soviet mission.
This seems at odds with the signaling story, doesn't it?
So Congress was trying to signal to the developing world that the U.S.
was the country to jump behind.
And Kennedy was trying to avoid World War III by signaling to Khrushchev that he was a friendly type.
Yeah, that's my interpretation.
At the same time the US and the USSR were racing to the moon, they were also negotiating rules to govern human activity in space.
Even in space, the world is run by lawyers.
Like this one.
It's so interesting to me to hear you talk in such a familiar way about these organizations that I've literally never heard of.
It's a kind of world that I think the regular person can walk through and never know that what you do exists.
It was surprising right in the middle of the Cold War that these countries were sitting down and talking in such a civil way.
Out of that era came five treaties.
The foundational one is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
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