Tyler Cowen: “It’s…important to understand that the payments market in the United States is a $100 trillion dollar market. Yes, $100 trillion. Any firm that captures even a small share of this market is going to be big. Credit cards are actually a small part of payments, about $7 trillion with roughly a 2% transaction fee or a $140 billion market. (Quick check. Credit card companies had 2020 revenues of $176 billion). ACH debit and credit transfers are the big market, $65 trillion, which at a .5% transaction fee amounts to a $325 billion market (this is retail price, wholesale is lower). Thus, payments revenue is on the order of $465 billion. A small share of $465 billion is a very big market (and that is just the US market)…. Crypto payments are in principle at least an order of magnitude cheaper than ACH payments…Crypto payments are the future.”
Michael Munger: “The argument for markets is not the perfection of markets or of the price mechanism. It’s the imperfection of the world, in which this is the best system for elaborating division of labour to foster specialisation. Of course division of labour also existed in Pharaonic Egypt. But in free markets you break out of the small command economy and don’t need to know the person that you’re buying things from. It cuts the transactions cost of impersonal exchange. There is no alternative system that increases the wealth of most people, most of the time, by more. Or that reduces poverty by more, not even close.”
Paul Bloom: “The simplest theory of human nature is that we work as hard as we can to avoid such experiences. We pursue pleasure and comfort; we hope to make it through life unscathed. Suffering and pain are, by their very nature, to be avoided. The tidying guru Marie Kondo became famous by telling people to throw away possessions that don’t “spark joy,” and many would see such purging as excellent life advice in general. But this theory is incomplete. Under the right circumstances and in the right doses, physical pain and emotional pain, difficulty and failure and loss, are exactly what we are looking for…The importance of suffering is old news. It is part of many religious traditions, including the story in Genesis of how original sin condemned us to a life of struggle. It is central to Buddhist thought—the focus of the Four Noble Truths…In the search for a meaningful life, simply seeking pleasure isn’t enough. We need struggle and sacrifice.”
