Videos here.

Panel 2, on the budget, includes Ezra Klein. He argues that the budget is, in the grand scheme of things, not such an important problem. I would agree that in the universe of problems, others are worse: unemployment, misallocation of health care resources, weaknesses in the education system.

But of the problems that government can do something about, I would say that fixing its own budget is the most important. That, of course, is where Klein and I disagree. His list of problems that government is ill-equipped to solve would be shorter than mine.

The first panel, on the economic outlook, is self-recommending (and Scott Sumner strongly recommends Brink Lindsey’s introduction), but it produced none of the intensity one might have expected. I think that most of us in attendance found the fourth panel, on intellectual property, the most interesting and informative. The third panel, on inequality, was one where I thought that Brink Lindsey did better than the panelists, perhaps because he has delved into the issue more deeply than they have.