Vanderbilt University enters The Bob Zadek Show only through the research its affiliated scholars have produced. Across two episodes, separated by more than two and a half years, guests cite Vanderbilt-based work as quantitative support for arguments about poverty and about pandemic policy. The excerpts contain no account of the university’s founding, location, governance, or academic programs; they name it solely as the affiliation of researchers whose estimates the guests deploy.
Poverty reduction and criminal justice reform
In the March 2019 episode on libertarian anti-poverty policy, Michael Tanner cites scholars at Vanderbilt University in the course of arguing that reducing incarceration would reduce poverty. Tanner tells Bob Zadek that holding people in prison is expensive, and that society spends money both on jailing people and on later efforts to keep them out of jail, when it could simply not put them in jail in the first place. He then attributes a specific estimate to Vanderbilt: “It’s estimated by scholars at Vanderbilt University, for example, that if we were to reform our criminal justice system and decriminalize many of the offenses that we have today, that we could reduce poverty by about 20 percent.” Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy (2019)
Tanner presents that figure as implying large savings in both incarceration costs and welfare costs. His broader argument in the passage is that a criminal record follows a young man arrested for a drug crime for the rest of his life, making employment harder because he is a convicted felon, rendering him ineligible for many education programs and scholarships, often ineligible for housing where landlords may ask about convictions, and ineligible for occupational licensing. He notes that in most states a felony conviction bars a person from obtaining a barber’s license. Bob Zadek returns to that point, citing Cato and other libertarian organizations for the observation that applicants for a barber’s license in many states must satisfy a board as to “good character,” which a convicted felon cannot do. Zadek calls this one example of how governmental policies prevent people from working their way out of poverty. Libertarian Anti-Poverty Policy (2019)
The Vanderbilt estimate functions in the exchange as an authoritative number rather than as an institution’s position. Tanner does not name the scholars, describe the study, or say how the 20 percent figure was derived. The excerpt records only the attribution and the magnitude.
The value of a statistical life
In the November 2021 episode with Ryan Bourne, Vanderbilt appears again, this time as the affiliation of an economist whose work underlies the value of a statistical life. Bourne, discussing the cost-benefit calculus of lockdowns, explains that economists study labor markets to measure how much people must be paid to bear elevated death risks at work, and that dividing the average compensating differential by the elevated risk yields the value of a statistical life. He identifies the leading researcher in this literature: “The main economist who looks at this pretty in detail is this guy called Kip Viscusi at Vanderbilt University, and he reckons that for very low risks at work, observed behavior suggests that collectively we put a value on about of about $10 million on any life—on any life mitigated by some regulation or whatever.” Ryan Bourne on the Economic Fallacies of the Pandemic Policymakers (2021)
Bourne then questions whether that figure transfers to COVID-19. He notes that the labor-market studies draw on workers, while many of those at highest risk from the virus are elderly people who are not in labor markets, and that literature shows elderly people tend to be willing to pay less on average than middle-aged people to bear a given risk. Economists who adjusted for such factors, he says, have thought the $10 million figure should be reduced by between a third and two-thirds, to something more like $3 million per life saved. With that lower value, Bourne argues, the cost-benefit calculus of lockdowns looks very different and the benefits are much smaller. Ryan Bourne on the Economic Fallacies of the Pandemic Policymakers (2021)
In the same episode, Bob Zadek frames the underlying question through Andrew Cuomo, whom he describes as having been Governor of New York and as having defended his authoritarian behavior by saying he would do all he could to save even one life, on the premise that a single life has immeasurable value. Zadek calls the conversation about the value of a human life painful and says nobody listening could pick a number, but argues that economics requires the calculation. Bourne agrees with Zadek that they largely agree on the lockdown question, saying the strongest case for extreme measures was very early on, on a precautionary basis, or just before vaccines were rolled out, and that he was highly critical of continued blanket measures in between. Ryan Bourne on the Economic Fallacies of the Pandemic Policymakers (2021)
Across episodes
The two episodes touch Vanderbilt only as a citation, and the excerpts show no development in how the university is treated. In 2019, Michael Tanner attributes a poverty-reduction estimate to unnamed scholars at Vanderbilt; in 2021, Ryan Bourne names Kip Viscusi at Vanderbilt as the main economist behind the value of a statistical life. The topic does not change between the episodes so much as the discipline does—from criminal justice and poverty research to labor economics and cost-benefit analysis—and neither guest discusses the university itself.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state where Vanderbilt University is located, when it was founded, how it is governed, or what it teaches. They do not name the scholars behind the 20 percent poverty-reduction estimate, describe that study, or indicate how it was conducted. They give no institutional response, statement, or position from Vanderbilt on either the criminal justice or the pandemic-policy questions its researchers’ work is used to support.