The Joe Walker Podcast - Back To The Future - Tyler Cowen

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

Tyler Cowen is an economist and public intellectual par excellence.Show notesSelected links •Follow Tyler: Website | Twitter | Podcast | Blog •Stubborn Attachments, by Tyler Cowen •Ideal Code, Real World, by Brad Hooker •Utilitarianism and Co-operation, by Donald Regan •Peter Thiel interview, Conversations with Tyler •The Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen •The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Benjamin Friedman •Fully Growth, by Dietrich Vollrath •'The Nobel Prize Isn't What It Used To Be', Bloomberg article by Tyler Cowen •'Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2020' •Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom •A Tract on Monetary Reform, by John Maynard Keynes •Indian Currency and Finance, by John Maynard Keynes •Individualism and Economic Order, by Friedrich Hayek •The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert GordonTopics discussed •If God is dead, life is absurd and there are no rules, why shouldn't we just commit suicide? •Why should we care about the distant future? •Does rule utilitarianism collapse into act utilitarianism? •How can we make decisions at all without succumbing to moral paralysis and total uncertainty? •Why isn't the epistemic critique fatal to consequentialism? •Why didn't Tyler donate the proceeds of Stubborn Attachments to an effective charity? •What is the Great Stagnation? •Why was 1973 the breakpoint in western productivity growth? •Is the Great Stagnation overdetermined? •What metric would Tyler look at to determine whether the Great Stagnation had ended? •When did Tyler first become cognisant of the...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

you're listening to the jolly swagman podcast here's your host joe walker a ladies and a gentlemen a boys and the girls a swagman and aagettes, welcome back to the show. There are no ads for this episode. Instead, I want to ask you a special favor. Now, the Jolly Swagman podcast is in the running to win the People's Choice Award at the Australian Podcast Awards. So, if you are a fan of the show, we would be very grateful if you voted. To vote, head to either australianpodcastawards.com slash vote or to my website josephnoelwalker.com where I'll leave a link to the voting page. It takes about 20 seconds and this is the people show, so it is only right that we win the award. But in all seriousness, ladies and gentlemen, swagmen and swagettes, we appreciate your support and every vote counts.

One other item of housekeeping before I introduce our guest for this episode. If you're new to the show, welcome. It is great to have you here. Now, with the exception of the past two weeks where our release schedule has been a little off, we typically release episodes every Monday morning, Australian Eastern Standard Time. So, that is Sunday night for the Brits and Sunday afternoon for the Yanks. So, please make sure you subscribe to or follow the show, depending on which podcast app you use, to ensure that you don't miss any episodes when we release them. Okay, this episode was a treat to record. It was recorded on Tuesday morning, the 3rd of November in Australia.

That is Monday night, the 2nd of November in America. My guest is Tyler Cowen. Tyler is the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as Chairman and Faculty Director of the Mercatus Center. Tyler is co-author of Marginal Revolution, one of the most popular economics blogs in the world, and he is the host of the popular podcast, Conversations with Tyler. Tyler is the best-selling author of more than a dozen books, including, and these are some of my favorites, The Great Stagnation, The Complacent Class,

and Stubborn Attachments. They are all excellent Class, and Stubborn Attachments. They are all excellent books, but Stubborn Attachments is perhaps one of my favorite books, period. It is incredibly profound, and at just 110 pages, it really packs a punch. Tyler Cowen is probably the most impressive polymath of whom I know. He is known for being a voracious reader, churning through multiple books a day, and if he doesn't like a book, he tosses it aside in an act that he calls liberation. Tyler has read all of what's listed in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, except for a few of the Icelandic sagas, he admits, if that is any

indication of his reading diet. This conversation was so much fun to record. I knew that being Tyler, I could play with the conventions of the interview a bit. So in this episode, there are many sudden changes of topic, few segues, and no apologies, ladies and gentlemen. They say that you should begin an interview with a softball question to warm the guest up well i did the exact opposite of that we jump straight in into the deep end there is no small talk tyler is one of the few guests in the world with whom you could begin an interview in the way that we do so without much further ado let's dive right in please enjoy this conversation with the great Tyler Cowen. Tyler Cowen, welcome to the podcast.

Happy to be here. Thank you. If God is dead, life is absurd, and there are no rules, why shouldn't we just commit suicide? Life has some kind of positive value. Any argument for doing anything presupposes a kind of agency and an underlying nexus of values. And it seems that some form of life is a presupposition for that. The economist would ask the marginal question, are there particular individuals who perhaps should commit suicide? And there the answer might be yes, but simply to obliterate all life seems to me as close to self-evidently wrong as we can find a proposition in ethics. Why should we care about the distant future? The distant future will be inhabited by a very large number of people, and although they

are distant from us in time, when their pleasures and sufferings come, they will be no less real. You're in Australia, right? You're distant in space. That shouldn't make you worthless, right? I'm in Northern Virginia. Time is not that different from space in this regard. Do you agree that we should have a positive social discount rate of some degree over a short time horizon, say within a generation, but then a discount rate of zero over longer horizons, say across generations? It depends what it is we're discounting. So there's the problem if you have different rates for short and long term, you can be kind of tricked into an intransitivity

situation where you make inconsistent choices and you can be Dutch booked or somehow gamed. I would say the correct discount rate depends on what you're discounting across. If you're discounting across cash flows, whether for the near or distant future, some positivity of return is appropriate because there's an opportunity cost that you can invest the money and get something positive back for it, at least in some, but not all circumstances. But if you're discounting happiness or utility or well-being or that kind of concept, I don't think there should be a discount rate across either short or long time horizons. And in that regard, we remain consistent across all these choices. Caring about the distant future doesn't come naturally to most people. Have you found any

framings or rhetorical lines to convince people to view the distant future as morally important? I'm not sure the distant future is the problem. I think once choices are even a little bit out there, we discount them quite a bit. So how much we discount 10 years or 200 years, I don't think is very different. It's things that are due in maybe in the next few weeks that we assign undue priority. So there are people who have induced themselves not to just obsess over the immediate present. Many highly successful people, many investors, countries with high savings rates. I'm not saying that's easy, but it's not so impossible that we don't see it.

There are plenty of examples. So I do think it is not demanding the impossible, but I don't think I have any secret magic formula for how to get it done. Be born into a culture with a high savings rate is the best thing you can do. Now, there's a chicken and egg problem. Where'd that come from? Well, those people were born into cultures with high savings rates.

Some of its demographics and so on, a difficult problem. Why do some cultures have higher savings rates than others? I think the most common reason is if you take, say, China during its period of very rapid growth, they are accumulating income more quickly than they are learning to spend it. And at the same time, the Chinese situation in terms of jobs has been fairly uncertain. So the precautionary demand for savings is high. And those two factors, when they come together, tend to be what give you very high household savings rates. And we've seen it in other

countries as well. But China is the most obvious and recent example. So to come back to how we discount the future, the distinction in most people's minds is between now and then, the future, whether that is over a short time horizon or a long time horizon. That's correct. People regard 100 years out versus 500 years out when you ask them as more or less the same. That's in its own way irrational, but it's not the main source of problems. The main source of problems is a fixation on the very soon. What's bugging me now? Does rule utilitarianism just end up prescribing the very same acts that act utilitarianism does?

There are different versions of rule utilitarianism. I would put it this way. The utilitarian proclamations are all asking people to maximize subject to a constraint. The best way to think about the difference between rule and act utilitarianism is that they specify different constraints, not that they give different instructions. So is there a single best way of thinking about how to specify the constraint? I'm not sure that there is, but I would say societies that can get themselves into a rule consequentialist frame of mind, on average, tend to do much better. So let's not discriminate against that. Let's try to lean into that as much as we can.

Years ago, I asked the philosopher Theron Palmer for book recommendations on rule utilitarianism, and he said to read Ideal Code Real World by Brad Hooker, a book which I know you've read. But I was delighted in reading your works to see that you gravitated towards rule consequentialism as well. It's always nice to have your prize confirmed by a very smart person. I like that book, but I would say most people should go further back, you know, and read Butler and read read Mill, and read Sidgwick, and of course, read Parfit. And the questions involved are so fundamental, that I think a kind of basic philosophy will get you to where you're going more than trying to read the very latest

journal article, which at this point, I don't think will really settle it anymore. It's fundamental questions at stake, not a tweak on, you know on the latest definition of these terms. And even the Donald Reagan book, I think that's 1980, on cooperation and utilitarianism. That's still quite good, I think, and to the point. But it's 40 years ago. Amazing. Yeah. Does that advice that we should go back to the original sources rather than the latest journal article apply to most topic areas in general? Well, I think if you're, say, trying to estimate how well, say, the program of Medicare Advantage in the United States has or has not lowered premiums, you want the very latest and best journal article. You don't want to go back and read John Maynard Keynes. But so many philosophical questions, it seems to me you get better understandings from the classics. And that philosophy itself has become over-specialized and sort of twirling

its own nose and less relevant. It's hard to see of younger people, like who exactly are the great philosophers today who are having an impact? And i think that's because there's so much specialization but reading the classics has become underrated in my view even in philosophy which is somewhat obsessed with them yeah or was how can we make any decision at all without succumbing to moral paralysis and total uncertainty? Well, we make decisions whether we want to or not, and doing nothing is just as much a decision as quote-unquote doing something. We're not even sure how to define the default. I mean, if I keep on breathing,

and if I cling to the earth as it hurdles through space, that's a kind of doing something, but we might typically call it a doing nothing. So you're going to make a decision. Uncertainty should not paralyze you. Try to do your best. Pursue maximum expected value and just avoid the moral nervousness. Be a little Straussian about it. Like here's a rule. On average, I think it's a good rule. We're all going to follow it. Bravo. Go on to the next thing. Be a builder. Get on with it yes because ultimately the kind of nervous nellies they're not philosophically sophisticated they're over

indulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it so it's not like there's some kind of brute let's be a builder view. And then in contrast to some deeper wisdom that like the real philosophers pursue, I think it's you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly and take your pick. I say be a builder. Why isn't the epistemic critique fatal to consequentialism? Because you typically have some idea what is the better course of action, and then you should pursue that. There could be wide uncertainty. Any action you take, there'll be wide uncertainty.

Who of us knows how the whole universe will turn out, right? Or even the history of planet Earth. If 500 years from now you read the Wikipedia page for Earth history, I mean, you're going to be shocked no matter what, right? No matter the history of planet Earth. If 500 years from now you read the Wikipedia page for Earth history, I mean, you're going to be shocked no matter what, right? No matter what you do. But that said, if, say, you pull away an innocent child from an oncoming speeding car, you've saved that child's life. You have no reason to think that child is the grandfather of the next Hitler, no more than under not saving the kid. So again, be a builder, do it. The kid might be the next Bill Gates or Marc Andreessen, whatever. Do it.

It took you about 20 years to write your latest book, Stubborn Attachments, and in many ways, it's the capstone of much of your body of work. You gave all the proceeds of that book to an Ethiopian man you met on a fact-finding mission. Why not donate the profits to an effective charity like the Against Malaria Foundation and save more statistical lives? Well, I'm all in favor of good charities. There are other ways in which I give money to non and charities, so part of it is a portfolio issue. But keep in mind, even very good charities have overhead. When I give money to Jonas, as I call him, I'm in regular touch with him, overhead is basically zero because I have a lot of money in my checking account. The bank doesn't charge me for the transfer, and he gets the whole thing. Do I think we should only do direct cash transfers? No. But at the margin, I thought stubborn attachment said we should do more to help other individuals. And I was pretty sure if I gave the money to Jonas, he would be a

responsible steward of it. And so far, that's gone great. His biggest problem right now is COVID-19. No more tourists come to Ethiopia. So his business plans are on hold. How did you first meet Jonas? He was my tour guide in a town called Lalibela of about 20,000. That's where the famous Rakhun stone churches are in Ethiopia. They're very beautiful, and Jonas was and still is a guide. And he has been engaged in setting up a business to sell

things to tourists and to sell vegetables to hotels taking care of tourists, but right now there are no tourists. What were you doing in Lalibela? Well, I had never been to Lalibela. These churches are beautiful. Ethiopia is a wonderful, lovely country.

It's quite safe. It's high in the mountains, so you can go there. You don't have to worry about malaria in central Ethiopia. I would say it's, COVID aside, one of the best places in the world to visit. Everyone should go. Most people don't get sick. Crime is pretty low. There's occasional political trouble, but it's a joy to go. I've been twice. What is the great stagnation?

In the Western world, productivity rates of growth slowed down about in 1973. Wages started going up more slowly, or in some cases, not at all. It seems that science itself slowed down. Other than the tech sector, it seems pretty clear that innovation slowed down. A number of these trends arriving at once in the 1970s. Since then, those trends have mostly remained in place, with a few short exceptions, and we have much lower living standards than if we had been able to keep the higher rates of economic growth. That I call the Great Stagnation. Why was 1973 the breakpoint? I don't think anyone knows. I was just discussing this with some people today.

There was clearly an immediate shock in that year, the oil price shock, that hurt economies and hurt productivity. The oil prices fell a great deal later on, and productivity really didn't quite come back. So I think that's one of the great mysteries in modern economic history. But the proximate cause was the oil price shock. That it didn't come back is harder to explain. Society is more regulated. People are more risk averse. There are more veto points in decision making in most Western countries. Those are all possible parts of the broader puzzle. In terms of the ultimate causes, is the great stagnation overdetermined?

I don't think it's overdetermined as the word is used technically. I think it's you probably have at least five or six causes coming together and they pile on top of each other. I think of overdetermined as say four people lifting up a feather. Any one of them would lift the feather the same amount. I doubt if that's the case here. It's a number of contributing causes all adding on to the final effect. That is my intuition. When you interviewed Peter Thiel for your podcast, you asked him what one metric would he look at to tell him whether the great stagnation had ended. And he didn't really answer the question. He kind of got caught up in the hypothetical.

So I want to ask you, what metric would you look at? Would it be total factor productivity growth, real GDP growth, growth in real GDP per capita, growth in median family incomes, all of the above, something else? family incomes, all of the above, something else? I would say all of the above, but just as a brute force measure, if you have consistently rising real wages for most income classes over five to 10 years, odds are the great stagnation has ended. Is that the only measure? No.

You would also want to actually look at science and technology itself. But odds are, if you got that result, you're making a lot of progress in some manner. It's not just that you got lucky, say, which is obviously possible, but not for so many years, not likely. So by that measure, the Great Stagnation persists? Well, now is a tricky time. We actually had some period of time in the United States where wages were rising robustly for a year or two. As you know, in Australia and Canada, you've had that for a longer period of time,

but I think in Australia and Canada, that just came from selling resources to China, not that you had really broken through some technological barrier. I think there's a possibility that right now the great stagnation is over. We can't quite see it because of the COVID panic. We're seeing actually a lot of developments, whether it be SpaceX or biomedicine or the greater speed of vaccines or the value of Tesla or solar power and battery prices doing better than we had thought. Those are a bit all in abeyance or not quite delivered.

But I do think there's a reasonable chance we're on the cusp of leaving the great stagnation, you know, as we are speaking. We're certainly not at that five to 10 year benchmark I gave you. But I've seen upswings in a way, say I hadn't five years before. Does Peter Thiel agree with you on that? I don't think so. I haven't spoken to him about this for a bit over a year, so I don't know his current view. I haven't heard him say that, and he didn't agree with it last time I saw him. But, you know, Peter's views, they're a kind of bundle of hovering probabilities,

which is how it should be. So kind of, does Peter Thiel agree with fill in the blank? I'm not sure it's the right way to ask the question, period. Do you remember when and how you first became cognizant of the Great Stagnation? Oh, I was thinking about the distant past and the present and the life of my grandmother, who was born, I believe, in 1905, and how much her life changed in her first 50 years. She used to talk to me about it when I was a kid. And then I just started thinking, this is around 2010, maybe 2009, well, how much has my life changed in what was then more or less my first 50 years? Clearly, computers are a big, big deal. And they were not a major factor in my

life when I was younger. But other than that, like a room is mostly the same, a car is safer, might have a better sound system, but fundamentally it does the same things. And you can go on through the list. And other than computers and now mobile, I don't think there are that many fundamental changes. I live in a house from 1960 or so, and it's been renovated a bit, but I live in it just fine. It's as good as a contemporary house built today. It has some different properties. Actually, I prefer it. That to me is weird.

My toilet is worse. My dishwasher is worse. That's because of regulation. My shower is worse. Does science come before technology, or does technology come before science? I don't think the distinction is always well defined. So there are clearly some cases like, well, you have quantum mechanics discovered early in the 20th century, for quite a while, never used, and then voila, it appears to be important for computers, and it leads to great

advances. In that case, clearly the science has come first. But if you look at, say, the development of algorithms and social media, or a lot of machine learning or artificial intelligence, it seems that technology and the science are kind of literally and identically the same thing at the same points in time, you know, embodied in the same molecules and circuits. So I think it depends on the case. Are ideas getting harder to find? It depends on the area, but for the most part, the metrics we have seem to indicate that science has been slowing down. Moore's law is tougher to keep up with. Crop yields are going up at diminishing rates, not at impressive rates. It takes more scientists to achieve a given amount of advance. So I think all those data

are highly imperfect, but it is hard to find ones that overall scientific progress is speeding up. But I do see one in the last nine months, and that is speed in developing a good vaccine. That has gone phenomenally rapidly. That is just n equals one. But it is at least one reason to think science is finally speeding up. Not a decisive reason, but a big, big factor that is likely to save many lives. If we remained in the Great Stagnation for decades, the concern is not just that we miss out on having a better growth rate, which compounds and makes the distant future even better than it could have been. But it's also on the other hand that if we fall into negative growth or if we continue to stagnate, then our thinking in the West could switch from being positive sum to zero sum. Or negative sum. Or negative sum. How likely is that to happen?

And is that something which could happen overnight, in a sense? Well, I think at the moment we're seeing it right now. I mean, most economies in the world are shrinking, and politics is not very nice in many places. Again, it depends on the country. Politics are nasty in many countries, and there's a sense of fighting over scraps at the table. And Benjamin Friedman argues this in his book on economic growth, that successful democracies require some kind of surplus that you use to get most people to agree and maintain consensus moving forward.

And we're losing some of that right now. Yeah, I had Joe Henrik on my podcast recently, and I asked him about this. And he basically agreed with you that you can see the switch to zero-sum thinking occurring in some strata of American society at the moment already he also made an interesting point about how thinking was zero sum in pre-industrial revolution times when really like the main resource that people were trying to gain control of was land which by definition is finite and when wages would rise in the longer term, population would tend to rise, and wages would go back down, and there was a struggle over the means for subsistence. So I think it's one reason why liberalism didn't develop, and that liberalism and the industrial

revolution, they don't exactly coincide, but to a considerable extent, both come out of England and Northwestern Europe over roughly the same two or three centuries. And I don't think that's a coincidence. Eric Weinstein has argued in public, including on my podcast, that our future lies in the stars or not at all. But his boss, Peter Thiel, believes that we need to be loyal to the Earth. Which side do you come down on? I agree with Peter. You know, I often say when Nevada is full, I'll start thinking about Mars. If I lived in Australia, I would have better examples.

Yet, Western Australia, Central Australia, they're much nicer and easier to live in than Mars. They have better food. The radiation doesn't damage your body. You don't have to worry about re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. If you think there's some very valuable mineral up there, let's have robots mine it, great. But I don't see what people really have to do up there that adds value or why many people would want to do it.

They're vulnerable sitting ducks at the hostage of a highly hostile environment. Isn't the value in diversifying our portfolio, so to speak, in ensuring that not all of our eggs are contained in the one basket of earth? I don't think we do diversify. I doubt if a Mars colony would be self-sufficient. I don't think it could exist on much of a scale to begin with. If you could actually send out space probes and have sort of something like humans on 200 different planets scattered throughout the galaxy, I'd be all for that. I strongly doubt if that's possible. The best we can do maybe is self-replicating fun Neumann probes

and some kind of panspermia, which I would strongly be for. But just like putting humans into a rocket ship, I don't see it. And if something wiped out the solar system, Mars is also vulnerable. And the speed of light, it does seem to bind travel, even if it doesn't in your ultimate theory of physics. In terms of anything we have access to anytime soon, I mean, we can't even get close to the speed of light. And then there's time dilation effects,

I mean, it's a mess, right? Like, what's wrong with Central Australia? You could set up some more curry restaurants there, better air conditioning if people really need that yeah maybe maybe we'll take you up on that i've been to central australia it is a very beautiful but largely empty expansive land so plenty of space for um american migrants and better governance than Mars. You know, in central Australia, more or less, everyone knows who's in charge.

The government of Australia. It's a well-run place. People are always upset about whatever. But if you compare it to the uncertainties of living under Mars governance, my goodness, give me Australia any time. Even a poorly run country, you might trust more. You know, somewhere like Thailand maybe will be governed better than Mars will because there are no focal points on Mars.

There's no history. There's no established culture. So everything's up for grabs. To me, that's highly risky. If you were put in charge of establishing the governance for the Mars colony, what kind of system would you establish? Well, early on, it's going to be something like almost martial law, like the kind of laws you have on spaceships, on space stations, fishing vessels in very dangerous positions. And we know how little liberty there is in those situations. It's probably necessary to maintain safety and order, but it's not pleasant and it's not a reason to do

it. But I would say, start by looking at fishing vessels and space stations. Plenty of data already. Is the Fermi paradox closer to being resolved now that the Pentagon has released videos of UFOs? I have studied the information surrounding those videos. I am highly uncertain as to what is going on there. I am on record as saying I think there is a 1% chance that those items are something like alien space probes or drones. 1%. So yeah, there's a 1% chance the Fermi paradox is resolved. Or there could be aliens visiting and watching us, which are not represented by those drones. We just don't see them at all, and the drones are some other weird thing. So the simplest way to resolve Fermi is just to say, they're here. Another way to resolve Fermi

is to cite panspermia. They're here, and we are they. To me, the chance of that is much higher than the moving objects in the footage being alien drones. But I think people dismiss the alien drones hypothesis just because they can't wrap their minds around it, and I don't think we should dismiss it. That said, I'm not crazy. I understand the direct evidence for it being alien space drones is not very high. The main argument for that is a kind of process of elimination argument,

which in philosophy can be very dangerous. If you don't know what you're doing, and it's like you list seven things and you rule six of them out, you'd really better not say, well, it must be the seventh thing. Most of the time that will lead you wrong. And here the best argument for it being actual alien artifacts is the argument from elimination. And that worries me. But look, Harry Reid, who was in the U.S. Senate, has as high a security clearance in the United States as you can get. He thinks there's something going on there and that we shouldn't just dismiss it. And he claims there's evidence that hasn't come out. I don't know what that is. It gets me up at least to 1%. 1% is pretty high.

In expected value terms, it's high. But look, it's probably some weird explanation we haven't thought of yet. Back to stagnation. Tyler, what do you make of Dietrich Vollruth's argument that the growth slowdown is less to do with productivity and more to do with a decrease in the number of workers relative to the population, as well as a shift from being a goods-driven to a services-driven economy?

In other words, that stagnation is actually a sign of our success. I don't think there's any difference between those two arguments. They have different emotional affect. But if you want to say the shift of more of the economy into healthcare is one reason why there's been a productivity slowdown, I'm pretty sure that's true. And his book has a wonderful explanation of why. But to say it's a sign of our success, that's just saying our level is high, our rate of growth is still miserable or mediocre, and we shouldn't be happy with that. Don't call that success. Did the people who put a man on the moon in the 1960s say, oh, we made it this far to 1957.

There's a chicken in every pot. You know, what the heck? Just forget about it. We don't need a man on the moon. We don't need whatever. No. So, I agree with his claims, but I think he does not take the negative side of it sufficiently seriously. Right. So, you're interpreting the data differently. Correct. But I don't think he and I disagree on either the data or the theory. Gotcha. And aging is also a factor behind the great stagnation. He writes about that. I agree. It's one of those five or six factors I mentioned earlier. There's good evidence for that. I'm not sure it's the main one, but it's a factor. You mentioned you were impressed with the speed with which we're developing vaccines for COVID-19.

In net terms, how has the pandemic caused you to update your great stagnation thesis one way or the other? It depends a great deal on the country. If you just take the United States, our institutions are much more dysfunctional than I had thought. And I was already considered a pessimist on those grounds. But that said, our biomedical research institutions are much better and quicker than I had thought. And our professional basketball league, the NBA, is also better. Those are the institutions that have done really well in the US. So many other parts of the picture have been a bad failure. But I wouldn't say it's the same for every country. Why haven't countries like the US or UK adopted mass testing as a third way,

a way of avoiding choosing between death and lockdown. It doesn't seem that hard, does it? The US does now have a version of mass testing. If you look at tests per million, we're among the world leaders. The problem is we don't use those tests or that information very well. We have a splintered federalistic society, people who are often not very obedient. We're politically polarized. We don't have local government structures up and running to do an intelligent version of, say, trace and track. So we do test, test, test.

Right now we're doing tests out the wazoo, which, believe me, is better than nothing. But it's not enough to stop it. And at the end of the day, if individuals go out without a mask and mingle with each other indoors, you're going to have a lot of cases, no matter how much you test. And that's where we're at. So we have turned it around on the testing front. But I think the evidence from the countries that have done better shows you need more than simply testing. It's follow-up after you test. It's critical.

And in the state of Victoria and Australia is a great example of that. You've done a lot of testing, but you also have much, much better follow-up than what you'll see just about anywhere in the United States. How strong do you think is the correlation between having large caseloads, failing to control the virus, and being a weird society, to use Joe Henrich's acronym, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic? I don't think that's the right way to express the correlation. So if you look at Africa, other than South Africa, most of Africa, for whatever strange reasons, is relatively untouched.

I don't think it is mainly cultural. I don't even think it's mainly genetic differences. It is most likely that Africans have been exposed to other assaults on their immune system, which give them greater resistance. That's a hypothesis, not a fact, but it's striking how well Africa has done the real outlier is parts of Asia northeast Asia more or less and they have governmental structures that a are good at doing things and b were ready because of the earlier SARS crisis and c they have different notions of privacy and deference to authority. And you put all those things together, I mean, they kicked our butts.

They're the outliers. Bravo to them. They may also have had better cross immunities. So, in the defense of the West, you look at Japan, which did not obviously do a good job, but they've gotten off pretty lightly. It could be those parts of Asia either had a less infectious strain as a dominant virus, and or because of their regional proximity, they had more exposure to related earlier coronaviruses that gave them more protection. You wonder, like, why have Laos and Cambodia done so well? Are their public health institutions so wonderful? I don't think so. I suspect

this differing cross immunities as a factor there too. But I don't mean to take anything away from the numerous Asian countries, plus New Zealand that have had a great policy response. So you don't think there's a lot of weight to the idea that their experience of SARS and MERS rattled them, made them more ready, it gave them better processes for dealing with a future pandemic, whereas the West was rendered complacent by swine flu? No, I agree with that. It's just one factor. They have other factors. Gotcha. And also, many of those countries, they are regularly familiar with the notion of existential threats to their existence. South Korea, they face North Korea, they face China, Singapore, and so on. They don't take macro success for granted the way the United States and Western Europe do.

And that's another factor in addition to the earlier SARS. Does that factor explain Israel's relative success as well? I don't think we yet know how successful Israel has been. I think it explains their first round of success. But they've had a bad comeback, in part because of very particular factors. Namely, it seems their Orthodox communities are fairly willing or even eager to defy instructions, and they end up with a high rate of transmission for very particular reasons. And that's led to a second wave in Israel. They've now done another set of shutdowns,

but they've done them very selectively, what seems so far to be pretty smartly. I would just say for a lot of countries, the final story, the final record is not yet in. And you heard people in July, August, even a month ago, saying what a great success Western Europe was. And now you can't say that France per capita has three or four times as many cases as the US and hospitalizations and deaths are rising there too now Netherlands Belgium Czech Republic it's awful right so not until the very end will we know exactly who has done well you recently argued that the Nobel Prize is losing its prestige should we view that as a symptom of the great stagnation i don't think so there's nothing sinister in this but look if you give

out more prizes the prize becomes somewhat common it's less of a big deal scientists also have developed other ways of earning money, even just writing best-selling books, giving talks. Those markets are much bigger than they used to be. Prize is great. But, you know, in the old days, there were like a dozen Nobel laureates in economics. It was like Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman.

It was like gods who walked the earth. Now there's dozens of winners. I would say they're really pretty much all deserving, very good picks. But at the end of the day, people don't care that much anymore. And furthermore, with the internet, sort of everyone knows who's going to win. So Paul Romer, people were saying for 10 years he would win. Good for him. He deserved it. When he actually wins, it's anticlimactic, like, oh, Paul, you finally won. We knew this 10 years ago. So the internet deflates the value of a lot of prizes because

it all is pre-discussed for so long. Should the committee give out the prize less regularly, say every two or three or four years? I don't know. I suspect what's happened is inevitable no matter what they do and I don't see it as a big problem like the total rewards to being great at science are still high probably they've never been higher the rewards are just a bit more other things and a bit less Nobel Prize so as long as the total rewards are rising, at least that part of the equation is fine. Was there anything people in the past did better in terms of cultural practices that we need to revive today to help us get back to the future? Well, they did almost everything better, right? I don't think we can revive that. We need to set out on new paths. American movies were much better in the 1970s.

Rock and roll, I would say, was better in earlier eras. Some of this is a matter of taste, but relatively few things are at their peak right now. Now, maybe by culture you mean Moors. The cultural Moors, again, it's going to depend a lot on the region, but for the American middle class, they were in some ways better earlier than they are now. But I would say the cultural more is for educated Americans. They are at a true peak right now, and they've been rising for a few decades, and they're pretty stellar. And that's one thing we've been great at, but that's only part of the country, and it's a big problem. It's led to a kind of polarization by education and by norm adherence. What do you make of Larry Summers' revival of secular stagnation? And how does it connect with your great stagnation thesis?

Well, Summers noticed that rates of productivity growth are slowing down. And he came along and reinterpreted what Peter Thiel and Robert Gordon and myself and Michael Mandel said. And he wanted to make it a big demand side story that if we all would just go on a binge and spend more money, it could be over. I think that's quite wrong. I greatly respect Larry. He's one of my favorite economists. I like him a lot as a person. I have a good connection with him, but on that, I do think he's wrong. Is the demand side story perhaps still correct, but for reasons other than the ones Larry posits? For example, I've been very impressed by

recent work done by Amir Sufi, Atif Meen, and Ludwig Straub, who argue that growing private debt is putting downward pressure on demand. I had an interchange with Sufi, I think, on Twitter or on the blog. But I think private debt just transfers money. It doesn't drain money from the system. And the debt is paid to someone. And those funds are recycled. They may be recycled into venture capital. But in the Keynesian model,

both consumption and investment are part of demand. And I don't see why he thinks demand should go down. So I guess I don't agree with Sufi. I think the problem he identifies is that debt repayments transfer permanent income from borrowers to savers, and the savers tend to have a lower marginal propensity to consume. But a higher marginal propensity to invest. I don't see why that should be bad. Is that empirically true, that they are investing more? Yes, sure. I mean, if they're consuming less, they're investing more. They're not burning their money. They may give some to charity, but that actually tends to stimulate consumer demand again, because people

who work for non-profits are not that rich. Yeah, I should have been more specific in my question. Are they investing in productivity enhancing areas? Well, a low rate of enhancement, but I don't think less investment is the solution to that. I think ultimately you want more investment. So investment is not yielding zero or negative returns. It's just much slower than it used to be, which is bad. But at the margin, investing more will get you further than consuming more, in my opinion. So I think Sufi got upset when I criticized him, but I don't agree with him on the analysis of debt.

Should we view the Great Stagnation as the deep cause of the housing bubbles that occurred across the Anglosphere in the 2000s, as well as perhaps the continuing elevated price levels that persist today in countries like the US, UK and Australia? In part. So when people's incomes started slowing down, there was a tendency amongst policymakers to juice up credit using the central bank, stimulate the housing market using regulations, and that in part led to the real estate bubble. I wouldn't want to blame the whole bubble on that by any means. I think there was also a commonly held view, well, we're just going to keep on growing at whatever percent, 3%, 2.5%, so we can borrow all this money. You know, growth will make it good. And we didn't keep on growing at whatever percent, 3%, 2.5%, so we can borrow all this money. Growth will make it good. And we didn't keep on growing at those higher percentage rates. And that was another

contributing cause. But I've come around to a funny, weird, radical view that there wasn't much of a housing bubble, at least not in the US. Homes are worth more now than they were at the so-called bubble peak at 2006. I think they're worth about 30% more. So a few regions of the country, like near Las Vegas, near Orlando, had local bubbles that have not come back. But country as a whole, those were, on average, decent investments. We had a number of years of panic.

The anti-bubble was the problem. We panicked too much. There are reasons for that. But those 2006 valuations were not insane. They were not all exactly correct, but they were not crazy. I think it's now wrong to call them just a bubble back then because there was a divergence between market price and fundamental value being driven by speculation. Whereas now, even though prices are higher than they were during the bubble years, perhaps they're had an anti-bubble panic, I would still blame the anti-bubble panic. I mean, say you bought a painting, you paid a million dollars, and for a few years people thought it was a fake, and it fell to nothing, and then people realized it wasn't a fake, and it went back to its previous price or higher.

You wouldn't say it initially was a bubble. You would say, no, you had this weird anti-bubble that was based on a mistake. And it seems that's what's true for real estate. Again, not every regional market, but for the country as a whole, especially for the coasts. And I don't know all the Australian data, but you actually never had the collapse. But again, COVID aside, Australian real estate can be pretty pricey, right? The Gold Coast and so on. And that's probably not a bubble.

It's probably worth it. What could be better in life than like a coastal Sydney apartment? Yeah, well, I mean, Sydney and Melbourne are in the top five least affordable cities in the world on demographics analysis. And they should be. And they are outstanding cities. I'm in Sydney and I walk around the harbour, I walk around the beaches and my breath is just taken by the beauty.

It may be underpriced, right? Potentially, potentially. There is an argument that a bubble exists in Western Sydney where valuations are incredibly high, but you don't have the same level of access to the central business district as well as the kind of beautiful beaches. I want to come back to this question of the anti-bubble. If there was an anti-bubble of panic in 2007-2008, what caused the panic? People thought that our banking system maybe was going to collapse. And that was not a crazy view at the time. There were a lot of pointers in that direction. But it turned out the Fed was more heroic than we thought. The Fed actions were more stabilizing than we thought. A number of other things went better

than we thought. And the panicking people turned out to be wrong. And prices jumped back at varying rates of speed. But it looked worse than it was. The panic was in large part induced by subprime borrowers beginning to default on their mortgages. And that seems to be consistent with the idea that there was, like, over lending to people who weren't credit worthy, which in turn must have been driven by incredibly optimistic beliefs about prices. And that's true. And again, certainly in many particular regions, it was a true bubble. But that said, you look at the value of real estate for the nation as a whole, and you ask, how did we get such a big shock as to cause such a big recession? A lot of the negative shock was itself the mistake and not the so-called bubble, I would say.

But again, parts of it clearly were bubbly and out of control and insane, no doubt. And it's easiest to see, again, in areas like Las Vegas. Then I guess on the other hand, cities that are more illustrative of the anti-bubble thesis would include, for example, Detroit, which I think had a bust without a boom. Detroit, too, has come back. The city is seeing a renaissance. So again, putting aside COVID, which is its own thing, but most of the economic value in the U.S. is produced in parts where the value of real estate is considerably higher than it used to be. It's like people said Bitcoin was a bubble, and it fell a great amount very quickly. So yes, of course, the previous price was too high.

But if it were just a bubble, it would have gone poof, and it's back again, and crypto prices are up quite a bit this year. I don't know what the right price should be. The current price could be wrong, but they too do not fit the obvious bubble story. They're just hard to value assets, and we've been getting it wrong and searching the price space, and we're still searching, but they're clearly worth something. I think that's a straw man, though, to say that the bubble story entails something going poof. Like, Bob Schiller is well known for arguing that bubbles can come and go in waves in the same way that viruses can spread through a population. Even within the same asset.

Schiller's been insisting stock prices are a bubble. He seems pretty clearly wrong about that. So, you know, Paul Krugman said, you know, Bitcoin was a worthless scam. Now, Bitcoin could end up being worth zero. But look, it's made several comebacks. The market has thought it through, cooled down, lost its froth and ardor, and it's still putting a decent value on Bitcoin. So I'll admit the previous price was wrong or too high, but you just think it's a bubble and a fraud.

I don't see that. I think that view has been refuted. To come back to the connection between the great stagnation and house prices, the logic here is that if median incomes aren't growing, then the only way to consume more is through debt and capital gains, as you write in your book, The Great Stagnation. And I thought you would be interested to hear how this plays out in the Australian context. And I think I can pinpoint the earliest moment at which the Australian political class had kind of cottoned on to this realization, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who was then Prime Minister at the time, was on radio in Brisbane in 2003, Tyler. And in response to a caller, he said that, I haven't had anybody shake their fist at me and say, Howard, I'm angry with you for letting the value of my house increase. So at least by that stage, they were very aware of the political importance of having their constituencies enjoy increased capital gains. And it's noteworthy that in that very

same year, 2003, house prices in Australia increased by 20%. I've had people telling me for 25 years that Australia is a bubble. It seems just wrong. So you've had a trade deficit basically every year. Your country was way undervalued 25 years ago. Maybe it's still way undervalued. You have tremendous fundamentals. I mean, I don't pretend to predict the future, but what's not to like? Well, again, to go back to that year 2003, lending to investors increased by 40% that year, whereas to owner-occupiers it increased by about 1%. And I think there was a strong argument to say that there was a bubble during that early 2000s period. But again,

it depends on how you define a bubble. And I think there are serious epistemic issues with the whole bubble story. And there's the lingering question question of can we ever call something a bubble ex-ante but even that philosophical issue aside practically speaking you have an option on more factor endowments you can anytime you want take in more labor which will mobilize more land and in turn bring in more capital right so you can boost labor land and capital all at once just by snapping your fingers. I get your voters don't always want more immigration along all margins, but if you really need it, you can do it probably more effectively

than just about any country because you have so much space. So it's hard for me to see the bearish case on Australia unless you think kind of water or climate change issues will prove totally insuperable. I guess that would be it, but otherwise, my goodness. So many positives. Such good food. And you've way outperformed. I remember when I lived in New Zealand, they all looked down on you as the worst governed country. That would never really do that well.

That was 30 years ago. Again, over those 30 years, Australia may have had better governance than New Zealand. But you had a longer history of being corrupt and kind of crummy local politics. Somehow you got over it, mostly. Yeah. Lee Kuan Yew famously ridiculed us as the poor white trash of Asia. And then Treasurer Paul Keating fretted that we might become a banana republic. But then the productivity reforms of the 1980s, which required amazing political dexterity on the part of Hawke,

the then Prime Minister, and Ke hawk the then prime minister and keating the then treasurer um were pushed through people accepted the short-term political pain and they've worked wonders for us opening us up to the world making us more competitive um and just opening our minds to the world in a broader, more sort of cosmopolitan sense. Historically, Tyler, housing bubbles tend to lead to nasty balance sheet recessions. And if we accept that premise for the sake of argument, should we try to preempt future housing bubbles to lean against the wind, so to speak, because under an expected value calculation, the one-time negative shock they could deliver to the long-run growth rate is just so bad? Or on the other hand, should we just focus on innovation, productivity, and

growth and worry about cleaning up after if the so-called housing bubble does happen to turn sour? I think it's hard for central banks to know when it's a housing bubble or when it's just a revaluation. But I do think the general point that you want your banks and other financial institutions to be well capitalized, so crises are not crises of solvency, that that would go a long way toward limiting cyclicality. And most countries have done that since 2008. And that's a good thing. The pandemic has come, it was an incredible negative shock. Financial systems, for the most part, have held together pretty well. So I would say we got that one mostly right. Tyler, two foreigners have been notorious for calling out Australia's housing market as a bubble. The first in 2015 was the Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, who came to Sydney and said that we have a pretty good bubble in the Sydney and Melbourne housing markets. And the second was investor and Rhodes Scholar Jonathan Tepper,

who did a trip, like a fact-finding mission in 2016. And Tepper famously said that criticizing the Australian housing market was equivalent to slaughtering a cow on the streets of India. That's kind of an indication of the media backlash he received after his trip. But what's most striking about those two individuals, Vernon Smith and Jonathan Tapper, is they're both self-diagnosed with Asperger's. And I know that's just a sample size of two, but I wonder if there's some kind of correlation there, and maybe you could make a case for the power of Asperger's in being able to swim against the current.

Well, the investor who called the correct short position on the housing bubble, portrayed in the movie The Big Short, he also is autistic. That's right, that's the name. So I think there's a tendency not to be swept up in social mania or fads with autistics. And in these situations where everyone else is going crazy, it's more likely they see the truth. I don't know that that's been proven,

but I believe that to be the case. And it simply has to do with the social influences are different. And there are in a number of other laboratory settings, greater objectivity of thought in autistic people. Are there ways that people who aren't on the spectrum can hack their way into nonconformity? Well, you can hang out with a better and weirder set of friends, including autistics, that may or may not make you a nonconformist. But, like, why hang out with the conformists? Unless you're a contrarian and hanging out with the conformists makes you more ornery. Hmm. at with the conformists makes you more ornery? Do you think reading widely might also help?

Like, for example, I've found that non-conformity has become easier for me in the political sphere after I began reading a lot of different strands of political philosophy, libertarianism, conservatism, progressivism, which convinced me that there's wisdom in each tradition, which meant that I wasn't so beholden to any one tradition. I agree definitely, especially if you read history. If you just read about current affairs, often people become more conformist and more wrapped up in the events of the day, and the social pressures become stronger. Whereas if you start thinking about why did the Roman Empire collapse, whatever the reasons are, you probably don't have some peer group, you know, pushing you to some particular point of view.

You're just trying to figure it out for yourself. And the more you get used to being in that mode, the more you'll be able to apply it to 2020. Thinking about politics in particular, how should radical uncertainty make us more tolerant of other people's policy prescriptions and less certain that our own tribe is correct? Well, let's say there's a bunch of views out there and you hold the view you think is most likely to be correct. You still ought to think something like,

well, there's like a hundred different views. The chance of each one being correct is 1%. I think my view is correct with 2%. So, of course, I'm going to go with a 2% rather than a 1%. That's rational. But my goodness, if at the end of the day, you're only at 2% for being right, you shouldn't feel too good about yourself, even though you may think you're where you ought to be.

And very few people are able to internalize probabilistic reasoning in that manner. They just think they're much more right than the other people. And the probability is very strong that they're much, much more right than the people they disagree with. And they just can't get out of that mindset. They need to be more Bayesian and compare like a 2% to a 1%, a 3% to a 1.5%, whatever the numbers are going to be, and realize they're probably wrong. I mentioned earlier that it took you about two decades to write Stubborn Attachments. How much did the core argument change over those years? Or how did it evolve? Or did it not change at all?

It did change, but first one point on the 20 years. I didn't work on it full-time 20 years or anything close to that. Each year I would devote like a month and a half to refining it and come back and let the ideas evolve. The main difference is this. The early versions of the book had a lot on existential risk and its importance. I still agree with what I wrote back then, I think. But just so many other books and other people have handled that,

I ended up cutting it. It wasn't original anymore. So that's the main difference. Not really a change of heart, but definitely the core narrowed. Earlier, I asked you whether there were any sort of framings or rhetorical lines that you had found useful in encouraging people to think, to care more about the future. And one of the passages I liked best in Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence, was about existential risk. And he was sort of talking about what we have to lose if we allow civilization to destroy itself

or be destroyed. And like Parfit, he assumes, and like you, he assumes that life has positive value, either as it already is or as it's likely to become. And then in superintelligence, he asks us to consider the number of planets that we might be able to colonize in the future, as well as the possibility that we develop conscious minds that can exist in computer operations

rather than in biological brains. And then, so allowing for those conscious computers, he gets to 10 to the power of 58 possible mind lives that could exist. And he writes, and this is the part that I love that I share with friends to try and encourage them to think more about existential risk. Bostrom writes, if we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the earth's oceans every second and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia.

And then he finishes, it is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy. That's a beautiful passage. I like to think he might be right, but I can't say I quite agree. I have maybe a more naive biological perspective. I see there's a history of primate species on planet Earth. Most of them have gone extinct. Most of the ones right now are going extinct very rapidly, and we'll probably join them. My guess is we'd be lucky to have another thousand years left, and I think it will be spent on planet Earth. Now, a thousand years would be great, but the chance we destroy ourselves

eventually, to me, is quite high. So I don't think we're going to get to that. I'm sorry. I'm rooting for it. But look, we've had world wars, we have weapons of mass destruction the chance they'll be used on a large scale is very small but just let the clock keep ticking and write down the distribution and the cumulative probability density function and all that. And things go boom. Does that pessimism undercut or strengthen the case for growth maximization? Well, however much time we have left, I want it to be as good as possible. But I would say this, if you think

we have like a billion years ahead of us with trillions of simulated minds or whatever picture you paint, we then ought to worry a lot more about existential risk, because you just want to hold on to get to this incredibly valuable future, and you just care much less about the next few hundred years. Whereas if you think we have, say, 800 years left and there's no weird science fiction-like scenario in the pipeline, you want to make those 800 years on Earth as good as possible. It is a different orientation. There's less to preserve, in my view.

What's something that John Maynard Keynes got really right? Well, he had so many different phases of his career, but if you read Tract on Monetary Reform from the early 1920s, it's one of the best books on monetarism ever written. It's mostly correct. If you read his book Indian Currency and Finance where he argued that the Indian vision of a gold exchange standard was better than the British vision, I think that was mostly correct. Bretton Woods, it seems to me, while intrinsically flawed and temporary, was about as good as we could have done and Keynes was a major architect of that. Keynes' short book, How to Pay for the War, I would mostly agree with. General theory is a jumble of many different propositions. The key recommendation, socializing investment, I quite disagree with. But fiscal policy then was the right thing to do. And

Keynes said that. Note how late to the party he was, 1936. People forget that. He wasn't like the guy with that idea at all. But still, he was right about that. I think Keynes was not as right about the Treaty of Versailles as people sometimes make him out to be. The Germans never paid more than 2.5% of their GDP on reparations. And, you know, he thought it was the end of the world for them. I think he got that one wrong. So there's a lot of different Keyneses. He was right a lot of the time. He was wrong some of the time.

Brilliant guy. I think he's to be admired. But he hardly had a perfect batting average. Indeed, no one does. Do you think people need to hate less on Keynes and more on Keynesians? I don't think people should hate any of that stuff. Keynesianism is a valuable contribution. It is very, very often overrated by its proponents, but it's part of this broader synthesis you should build in your mind. And Keynes, to me, is one of the greatest economists of all time. Yeah, hate is perhaps too strong a word.

But I'm not trying to push him out of the canon, just to be clear. I think a lot of modern economists overrate Keynesianism and indeed don't even understand or know what Keynes actually said. What's something that Friedrich Hayek got very wrong? Oh, well, there's, again, a long list.

His predictions in Road to Serfdom that parts of the West through nationalization would become non-democratic were quite wrong. I think they were actually a reasonable belief at the time. I don't hold that against him, but he was wrong there. You had big growth of government. Those countries stayed democratic. Norway is not even vaguely close to a totalitarian state.

Keynes has booked the sensory order. I don't think makes sense. Keynes on monetary policy and monetary theory of the trade cycle. He called for a strange version of NGDP targeting. That was pretty good. Around the time of prices and production, he was more of a liquidationist. It seems to me that was very much the wrong direction. So again, many different Hayeks, brilliant in many areas. His best pieces are some of the

best economics ever done, use of knowledge and society. But again, on a lot of concrete issues, he was wrong. Which one of his works, whether it's a book or an article like The Use of Knowledge in Society, would you recommend to the average educated person who's yet to read any of his works? I don't know who the average educated person is. Maybe he wrote to Serfdom, that was a bestseller. But like his five best articles in that collected book, Individualism and Economic Order, that is the most important part of Hayek's contribution. And then some essays in his book, you know, Studies, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, like Competition as a Discovery Procedure, Use of Knowledge in Society,

Economics and Knowledge, his essays on the socialist calculation debate, some of the greatest and most influential pieces of economics produced. And if you go ask someone like Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, where'd your inspiration come from? Jimmy would say Hayek. And that's phenomenal. Such powerful, wonderful ideas. Yeah. Tyler, I want to ask you about Tylerler cowan's production function as well as some other other miscellaneous tyler cowan related questions so you've said that everyone needs their equivalent of a musician practicing scales and that your equivalent as an intellectual and an economist includes activities such as writing copious notes and essays that often never see the light of day, as well as writing opinions that you disagree with. But my question is,

what is the feedback loop for those private essays and pieces of writing? So, you know, when LeBron James is practicing in solitude, he can see when he misses a shot because the ball doesn't go in the hoop or it bounces off the rim so what's your equivalent of that what are your private feedback loops when you're not publishing an article well one of the best of those is actually what lebron james does and that's shooting baskets which i do all the time every day when the weather's nice. And you learn that you can always miss. It doesn't matter how many years you've been doing it for. You can just flat out miss and be bad at it. And you do that every day. It's another way to practice, is to do something you're not good at.

I would add that to my list of how I practice. Great. But when you're writing articles that you don't publish, how do you know whether you're writing something that's good or not? I lose interest in it. Or do you only get the feedback when you publish? Well, you might try to publish and be rejected. But you lose interest in it, or you see why your argument wasn't correct, or you just see

someone else did the same thing. It happens a lot. I don't think it's that hard, like to see, like the people who came out with writings on existential risk before I published the Posner book. It was obvious to me I had not much to say, if anything anything in addition to what Posner was saying so I didn't feel it was some mysterious process I just put it aside did other things what about as a conversationalist and podcaster how do you get feedback is it just a matter of observing the guests reactions and body language and getting correspondence from the audience. You can do them in front of an audience. I used to do quite a few in front of a live audience. I'm not sure it's good feedback.

So the audience loves humor and entertainment, and it's great in the moment. But does it make for a better podcast? Maybe we have too much feedback. Like, I don't check how many people download each episode. It seems to me like too much feedback. Yeah. Earlier in the year in Melbourne, before the pandemic changed everything,

I recorded a nearly two-hour live podcast with Peter Singer in a pub with a live audience. And we sprinkled a little bit of humor in, but it was a pretty dense conversation. I'm not sure it was the right forum. And I don't know if the humor is still funny a year or two later, even if it's great. What if Marginal Revolution and conversations with Tyler taught you about how to build an audience? Not to worry about building an audience like do something you care about yeah and really don't check the meter or whatever you've got you've said that peter teal may be the smartest person that you know um why is that true well there's different notions of smart uh peter is probably the most original thinker I'm not sure he's the kind of quickest, most blinding intelligence

when it comes to just learning something from scratch. Like that might be Patrick Collison. But Peter is kind of deep and profound and original on virtually any topic. And he's always thought it through like deeper than you think is going to be the case, even if you've spent a real amount of time with him. And that's pretty phenomenal. And most people just don't realize it. They think he's this guy who says a few provocative things.

They have different opinions about those things. Fine, but they don't get how smart Peter really is. You reply to emails very quickly. What do you infer about someone from their email response time? Sam Altman said this, and he and I agree. It means they're on the ball, they're paying attention, and they consider communication with the outside world and openness as a priority. And that's great. I get that not everyone can do it or you might have family, but overall it's a big positive.

When you're reading a book, do you take notes on the book or do you just read it and let it sink into your psyche? I read it, but I fold over pages I like. I don't even necessarily return to them somehow i feel i remember it better but i don't take notes it's just another thing to handle or manage it seems inefficient yeah you think that most books are at best articles are there any articles that should be books? Well yes, but you need the person to want to write it and the talent is what is scarce, not the idea. There's always another great idea for a book about some 18th century invention or whatever, but like who's going to do it? So if you don't have anyone to do it, you don't really have the thing

to begin with. But a great writer, thinker, person can take almost any idea, a tweet, and make it into a great book. That's what's amazing. Like there's this richness to all of it. But talent is what's scarce when you're writing a book how do you organize your research do you have research notes organized under different topics that you then draw on when it comes time to write i don't have notes i don't have outlines i read books and then i type things into a file. Not necessarily well-ordered.

And then I revise and revise and improve the ordering, and eventually it becomes a book. But I don't have what you might call an efficient system, and I'm not recommending this for other people. But that's how I do it. Really no system. Read, type into a Word file. Improve, one hopes. In The Great Stagnation, I noticed that you cited Peter Thiel, even though at that stage Peter hadn't yet published on the topic.

I also noticed in Stubborn Attachments and in the original journal article, Caring About the Distant Future, you tip your hat to Don Boudreau for helping you to frame a point about thinking about how much living standards have gone up. Do you think, on average, public intellectuals give too much or too little credit to their peers and to thinkers who've come before them? Too little. They haven't read widely enough. They think they're more original than they are. They underinvest in conversation as a way of learning things. You know, I get how it works and the incentives to be more original. But I don't think you actually get anything from that. You could credit people way more than you do, and whatever the world thinks of your originality is not going to go down. You could title your book,

all the great ideas I took from other people. And it still could be judged as a highly original book. Like it may or may not be, but I don't think that would lower its originality prize at the end of the day. I found it strange that Robert Gordon didn't mention you in the rise and fall of American growth and Peter Thiel barely credited a mention. I think Gordon doesn't like me. I'm not sure why. You know, I once pointed out that Gordon, for a while, was a total productivity optimist, and he wrote several pieces in the early Audis saying, like, rate of productivity growth would be about 3%

ongoing. We didn't have to worry about budget deficits. And he doesn't like to talk about that previous history of Robert Gordon. You get a kind of, we have always been at war with East Asia version of Robert Gordon from Robert Gordon. I don't know that I've ever met him, not face to face really. So it's not that there's hard feelings, but somehow I think he doesn't like me. Why do you encourage people to abstain from alcohol altogether? Why not encourage the occasional glass of red wine, but no more?

There are so many other encouragements out there, right? Advertisements, friends, but it's bad for you. Like at least 10% of people will end up abusing it. So why not just not do it? It's a big external benefit to your friends, even if you are in complete control of your drinking. How many people would think of like having friends over and pulling out a bunch of submachine guns and bullets and like passing them back and forth across the table it's not that you think one of

your friends will pick up the gun and start firing you just don't do it i think people should think of alcohol the same way it's ugly and destructive and it should we should think it's like gross almost. What makes Tom Stoppard one of the smartest people alive? His plays, especially the better known ones, are brilliantly constructed fantastically witty, have perfect dialogue, they bring together ideas and history and drama and humour. In a way I just can't think of anything comparable.

And he's truly a thinker of the Enlightenment, and he understands the value of liberty as a major achieving artist. It's incredible. Like a true classical liberal in a deep way. Comes from his Eastern European background. Why is the Odyssey superior to the Iliad? I don't know that it is. I prefer it. There are the Odyssey superior to the Iliad? I don't know that it is. I prefer it. There are more different parts to the story. To me, it seems more philosophical.

It's not just fixated on war. But to write a very intense story with a fixation as important as war could in some ways be more profound or more important. But I prefer reading the Odyssey. So election day is tomorrow. Who are you predicting to win? And who would you like to win? I'm not a good predictor. The betting, I got it wrong last time. The betting market says Biden.

I see high turnout. I suppose I think that helps Biden. So I'll predict Biden. As director of a non-profit, I don't feel I should take public stances on elections, but I can say I have not been happy with living under the reign of Trump. What do you think Trump will do if he loses? Make a lot of noise and go away and be a jerk. I'm not expecting some big catastrophe or, like, struggle for power.

I think people overrate that chance. If there was one thing you could change about the US electoral system, what would it be? Well, it should be easier to vote. I don't think that would improve the outcomes, but I think it would be more fair. I think the US electoral system is much better than people think, and who's ever losing something at a given point in time will tell you how terrible it is. But fundamentally, it works.

Though there are all these ways in which people are discouraged or prevented from voting, and I don't favor those. Is the Girardian scapegoat a cultural adaptation, and does America need more Girardian scapegoats at this moment of intense polarization? America has so many Girardian scapegoats. It's all we've got, in a way. So I think we need other things. We need healing. We need tolerance. We need centrist figures of respect. We need more religion. We need to be more philosophical. We need to wear more masks.

It's a long list. We don't need more Girardian scapegoats. We're so good at entertainment and storytelling that it turns out in our politics we overproduce a lot of emotions and narratives. It's like the negative flip side of Hollywood, like Bruno Meshach has been telling us. Why does America need more religion? It's a social and community bond.

I think it lowers the chance that you end up as an opioid addict. It raises the chance that you're raising your children in an intact two-parent family. It's a positive social externality on the whole, not in every case, but mostly. And religiosity in the last 25 years has declined greatly. It remains an underreported story. And to me, it's concerning. I'm not religious myself, to be clear. I think America's super-educated, high-conscientiousness people in a sense don't need religion, or you could say they have their own religion,

however you want to put it. But most of the country isn't that. And it's as if the elites have foisted secularism on everyone for their own benefit, like so they can have more sex, whatever, drink when they want, take whatever drugs they can have more sex, whatever, drink when they want, take whatever drugs they want to experiment with. And it's bad for much of the country.

Final question. What does America need most right now? What does America need the most? A really good vaccine that is safe, efficacious, and approved by the FDA pretty quickly and distributed fairly effectively. We have a pretty good chance of getting that, but it is not yet in the bag as we are speaking. This is, I believe, November 2nd. We will know more very soon. I'm optimistic on that front, but it still remains to be seen. And after the vaccine, over a longer horizon, what does America need most?

Stronger social capital amongst its less educated classes, a better sense of its actual standing in the world, a better strategy for dealing with China, dealing with the fact that there are so many checks and no points and veto points in the system. Those would be some of the main things we need. Freer markets, less government regulation in most areas, and more of a willingness to be philosophical and learn from other cultures. We so rarely learn from other countries. Around the world, people are fighting coronavirus. First thing they do is look at other countries and try to draw conclusions. That's not even the last thing we do. We just don't do it.

It's crazy. We're screwed up. I'm sorry. I apologize to you, my Australian listeners. I hope we get better in this. I don't think we will. Well, I will accept your apology, and you are, Tyler Cowen, always welcome down here in Australia, Sydney especially. But for now, thank you so much for your time, and take care. Thank you for reading so closely. Have a good day. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. We discussed a lot of different sources, links, I really hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. We discussed a lot of different sources, links, articles, and books in that conversation.

If you want to follow any of those up, there are two places you can do so. One is our Facebook discussion forum, Swagman and Swagettes. The other is my website, josephnoelwalker.com. That's my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-e-l-w-a-l-k-e-r.com you'll find everything in the show notes for this episode the audio editor for the jolly swagman podcast is lawrence moorfield our very thirsty video editor is the great alf eddie i'm joe walker until next week thank you for listening ciao listening. Ciao.