What Tyler Cowen Thinks About (Almost) Everything

17:22Tyler Cowen:And if people look up to you, that's great. So there's good and bad influencers. I don't overall see where the huge problem is. Clearly, some of them are bad. But I think it's fine. And there was a time when celebrities were not really a thing in the sense of there were not commonly known movie stars or sports figures before the 1920s, for the most part. And heroes would be religious figures or George Washington. And people thought it was some great tragedy when that went away. And then it was Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin. And that worked out fine, even though you might think, well, George Washington is more important and more meritorious.

18:01Tyler Cowen:And I think this shift is working out fine.

18:04Coleman Hughes:Overall, the Trump administration and Doge, their approach to USAID, do you think it was a net harm or a net positive?

18:13Tyler Cowen:A net harm. So I would not have done a number of the things they did. I would have kept PEPFAR in place to help HIV AIDS sufferers in Africa, for instance. But on the other hand, I think it's much more understandable than the critics are willing to admit. For one thing, a lot of the countries we were giving aid to, in some ways you could call them enemies of the United States, and to think we should be sending our aid elsewhere. Again, I wouldn't have made the switch, but I don't think that's an unreasonable view. And some of the countries, South Africa in particular, have enough wealth and state capacity of their own that they could pick up the slack.

18:57Tyler Cowen:Now, they may not pick up the slack. I understand that pretty well. But at some point, when you've been doing a particular kind of aid for 25 years, and you say, well, we're phasing this out, we expect your government to do it now, it's just not that unreasonable a position. And if you publish an article saying this killed so many hundreds of thousands or millions of people, I don't think that's the right counterfactual. I think the better question is, what is it you need to do with your aid programs so that they're actually sustainable politically? They can do some good. They will always be limited.

19:37Tyler Cowen:And in that framework, it's a lot less surprising and a bit more reasonable what the Trump people did. But still, I think on that it was a mistake, and a lot of innocent people will suffer, and it wasn't costing us that much money, and there were better ways we could have reformed government.

19:53Coleman Hughes:So this is, in a way, related to my celebrity fame question, but a little different. I'd say overall, society today is more fractured. Like when I was young, everyone, you know, if we watched American Idol on a Tuesday, everyone would be talking about it on Wednesday. There were all these things that we had in common that you and a stranger could strike up a conversation about more easily because you watched the same thing or experienced the same piece of cultural content. Today, besides like the Super Bowl, there basically isn't anything. Besides the Super Bowl and national politics and national elections, there isn't that much you have in common with a stranger.

20:38Coleman Hughes:Overall, do you see this as a positive trend, a negative trend, or basically neutral?

20:44Tyler Cowen:It's probably a negative trend. I don't think we know for sure. There's a number of other negative trends going on. And what's going wrong in our world may be due to the other negative trends. And this one may be quite secondary or tertiary in importance. But I think one particular mechanism I don't like is a lot of local politicians. They're no longer accountable for what they do. They're either Republicans or Democrats, and they get a vote share or re-election prospect, depending on what people think of Trump or the Republican Party. And it seems that makes state and local government quite a bit worse.

21:19Tyler Cowen:So that would be a negative. But overall, how fractured should things be? And, you know, as you presented your question, you gave more and more examples of how it's not completely fractured. It's maybe a sort of barbells thing. There's a few big topics we all talk about, like Trump or the Super Bowl, and then a whole bunch of topics that are quite niche. I'm not sure in principle that has to be worse. I tend to think the real problem today is just too much negative emotional contagion and too much negativism. and that feeds on cynicism and that increases layers of corruption and that in turn makes the cynicism worse and it feeds on itself and it spreads.

21:59Tyler Cowen:And that may be a set of mechanisms pretty distinct from how niche our cultural discourse is.

22:05Coleman Hughes:If you could start a new religion today and it would have a wide subscribership, like millions of followers, it wouldn't just be dismissed as a cult, what would your top commandments be? What would your commandments be? What would your lifestyle prohibitions or directions be?

22:27Tyler Cowen:Well, can I say Christianity as my new religion? What we have is quite a devolved version of it. And the commandments in the book of Exodus, whether you agree with them all exactly, You know, is worshipping graven images that high on the list of sins? For me personally, it really isn't. But it's very Lindy, right? What we call the Ten Commandments. So I would stick with that and want a renewal of Christianity in some form, and earlier forms of Christianity. There's still remnant versions of those in Ethiopia and Armenia. They're not totally absent from us. it's the religion I think that's done the best.

23:11Tyler Cowen:So that's my answer.

23:12Coleman Hughes:But presumably, given how much the world has changed, there are new vices that didn't even exist and couldn't have been conceived of by Jesus or his disciples or interpreters. Presumably there's some way you could improve upon or add to the lifestyle prohibitions or commandments that would be especially useful for people living in today's world?

23:37Tyler Cowen:Well, are we going to have a 12th commandment, thou shalt not gamble on sports? You know, you have to think about sustainability. They have to be simple. They shouldn't be too specific. They should be not too hard to memorize at least a bunch of them. To people, they should be intuitive. Again, I like the ones we have. It wouldn't exactly be my list. And as you know, there's more than one version of the commandments in the book of Exodus itself. Like, which one are we talking about here? The first version is the version I like the best. There's even, you could argue, 11 on that list, depending how you divide them up.

24:14In Islam, you know, five pillars, but it's more about a very particular kind of behavior.

24:21Tyler Cowen:Judaism has too much adherence to ritual. That makes it more of a minority religion. So Buddhism, it seems to me, is fading, not as peaceful as people think. Christianity is a clear winner. And it's had some very fruitful offshoots. So this Church of Latter-day Saints, Protestantism, a form of Christianity, but also an offshoot. They've had pretty phenomenal influence in a whole bunch of ways. driving the scientific revolution or LDS in this country, boosting prosperity, getting people off alcohol. So it seems pretty important to me, Christianity. And as you know, I'm not myself religious.

25:08Coleman Hughes:What do you think about strict church theory then? I mean, like, so you don't believe in God proper, nor do I, but you see a lot of value in Christianity. Can you sustain those good things without some level of literal belief?

25:23Tyler Cowen:I think you need the literal belief, or you get slow decay. But I don't think all churches should be strict. You need a mix. It's a bit like price discrimination, but quality discrimination. There should be easier options for people. So you want a certain amount of what is sometimes called cafeteria Catholicism, because it keeps people attached in some way. And you want also stricter sects where people truly participate and produce all these local public goods. I don't know what to do about the dwindling of religious belief and participation. I don't know if it will ever come back. Historically, it has ebbed and flowed.

26:03Tyler Cowen:One view is that there's something special about modernity that it's just not ever going to come back.

26:09Coleman Hughes:Underrated or overrated, the United Nations?

26:12Tyler Cowen:Well, it's one or the other. So you learn in grade school, it's so wonderful, and then it's overrated. And then you have people, say, typically on the American right, who think it's totally worthless, and they are underrating it. So I think it has some role as a forum for discussion. It's maybe helped some conflicts get settled a bit earlier than otherwise. But I don't think it yields a very high return. Conflict is rising in the world, and the United Nations seems quite impotent. So I'm not a huge fan. It's massively bureaucratic. I have worked with them in the past. It was super frustrating.

26:51Tyler Cowen:But they don't cost that much. So I don't know. It's either overrated or underrated by pretty much everyone. I don't think it's going to solve our problems moving forward.

27:03Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I don't see it as actually solving conflicts, but as providing a forum for people to talk, which is probably a gentle positive. But it definitely doesn't do what its biggest defenders promise. You know, it's toothless. That's right. I agree with that. Underrated or overrated international law.

27:26Tyler Cowen:it's good that we have it but it has its limits it's not the final standard of right and wrong when countries face existential risk they will disregard international law we need to realize that and plan accordingly and not just go around screaming they're breaking international law but it concerns me how much of international law has fallen away and say the last seven or eight years, and I do think that's bad. So on net, I'm a fan, but it's a delusion or an illusion, you could say. It's an illusion we do better to maintain. You probably can't maintain it forever because existential risk gets spread to more countries.

28:08Tyler Cowen:And when the existential risk spreads, the international law falls away. So, you know, the allied powers in World War II did not by any means, fully adhere to what we now call international law. You can condemn that. You can say it was justified. But I think it's better to try to understand that phenomenon than to judge it morally. So the world is entering that same kind of situation once again.

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29:35Coleman Hughes:Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Overall, monarchies seem to be working much better than democracies in the Arab-speaking world, North Africa.

30:12Coleman Hughes:Yeah, we commonly assume that the transition from monarchies to democracies in Europe and your offshoot societies was a very good thing. What accounts for that difference? How do you reconcile those two observations?

30:25Tyler Cowen:Well, when you say monarchies, we need to be clear which countries we're talking about. I think often the monarchies work well because there are these lower tiers of fairly wealthy people, maybe in the same families or clans, who are quite attached to the system. So if you look at United Arab Emirates, which is now quite prosperous, is that working well because they have a monarch? Or is it working well because they have sub tiers of 8 ,000 people who want to maintain the system? I don't feel I know. I suspect if you simply installed a monarch in one of the places that's not working well, say you reinstalled a monarch in Iran, I don't think it would work any better.

31:09Tyler Cowen:So I'm not sure it's monarchy. It's the evolution of these interlocking interest groups that take on enough numbers, enough wealth, enough influence to be dominant and lead to stability. And that's hard to replicate on short notice. So I think that that is how I would view it. And if the UAE, you know, tomorrow moved to democracy in some form of voting, it's not clear to me the country would end up doing better.

31:35Coleman Hughes:How optimistic are you about regime change in Iran?

31:39Tyler Cowen:Well, we've already changed the regime at least twice at the time we're recording, and things still aren't going that well. So what is it we're hoping for in terms of the new regime? I don't understand Iran very well. I've never been there. That also means I've probably read fewer books about the place for a country of its size because I've never had to travel there. I don't understand why their government has been so screwed up for so long. Given that, I don't know how to make it better. Simply killing the people in power doesn't seem to be working. There's also the risk that if they had a truly competent government in place, they'd be a greater threat.

32:20Tyler Cowen:They could build nuclear weapons. They could do more to menace Israel, some of their Sunni neighbors. So I'm not even sure what we're rooting for here. Very difficult problem. I don't really see the scenario where it ends that well.

32:34Coleman Hughes:Why do you think that religious people in general are happier?

32:38Tyler Cowen:The papers I've looked at, religious people are only slightly happier. So I don't think it's a big effect that needs explaining. But I suspect religious people are in touch with a greater number of other people, perhaps because they go to church or temple or the mosque. That will make them a little bit happier. You know, there's a reverse causality problem. maybe happier people are more religious. So a lot of people are made unhappy by religion. It's too strict for them. Or maybe their religion doesn't approve of the fact that they're gay or they want to be gay in terms of how they're going to live their life.

33:13Tyler Cowen:So I don't think it needs that much explanation. In a way, it's surprising how small the effect is, at least if you believe that Jonathan Gruber paper from a while back. And I see plenty of unhappy religious people. I don't think it's some kind of cure-all. There might be some subgroup of young men who feel lost, who just really need to start, like going to an Orthodox Christian church to be embraced and mentored and feel they belong somewhere. Probably the biggest gains are there. The people who tend to go are women over 40 to churches or religious buildings of all kinds. They're maybe the ones need at least.

33:51Coleman Hughes:So one of the challenges to your Stubborn Attachments book could be that though economic growth is extremely important and key to well-being over time, the perception of income inequality or wealth inequality can lead to revolution and political unrest, which is then bad for growth. So that policies which reduce growth in the short run could be in the long run wise. One of my questions is how much the perception of inequality is linked to the reality of inequality.

34:31Tyler Cowen:In the political science literature, income inequality per se is not very predictive of revolution or revolt. So that's an extremely weak connection. There's the second question you just raised. Well, the perception of inequality, How does that relate to actual inequality? It seems when you have revolutions, there's something going on within the elite, and the people who see the thing through are already fairly wealthy. That may be one reason why it's not that correlated with income inequality. So I think people are looking at the wrong issues there. It may be about specific grudges. So if you look at the Bolsheviks, who obviously won, or you look at the French Revolution, a lot of that was about taxes.

35:17Tyler Cowen:The American Revolution, partly about taxes, partly about the desire to seize some of the rents from domestic government for Americans rather than British. a lot of complex causes, but I don't think inequality is central in most of these cases. So I think it's people who want to argue inequality must be so, so terrible, and they'll clutch at any straws they can to make that case.

35:43Coleman Hughes:So does that mean countries should try to manage inequality within the top, say, 5 % or 10 %? Especially the perception of inequality, because in many countries, the top 1 % to 5%,

35:55Tyler Cowen:they have enough money. They might feel abused or not sufficiently respected or somehow frozen out from decision-making, and managing that is very important, yes. And getting back to your question about these Gulf state monarchies, I think from a great distance, they've managed that okay. They've been very stable, right? And people didn't think they would be stable. So I think that's one of the things they're good at doing is giving everyone something and not just money, but some kind of valid form of participation.

36:29Coleman Hughes:What's your position on gun control in America and the Second Amendment?

36:34Tyler Cowen:We have the Second Amendment. I think if America is going to be the world's global policeman, that you need somewhat of a martial culture at home. You can't treat everyone at home the way, say, German male youth have been treated since the late 1940s, and then expect them to go out and fight and defend other places around the world. So the big gun culture in the U.S. tends to be in the South and in Texas, and the people who enlist in the military disproportionately come from those same places. And one has to deal with violence and guns in some manner in a regular way. if your country will have that same stance internationally.

37:19Tyler Cowen:So I think it's a kind of ideological equilibrium of a sort. Now, do I think America should be some kind of global policeman? Well, not the whole globe, but some parts of it, yes. So I think you could say guns are underrated in my worldview.

37:35Coleman Hughes:Which part should we police?

37:37Tyler Cowen:It depends on what point of time you're looking at. We should be defending Europe. We should be in NATO, all the more so when the Soviet Union was a larger political entity, but now Putin's Russia is extremely dangerous. The Middle East, I'm never quite sure what we should do, but I don't believe we should do nothing. It seems sufficiently complicated that no one has a good answer there. I think we should defend Japan and South Korea. The parts of Southeast Asia we can sustainably defend. I fear that may be turning against us, but insofar as it's worked to say, have military bases in Singapore, I think that's been wonderful, and Singapore has flourished under that.

38:20Tyler Cowen:There's very little in sub-Saharan Africa where I think we should be intervening or putting many of our military resources, maybe none of it. Latin America, I think quite a few of our interventions have turned out fairly well. Panama under Bush, a huge success. Haiti under Clinton, not a success, but the overall record there is not so bad. I think what we did in Venezuela, I wish we had consulted Congress, but the place can't get any worse. So in expected value terms, I would view that as a positive. Cuba to come, probably a positive as well. So it's super, you know, era-specific and place-specific, but it's actually quite a bit where I think America should have an active role.

39:05Coleman Hughes:From my point of view, it seems like formerly colonized peoples often accept the religion of the conqueror, whether Christianity or Islam, but often polarize against the political values. So, for instance, African Americans quite often accept Christianity, generally do, even though that came from our former enslavers, but will often criticize Western values or capitalism in general as a function of white supremacy. Why do you think that is, that we accept the one and not the other?

39:37Tyler Cowen:In South Africa, this is all the more marked. So in a lot of communities, there was remarkably little resistance to Christianity, and it was embraced pretty thoroughly. But at the same time, capitalism is not that popular, and there's still an active and pretty popular communist party that might be someday part of a governing coalition. it's some sort of portfolio issue. So the religion comes before the actual system comes, and you embrace the religion, because I think monotheistic religions overall, people convert to them away from polytheism, for reasons David Hume expressed way back when. And then they're converted first to the religion, and then they want to resist the culture in a number of ways.

40:25Tyler Cowen:and say, you know, it's tribal cultures in South Africa. They've been extremely communitarian and risk-sharing and resource-sharing for millennia. And all of a sudden, they're asked to come along and live in urban centers where there's capitalism and radical change. And that they don't like it, it just shouldn't be a big surprise. You can tell them all you want, read Henry Hazlitt, it's good for your living standard, what about per capita GDP? it just doesn't feel that good or that natural to them. So I think it's that combination.

40:58Coleman Hughes:Should Elon Musk donate more of his wealth to charity, or is his money better served investing in new projects?

41:05Tyler Cowen:It's probably better served investing in either new projects or the projects he already has going. I don't know if he needs a new one. I would say I'm pessimistic on trying to get to Mars, but the ones that are running all seem pretty fantastic to me, and they're hardly finished. So I don't think he should give much to charity. Maybe nothing.

41:24Coleman Hughes:Do you think he should take the Mars money and donate it to charity?

41:27Tyler Cowen:I would like to see him take the Mars money and donate it to something closer to Earth. Maybe it's space stations in orbit. Maybe it's the moon. He's already talked about refocusing from Mars to the moon. Maybe it's seasteading on the ocean. I don't know which of those is best. But if Elon sets his mind to it, I suspect the returns to whatever that would be would be higher than Elon giving it to charity.

41:52Coleman Hughes:So if I look out at the political landscape, it seems to me the two motivating emotions behind most of politics, most of what I hate in politics, are fear and envy. Like, envy to me is at the root of socialism, communism, anti-Semitism, anti-Western values, wokeness, this hatred of those perceived to have more, whether it is wealth or status or whatever, power, and the conviction that they must have gotten it unjustly. And then on the other hand, it's like politics of fear, fear of losing your culture to immigrants, fear of a racial group that you're afraid physically of, fear of invasion from foreign countries.

42:38Coleman Hughes:Do you agree that envy and fear are the two emotions that create the most problems in politics?

42:49Tyler Cowen:Probably I agree with that. but I'm more optimistic about the overall picture than you might be. I think the dominant motive in politics, believe it or not, this may horrify you, but is that people want to make their country a better place. Now that gets mixed in with fear and envy, or they may have to deal with interest groups who are motivated by fear and envy. But I actually think the dominant motivation is not so bad, at least in the United States and most developed countries, or maybe even all developed countries. People go into politics, sometimes out of sheer love of power. But in most cases, I think a big part of the motive is wanting to improve things.

43:29Coleman Hughes:If you were to reduce the difference between how you and how Brian Kaplan think about the world to one master variable, what would it be?

43:38Tyler Cowen:Brian thinks he can deduce a lot of truths through a kind of a priori reasoning. I don't think he would call it that. but he starts with what he calls common sense morality, and he thinks libertarian morality is derived from that, and it's simply absolutely true and morally binding, and there's a set of fairly simple principles, and they tell you what one should do with the world. And I don't think that at all. I think most things are pretty complicated.

44:06Coleman Hughes:Same question, but you and Alex Tabarrok.

44:09Tyler Cowen:Alex and I are much closer in terms of views. I think on foreign policy, I hesitate to use the word hawkish, but I'm more willing to countenance intervention than he is. He grew up in Canada, and I grew up in America. That would be a big source of difference. But we're both fairly pragmatic. I think Alex is more technocratic than I am. So he thinks there are these various economic—I call them schemes. I don't think he likes it when I call them schemes. But say he thinks prediction markets will do a lot of good. I would say I'm just more agnostic. So I think simple economics is less powerful than he thinks it is, would be my way of reducing it.

44:53Coleman Hughes:Okay, so if you think about the concept of the political left and the right across time and across places, are these real concepts that have actual substance, or are they just a way of describing the fact that society is split into arbitrary tribes with a rotating basket of beliefs?

45:15Tyler Cowen:I've never understood this. You can take one subset of the historical data, and left and right seem like these very universal categories. Like you go back to the French Revolution, which was a long time ago, and geographically distant, and left and right are quite recognizable. At the same time, if you go back to 14th century England, the political spectrum then is not really recognizable today. In most of world history, the political spectra we see are not very recognizable or easily mapped into current categories. But current categories seem super strong across some subset that can span time and place very powerfully.

46:02Tyler Cowen:And if it were all spannable or none of it were spannable, I would understand it better than the way it's worked out. This to me is one of the big mysteries. Like you go to South Africa where I just was, and what's a left-wing, right-wing view? Who will hold it? Can you sort of recognize someone is probably left-wing by the way they walk into a room? The answer is yes. It's crazy. How can that be? There's South Africa. It's a 14-hour flight, and they have a totally different history. Nonetheless, there's some guy I met. I was like, yeah, he's on the political left. You know what? I was correct.

46:37Tyler Cowen:He walked in the room. That was my thought. I knew it. Some other guy I met, I thought, eh, he's probably like right-leaning Afrikaner. I was, again, correct. It's crazy. You're in New York. I'm sure you see people all the time where you're just thinking, yeah, they're probably on the left, right? And most of the time, you're correct.

47:01Coleman Hughes:How do you think about the returns to an undergraduate degree right now? Say you're a 16-year-old, smart 16-year-old, 17-year-old. What algorithm should I be doing to determine, A, if I should go to college, and how I should balance between taking on debt and the kind of institution I want to go to?

47:24Tyler Cowen:If you can finish college, you should go. Adam Ozimek just had a good tweet today that the returns to college are still pretty high. But the if you can finish is a big caveat. Schools don't like to release the rates at which people finish. My best guess is they might not even be at 40%. Maybe they're a little bit less, maybe straining to reach 40%. That's a pretty poor record. If you're not going to finish, should you go? Well, you'll learn something, but then I'm a lot more skeptical. Now, can you know in advance if you're going to finish? A lot of people do. A lot of people don't. The tough cases are when you don't know in advance if you're really going to finish.

48:03Tyler Cowen:Then I'm at a loss for advice. But if you're going to finish, definitely go. Unless you're in that rare subset of people, you know, the Mark Zuckerbergs who drop out and become billionaires and so on.

48:14Coleman Hughes:Okay, just two more questions. What are your top three movies of all time?

48:19Tyler Cowen:Well, my favorite director is Bergman. And my favorite Bergman movies, I think, would be Persona and Scenes from a Marriage. I'm never sure what the third one is. I quite enjoy The Devil's Eye as a kind of unknown pick. The first Star Wars trilogy, a lot of Hitchcock movies, my favorites being Vertigo and Rear Window, a lot of classic European cinema. Most recently, Sirot was the movie I saw that impressed me the most. I know you said three. That's not three, but that's what comes to mind.

48:55Coleman Hughes:And final question, what do you consider your biggest weakness intellectually?

48:59Tyler Cowen:Lack of patience. I lack a lot of skills. I hardly have any skills. I don't really have any skills. I'm not even good at working the microwave at home. So when you have to do things in the world that involve some kind of skill that's not reading and talking or writing about what you've read, typically I'm bad at it. So close to zero skills, no balance of skills, impatience. That's just the beginnings of it. Not really being that smart. I think people often underrate how much I know, but they definitely, on average, overrate how smart I am. If I just have to take a university class and compete against other people, I do fine, but I don't do that well.

49:45Tyler Cowen:It's not like, ooh, that guy's the smartest kid in the class. it's like I have to work to get an A.

49:51Coleman Hughes:That's the end of my questions. Tyler Cowen, thank you so much for coming on my show.

49:55Tyler Cowen:Coleman, a real pleasure. Hope to see you soon.