Tyler Cowen on Legacy, Twitter + Harvard, and Fertility Decline

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today we're re-releasing a conversation I had last year with economist Tyler Cowen when he released his book, GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter? We discussed the book, talent spotting, stagnation, fertility, AI, and more. Please enjoy.

Tyler, the latest book is The Greatest Economist of All Time, The GOAT. Welcome to the podcast.

Excited to chat again.

Thank you. Good to be here, Erik.

Before we get into it, what is your algorithm for determining what to write? When you look at the next few decades of your writing career, I think you're over 30 books at this point or something like that. What is, how do you think about what, do you just have a big list of books you want to write? Is it much more, you know, at a time? How do you think about that?

It's not rational. It is much fewer than 30, though it's a fair number. But this book has a specific story that I was trapped at home during the pandemic, couldn't travel, and my libraries were closed. So I thought, what's the thing I can work on so I don't go crazy? And to write about the great classics of economics, which mostly I own or they're online, you don't have to go anywhere. That was the one project I could do. So that's how it came about. And I wasn't planning it at all. Just one day I woke up and, well, I want to do something.

Yeah. Why does it matter? That's part of the subtitle of your book. Like, even zooming out, when you think about the impact that macro and micro has made, we were in a Clubhouse a few years ago. I was reviewing that conversation with Marc Andreessen, and we were talking about how macro certainly hasn't been predictive. And you said it will likely never be predictive. And so, what is the importance, or what is the contribution to society that understanding macro contributes, or macro, the field within academia contributes?

Well, my book in particular, I take to be a sequel to my talent book with Daniel Gross. So, here's case studies of the very top economic talents. What made them great? What were their weaknesses? How do we think about that? How can we learn to appreciate them? So that's not a gain from macro per se, but you need to understand macro to evaluate these individuals. Now, if you're looking at the global stage and you want to figure out how different economies will do, macro has some uses. So for instance, we were just both in Argentina at the same time. And if someone asks me the question, will Milei succeed? I'm quite sure I can't predict that. But I do have a sense what variables it depends on. And the notion that he needs to raise about $30 billion to dollarize, I understand how that works because I understand macro. So there is value to macro because Malay understands macro. So far, he's done some good things. He may or may not continue on a good track. So it has practical value, but not for forecasting.

Yeah. Just to ask you to make a forecast, you did just write a great post on Argentina. If you had to guess what Milei's legacy will be, what do you think? What would you predict?

My total seat-of-the-pants judgment is that his chance of succeeding, even if he does everything right, is somewhat below 50%. So his legacy is most likely to be, here's the guy who came in really knowing what needed to be done, and he still failed because the rest of the system wouldn't cooperate. That said, I'm not a total pessimist, and he has a good chance of succeeding if the other parties don't just wake up and decide to pull the plug on him and send him and their own country to its doom. I think what he's doing will work.

Yeah. Is there an example of a, of a president, same for president in the last few decades, who's been able to come in and dismantle massive parts of the administrative state or, or your sort of bureaucratic machine?

Well, you mean only presidents, prime ministers?

Prime ministers count too, yeah.

Well, New Zealand was a terribly statist country, and they had a series of governments, both Labour Party and National Party, that made it much freer. I wouldn't say they dismantled the administrative state, and in some ways they enabled it to grow, but overall they moved to much lighter and cleaner regulation and better transparency, and the country avoided bankruptcy because of that. So that's one example. Now, the collapse of communism is a more complicated story, but there's definitely a kind of regulation they really did get rid of.

Yeah. Over the last few decades, has the US become a more, uh, statist or more libertarian, uh, economy, or freer or more controlled?

Well, the economy is more controlled, obviously. The American electorate has shifted to the left. We redistribute more income. We regulate much, much more. The different layers of regulation from federalism, they bite more, but we're freer on many personal issues. So we have gay marriage, and if you do something with marijuana, your chance of going to jail, I guess it depends on the state, but it's really very low. It might even be legal or decriminalized. So a mix, but in economics, not way more statist. I don't think that's disputable.

Is that true also in academia? Has academic economists moved more to the left as well? Or because libertarians—

Academics in general. I have a colleague, Daniel Klein, who works on measuring this, and I don't have his numbers on the tip of my tongue, but there are just very few right-leaning academics left, and a lot of them are quite old or not that active. If you look at the flow, it's a pretty grim picture. And even to be centrist makes you a right-winger in today's academic world.

In economics too, because libertarians like to celebrate and say, hey, I know we haven't won any sort of formal political battles, but they like to say that they've won the war of ideas in popularizing free market ideas among smart people. Is that cope? Meaning, is that untrue?

Economics is the sanest field, but last I looked, it's something like 5/6 of economists with party affiliations are Democrats. They tend to be more conservative or market-leaning Democrats, but on a lot of issues of trade and protectionism, minimum wage, yes, economists have shifted to the left.

Yeah.

So, you outline here in the book, I believe, 6 economists that you focus on. Why don't you just, as a survey to people who haven't yet dived into it, give a brief survey of who are the economists that you attribute to a tie of the greatest of all time and what were their main sort of contributions to economic thought?

Sure. But let me first say the book is online and it's free. So, if you want to read it, you can just Google to it. Google Tyler Cowen GOAT, G-O-A-T.

And you have a great GPT, right? Yeah.

It comes with an AI GPT-4-linked bot. which will answer questions about the book. You can just read it on your Kindle or print it out. But if you just want to ask GPT, summarize chapter 3, I don't want to read about Keynes, it'll do it. But anyway, the figures I cover are Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Robert Malthus, and of course Adam Smith. They're the contenders.

Who are the honorable mentions?

Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, who are both uncles of Larry Summers, by the way, Joseph Schumpeter, Alfred Marshall, Gary Becker, who are like very strong, you know, top 10 or top 12 figures. But I don't think they're really in the running to be number 1.

And where do you think your list— I saw you did an episode with the market monetarists, I forget which, Macro Musings. Where does your list differ from your peers? terms of, uh, you know, where, where do you think they're more likely to feel differently?

It depends who you take as my peers, but if you took kind of median economists at top 30 schools, I don't think they would deviate far from my list. They probably wouldn't put Malthus on it, or maybe they wouldn't put Mill on it, and they might have Samuelson and Arrow a bit higher, uh, but I don't think I'm far from a consensus in whom I'm considering. Now, Scott Sumner, speaking of market monetarists, he wrote a post on the greatest monetary economists. And he said, they are David Hume, Milton Friedman, and Irving Fisher. And I agree completely with Scott on that. Those are the greatest monetary economists.

What's Hume's contribution there?

He was first, for one thing. He understood why mercantilism was wrong. He outlined the quantity theory of money and what causes inflation. And he had a very good understanding of how inflation moves through an economic system, all in clear, beautiful prose. I think it was published in 1752, but written sometime before then. And Hume was one of the smartest people ever, maybe the smartest. And in economics too, he's amazing.

And my sense is that 100 years from now, if we're talking about the, the best philosophers of all time, that most of that list will still be the same from today, that we look back for— let me know if you think that's incorrect. I'm curious.

I agree.

Yeah, I'm curious in economics, if we look out 100 years from now, how many— are we gonna have new economists that come up, uh, or is it also going to be sort of a, uh, sort of, you know, um, old field like, like philosophy?

I don't think it will change much. I think Malthus is the candidate who might be revalued. So if we do collapse due to environmental problems, which is not my prediction, not my view, but it's possible, right? Then I think Malthus will really rise in people's estimations. And if we don't collapse, he'll probably fall somewhat more. The others will keep their posts of honor, so to speak.

Yeah, I, um, well, on the Malthus question, That feels to have resurfaced in light of AI safety, resurfaced in different ways, this idea of how much growth can we have. The guy who wrote the book Scale, I can't remember, Jeffrey West, he quoted in the book, maybe quoted someone else, this quote that said, the only people that think exponential growth is possible are idiots and economists. And I remember asking you that a few years ago, And you said kind of glibly, I think something like, you were half joking, I think, like, I'll take 700 years of great growth. You know, at some point, maybe, you know, we'll be unable to handle it. What are your thoughts on sort of like runaway growth? And how should we think about, you know, our potential ability to handle it or not handle it?

Well, economic growth brings dematerialization, right? So we can do more using less water, using less land, using less material resources. So there's not some inexorable logic where the material pressure on the Earth just causes it all to explode or run out of everything. On that, I'm quite optimistic, as are most economists. My main worry, which I've had for a long time, is simply that as energy becomes cheaper— not intelligence, but energy— It will at some distant point be too easy for someone to build, buy something like a nuclear weapon and just set it off. And that may lead to the collapse of order in the world. Say you could set off something like a nuclear weapon for $50,000. What would the world look like? I don't know. I just don't think that's stable forever. And that's my biggest fear for the future.

Our mutual friend, Nathan LeBenz, he equates Or makes analogies between AI and nuclear. He says we wouldn't open source nuclear codes or sort of, you know, bioweapons. AI is going to get that good. Why would we think about open sourcing something that is so potentially dangerous? Are you sympathetic to that instinct?

I would reframe it. I would say some of the cats are already out of the bag, and we have to decide, do we want to have to deal with our problems through Chinese AI? Or American AI. And on that, my choice is clear. So I think he just has a quite wrong starting point for the question. I don't think it will necessarily be easy. I'm not worried about the Eliezer scenario where it just kills us all. I just think any technology that's super dynamic is also disruptive. And yet we have all these institutions geared around stasis.

Yeah.

including our politics. And again, it's an open question how well that's going to go, but I would still rather confront it with more intelligence than less intelligence.

That relates to another topic that we discussed the other week, which was, uh, fertility and, and underpopulation, um, or the population sort of demographic collapse. My AI friends in San Francisco will say don't worry about that because the losses that you're forecasting as a result of a lower population will be offset by the gains in productivity that AI will bring. And in fact, if we have too many people, we won't have enough things for them. Although that you could make that claim, that claim doesn't need to be part of that argument for it to make sense. Do you sympathize with that? The implication is thus we shouldn't worry about population as much because AI will—

No.

Take care of it.

Elon is right. I mean, I'm optimistic about AI on the whole, but you need people around to enjoy what the AI will do for us. So if South Korea has 17 people and awesome AI, and those 17 only average half a kid, they're done. Doesn't matter how good the AI is. Now, my hope, which I'm— again, I'm not sure I hold this as a prediction, but if AI raises productivity enough We can subsidize people having kids to the tune of like $300,000 or $400,000 per kid.

Yeah.

And a subsidy that large, I do think would matter. Maybe something like robots or certain devices would make rearing a child easier also. Uh, but you just can't have a shrinking population for too long.

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We talked about also how there have been no policies that have seemed to, to make a difference. The one idea I had since then is what if there was an equivalent of like DEI, but for people who've had kids, i.e., in order to progress in your career or rise up within a company, you have to have 2 kids, or kind of your preferential access if you have that. Do you think that could— because we don't just want to encourage anybody to have kids, we want to encourage our most striving, most intelligent, most impressive people to have kids.

Yeah.

I would think that's hard to enforce. There's— there are going to be plenty of exceptions, uh, and a simple cash subsidy appeals to my background as an economist. But whether it's a mandate or a subsidy, you have to pay for it in some manner.

Yeah.

So I think there's a race to find a way to pay for it. And that's one reason why just turning our back on AI is not an option, because it's by far the most important technology the best chance we have of being able to afford a lot of other protections we're going to need— asteroid defense, whatever other problems you think are there. Just having a more productive Walmart is not going to pay for it.

Yeah, it is interesting. If we would have said 20 years ago or 30 years ago, if we would have said, hey, our goal is to have more Latinos— as a half-Latino, I'll use my example— represented in big tech or something, We could have said, hey, we should just give big tech companies a subsidy, or we could have said, hey, let's put all sort of cultural pressures on them in order to do so. And it feels like the cultural pressures, I guess, plus some legal sort of civil rights laws as well, sort of emboldening those culture pressures, it feels like those worked. Feel free to let me know if you don't agree with that characterization, but I wonder if cultural pressures are underrated as a force to encourage people to do things?

Well, cultural pressures to have more kids, I do see them coming back. That if someone is somewhat well off, to me, anecdotally, it seems much higher status to have 4 kids now than it did 10 years ago. That may not be enough people to change matters, but keep in mind, there's this other evolutionary element of the system that cultures that encourage childbearing Amish is the extreme example. They will become more important as other people don't have kids. If you think there's something about East Asian culture where people have especially low fertility, well, that will become less influential. So that might work in our favor, just a numbers game through social evolution. Again, I'm not sure that's strong enough to overturn it because it seems almost every culture is headed for below 2.0. And you actually need a bit higher than 2.0 to maintain a population.

Except Israel. What can we learn from— what can other countries learn from Israel's situation?

Some of it is religion, but even secular Israelis in Tel Aviv, I believe, are above 2. It may be the sense of being threatened and beleaguered, that if we don't have children, like there won't be in Israel at some point, an acute awareness of numbers. So I think every Israeli knows How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust? And so how many Jews were back then, how many there are now, uh, it's too high a price to pay for an awareness of numbers, but that may be where it comes from. Yeah.

Are you with Robin Hanson that we are likely to have a dark age as a result of global, uh, population collapse? Or how, how bad is this going to get?

No, I think AI has quite a good chance of limiting or forestalling or preventing that dark age, that the big gains will arrive in time, but there's still this dark age if there are not many people around to enjoy it. So in that sense, Robert is broadly correct, but narrowly I would say incorrect. He thinks when you have shrinking population, just tech progress stops. That's an interesting hypothesis. But I don't think it's obviously true because you have more brains through AI working for you.

Why don't you think there are more people sort of interested in this or obsessed with this? We had some hypotheses in our conversation, but given sort of the scope of this problem and the sort of ambition of what it would take to fix it, Wouldn't it make sense that we would have more brilliant people focused on it? Why don't you think that is?

Well, an awful lot of potential grandparents are focused on it, right? And that's a big chunk of America. And a lot of smart people are focused on it, but they're afraid to speak up in public. In a feminized society, it's a little difficult to talk about because it sounds at least like you're suggesting women should deprioritize career and prioritize having 3 or 4 children. And that's just not a popular thing to say or even hint at. So the discourse is stunted, but I think Elon has really shifted the Overton window, as have a number of other people. And there's so many potential or current grandparents out there, would-be parents, uh, it's not going to go away. So—

By focus on, I don't just mean have more than 2 kids. I mean, Identify the bottlenecks, or, um, whether they be reproductive technology, whether they be childcare, whether they be housing, whatever.

It's none of those. I, I know all the YIMBYs, oh, we'll make things cheaper. Yeah, you know, I'm all for YIMBY and making things cheaper, but South Korea is a super YIMBY country and they're at 0.7. Japan is a YIMBY country, they're at 1.3. I think the main bottleneck is that To most people, kids aren't that much fun, and that's a really tough bottleneck to overcome. And women often are the ones who have to put in more work and who have a greater say in the matter.

So yeah, the opportunity cost of women is too high. Um, so what you're saying is the economics— if you paid people $300,000, that would lower the opportunity, you know, that would, um, increase the gains. I also wonder if it would increase the status somehow, or if there's a way to increase the status where it almost feels like you're not making a trade-off between career and mother, 'cause mother is a career that is both remunerative and respected.

That's right, we would do that. But, you know, there are negative historical associations. So the Nazis made a big point of paying people to have kids and raising its status. And that was part of something really extremely unpleasant. And you might say, well, there's some intrinsic reason why having the government pay for kids and raise the status of kids will lead to other bad views. I don't think that's the case, but again, I don't dismiss that argument. Uh, it is possibly true, and that maybe in a lot of ways you don't want to reverse the feminization of society.

Yeah.

Because it is more peaceful and less fascistic in some ways. So I don't dismiss that argument. So, like, I've never made it my personal mission to go around saying, oh, we need to, like, pay $400K for a kid, because it's very hard to foresee all the levers and pulleys and what you're really doing. But I'll just say, you know, sort of predictively, the societies that do something like that will in numbers outperform the societies that don't.

Yeah. A female friend who I was talking to about this, one thing that she said, she loves the idea of having kids, but she's more motivated in her career. One of the reasons is because she feels like she can really differentiate in her career. She can become the best in the world at something and really prove herself and gain sort of respect from that, where she feels as a mother, she would be kind of like everyone else. It doesn't feel that there's distinct ways to differentiate or become exceptional. in public, societal recognized ways. So then I said, well, if you have 20 kids, that would be exceptional. But I didn't actually say that.

But look, as a mother or father, you are truly exceptional to your own children, right? There's no doubt about that. The question is, how much is that worth to you? And that gets into these deep cultural issues about choice of audience. And it does seem there's something about the contemporary world that gives you such a portfolio range of choice of audience. And kids are still there, but they've always been there, and they're just another possible audience, and they're not necessarily winning out. Yeah.

If you were head of xRisk and you were given a massive budget, where would sort of population collapse be on your priority list, or what would be— how would you kind of pie chart your priority list? if you were head of existential risk planning?

Well, I don't think it's a problem you solve well by spending lots of money. So I would in general, as I would for a lot of problems and x-risk problems, cultivate a lot of talent. You don't know what your x-risk is going to be typically. Everyone thinks they know, and I have my own hypothesis about like very cheap, very powerful weapons. But if you don't know in advance, you want to make these very general investments. And in fact, the work I do is geared toward that end. So in a sense, I do have a kind of x-risk fund.

Fantastic.

It just doesn't think of it— yeah, Emergent Ventures. It doesn't focus on x-risk, but under the surface, it believes that a lot of general talent being mobilized is what's going to do the trick. Yeah.

So say more. So I understand sort of Fast Grants and how that ties to it. Say more on Emergent Ventures in terms of your algorithm for picking people and how you think it ties to it. Because my read from the outside in is that you pick a number of people are almost kind of like mini-Tylers in that they're very strong generalists, exceptionally curious, very creative, very knowledgeable. Is that too crude, or how do you think about your algorithm for what you're trying to do with emerging ventures?

Well, many more of the winners are specialists than generalists. But I think given who and what you are, the generalists are the ones you hear about and read about. Just today, I made an award to a 15-year-old young woman in Canada. who wants to study how to make batteries last longer for a variety of reasons, which are mostly obvious. And she's extraordinarily impressive. Whether she ends up working on batteries, I wouldn't say I don't care, but it's not an investment in batteries. It's an investment in her. She's an extraordinary writer, thinker, full of energy, engages with a lot of other very smart young people. It just seemed obvious to me we should make an award. I wouldn't call that an algorithm. Uh, there's just some number of people where it seems obvious to me we should make them an award. We now have over 500 winners, noting that Shruti and Rashid Griffith, you know, do India and Africa respectively. I do the rest of the world.

Yeah, I— so I see how the battery technology person— but when you pick someone who's working on some sort of liberal arts thing? Like, how do you justify that? Or like, what is the scope of Emergent Ventures? If you saw someone who was doing something interesting in basketball analytics, would that be— you personally found it interesting, but would that be outside of the scope of Who Wins? Or how do you think about that?

I don't think it's outside of the scope. I would be interested in whether they worked to draw broader lessons from basketball analytics.

Right.

I could imagine supporting that. There's one woman we supported, her original emphasis, which she still does by the way, and it's very good, but to compose contemporary music and Azerbaijani traditions, which is like beyond niche. Her music is excellent. She's actually ended up becoming an important figure in the meta-science movement, super smart, a great work ethic and will do great things in both areas. Now, I had not at all foreseen she would end up working on metascience in a significant way, but I mean, there you go. So, I mean, you know how venture capital works. You take a lot of chances.

Yeah.

You've got to look for things other people are not looking for, or what's the point? You can always find people on the rise and fund them and boast that you are responsible for it, but that's a waste of time. Like, I'm not paid to do this. So, I really want to pick the people who will have a marginal impact.

Right. Yeah, but the venture capital works is exactly described, but the result is clear. The scoreboard is clear. They either have a return or they don't. Whereas, for what you're doing, the return is a bit more subjective, right?

We need more non-legibility in modern society is one of my strongly held beliefs. And Emergent Ventures is designed not to be fully legible. Like, does the person believe passionately in what they're doing? Like, it probably can't be a hair salon in Dayton, Ohio, but an awful lot of different things are eligible.

Why do we need more non-legibility? What does that bring?

Well, so many different institutions are being bureaucratized, right? So there's committees, there's boards, there's letters of recommendation, there's credentials, all mattering more and more too much. And someone who wants either like a small grant or something that's hard to explain or justify to a committee, they're the cases where maybe I think my marginal return is highest. So I'm attracted to those quite often.

Yeah.

This 15-year-old young woman, there's no way she can just apply to a foundation and sort of get through the process for what is, you know, a small grant. And part of it is the networking opportunity. and inspiration and chance to consult with different people. And that's what we're trying to provide. Yep.

Speaking of, uh, bureaucratization and, you know, administrification, let's talk about Harvard. Is what's happening at Harvard a, um, sort of watershed moment for the institution, or is it kind of, you know, new person, same, same clothes? It feels like Bill Ackman is is conducting an activist campaign to take over Harvard in a similar way that Elon maybe did to take over Twitter. Uh, it was— it turned out easier to take over Twitter than, than start a new one, and it's really hard to start a new Harvard. Um, no one has been able to do anything like it in the last few, you know, few decades, maybe 100 years.

Yeah, more than a few decades. I think Harvard will shift to the center and change marginally, and the next president will be quite a safe choice. probably too safe a choice, and the worst outrages will slowly be purged or downplayed, but Harvard will not fundamentally change, and it's never been fair or meritocratic. Now today it's unfair and non-meritocratic in quite new and different ways, which many people hate, and I don't— I'm not myself fond of them, but don't be too shocked. There's no idealized Harvard in the background that we've strayed from. So it was not designed to be fair and meritocratic, and it will continue to be Harvard.

So the Harvard of 2023 is not that significantly different from the Harvard of different decades in terms of this idea of like pursuit of truth, people there doing real work that matters?

Well, many departments are better in that regard than they used to be. Maybe not all of the humanities, But a lot of the sciences are much stronger, and there's more funding and stronger checks and better networking. So significant parts of Harvard have never been better than they are today. It's important to realize that. But within the administration, there's so much rot and bad ideology and lack of accountability and clueless people living in bubbles, maybe even in some cases having personality disorders. That it's not very functional at some of the macro levels. Yeah.

Our friend Marc Andreessen is famously much more negative on the state of current higher education. You know, we're using Harvard as kind of a placeholder for the elite education. But even in the hard sciences, he thinks a lot of it has been either politically corrupted or more just like non— reproducible, or just, you know, majority of what people are producing doesn't— isn't real, doesn't matter.

That's always been the case. I would stress that a lot of the tech excitements that Mark gets excited about are in fact downstream of universities.

Even still, or like, I know, even still, maybe more. Got it. So when you— when we look at the future of higher education, Let's say we're having this conversation 40 years from now. Do we think that higher education is going to look pretty similar to how it does today in the sense that there will be Harvard, there will be Stanford, there will be Princeton, like the major players that exist will be the ones that already exist and the experience is not going to be that different? Or how do we—

I think the experience will be quite different. I would still bet on those to be the top schools. I think AI will change higher education a great deal. whether higher ed likes it or not, just as the internet has changed it a great deal. So I'm not predicting stasis, and I do think at least half of these top schools have truly terribly macro-level dysfunctional administration in a way where something does have to give. So the critics are not wrong when they talk about rot. But if they think just like the quality of what's coming out of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, is junk. It's just simply not true. Again, you might think it's true in some number of fields, the less scientific ones, but it's just flat out not true. It's not true in economics. Smart people still want to go to those places. It's not true for biomedicine. All the vaccines and other innovations we're getting largely downstream of universities.

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Would you agree that Elon taking over Twitter has had a massive culture shift?

Absolutely. And positive. I think he just had the stones to say, I'm willing to lose, what, $30 billion? I don't know the number.

$30 billion.

Whatever he'll end up losing, what he paid, $44 billion, it'll be worth something. Willing to lose $30 billion to steer this beast in one direction because he understood how much is downstream of Twitter. And it was brilliant. And for all the critics, he's basically pulling it off. Of course, he's going to lose the money though.

Yeah. Is, is that possible? Could something similar happen to Harvard?

Well, you can't buy Harvard. So someone could, in some sneaky way, try to take over the board of directors. I don't know what their bylaws are like. Typically, that's very, very hard. And I would be very surprised if that were a realistic option.

Have you been following Bill Ackman's Twitter? He's— Of course.

He's been extraordinarily effective. But I think he will find it much harder to get broader reform than to get a few scalps. Yeah, I'm very glad he did what he did. My kudos to him. But at some point, you just have systems filled with people of particular points of view, and they have tenure. I just don't see how that budges.

There's this narrative some people have where they basically say that the US is so much downstream. You mentioned Twitter, but also, but between academia, you know, between Harvard, the New York Times, and government, there's what some people call the cathedral, this gated institutional complex, or this sort of like web of relationships and kind of self-reinforcing, uh, kind of power generators. I'm using pretty like vague terms, but you, you kind of get what I'm, what I'm, what I'm getting at.

Sure, of course.

Do you agree with that sort of narrative? Like, what would be the— if someone were able to take over Harvard, would it have a similar culture shift to what Elon has done for Twitter?

I don't think so, because you're not changing the research that's done, what's taught in the classroom. So I think the people who talk about the cathedral, in general, they underrate the quality of the establishment, they underrate the degree of dissent within the establishment, and they underrate the degree to which the establishment can reform itself. And to think that the outsiders will nudge the establishment in a better direction And some of them will become part of it and will muddle through, and a lot of things will continue. It's to me by far the best bet.

Yeah, it's interesting. Right now as we're communicating, uh, Richard Hanania and Bronze Age Pervert are getting in a feud on the internet, uh, about sort of this. Um, and if, if people don't know who those are, uh, God bless you. These are, uh, you know, um, sort of, uh, Twitter public intellectuals, uh, on the right. Richard Haney, I believe, is a, uh, part of Emergent and, um, you know, Emergent winner, and he's a fascinating thinker. And, and Broadzage Pervert is, uh, a, uh, you know, Yale PhD, uh, philosopher turned anon, you know, uh, book author and, and Twitter personality. And they're getting in an argument over how to explain to the public why there are differences, um, in outcomes among, among peoples. And the, uh, reason we're having that conversation is because DEI is kind of being questioned in a way that it hasn't been questioned for, for a long time because of what's happening at, at, at Harvard. And the, the logic that some people say is— Amy Wax has been proposing this view and, and others— is it takes a theory to beat a theory. And the reason why DEI was able to— affirmative action was able to be, um, sort of implemented so effectively is because people look at disparities and they say, hey, this must be explained by, uh, racism or prejudice or systemic discrimination or whatever. And if you don't have a response to that, then you have to give in to, to that framing. Thomas Sowell, of course, wrote books trying to explain how culture matters and history matters and explain how all groups are different, whether it's the French or Russians or Italians. Like, every group is going to have different outcomes. And so, Charles Murray, of course, has been on this kick for recently and also a long time. If there's a question as to how honest society should be about things that are maybe ugly or not flattering, or could lead people to take the wrong interpretations of them when we think about why outcomes are different. How do you react to this debate, either on the meta conversation of how honest should we be as a society, or how should we think about inequalities as a society between people? Should we think that, hey, that's just a natural outcome? Should we try to mitigate it within certain constraints? Where do you net out?

There's a lot of different questions packed into there. I think a lot of that current debate, I haven't seen all of it, but it seems to me counterproductive. It's people talking to themselves, going in circles, and what people really should be working on is innovations in whatever space that will help groups that have been at a disadvantage do better. So I think we should all admit racism has had a huge impact in the American past. It is by no means gone. There are some markers that it's coming back, at least in significant corners, even if maybe if not at the median. And that's a bad thing. And, uh, yeah, we need to be more, you know, more positive looking, more forward looking, and more positive some. And that probably puts me closest to Saul.

Some people say that Bronze Age Pervert, and we don't have to talk about him specifically, but just has popularized this idea of kind of like, uh, uh, you know, I think Christian Annie has a blog post around sort of a mythos for the non-Christian right as, as sort of a Nietzschean liberalism or something, but like emphasis on the Nietzschean, or sort of revitalizing, reviving Nietzsche for a kind of online memetic, uh, you know, Twitter, Twitter era. It seems like, you know, we talked about how earlier the culture is is pretty, uh, pretty feminized, pretty, pretty, you know, I mean, it's pretty Christian. Um, do you also see sort of this rise of, of, of kind of a new Nietzscheanism, and, and what do you, what do you make, make sense of it?

Oh, I think it's very niche. So there's a corner of the right wing that has made it their thing as a kind of act of rebellion. I'm not— Bronze Age Pervert understands Nietzsche. I'm not sure how many of the others do. Uh, it's not going anywhere. So I mean, to look at it very concretely, you know, to take the world of Latin America, which you and I are both reasonably familiar with, what really changes people's mind is events. So now Panama and Dominican Republic and Chile are doing pretty well, and there's different things you can do To encourage them to do better or have more cases like that. I hope Colombia joins that group. They have the potential to, but they haven't yet. I hope Argentina does. And if those things can go better, you're going to get much better outcomes. And not like, don't worry too much about Nietzsche or whatever. That's where the action is.

So You're, you're less excited about any sort of post-liberalism, or the people who, who talk about how liberalism has atomized us, or, you know, continued to lead to sort of, um, a lot of these cultural problems because the economic growth solves for it?

Migrants want to live in the liberal countries, right? The liberal countries are at risk of losing some of that liberalism. Uh, we should all fight to defend it and make it better, to be clear. Liberalism By its nature, never claimed to be perfect or close to perfect, but it ought to focus on self-improvement in a way that a lot of these intellectual discourses do not.

Do you think that Patrick Deneen kind of— I can't remember the book, it's called Why Did Liberalism Fail? Are you familiar with that?

Yeah.

Do you think he's kind of misguided? Is that a fair—

Yes, sure, he's misguided. Where does he want to move? I've never met him that I can recall, But I would just ask him, Patrick, where do you want to go? And we do have 50 states. I know there's common elements, but there's a lot of countries in the world, and I know where I want to be. And if I had to leave my own country, I'd be looking at places like Canada, Australia, Denmark, UK, Ireland, right? Nothing that would surprise you.

Yeah. And speaking of, or kind of adjacent, I remember we had a conversation a long time ago offline, and you mentioned how you were— you thought that the Rawls sort of veil of ignorance was highly overrated or not a great view. Can you explain that?

Well, Rawls asks, you know, if you were stripped of a lot of features of your identity and you would be randomly born into a particular place, what kind of institutional rules would you want and what kinds of decision procedures would you favor for evaluating outcomes? And I think what he came up with, you know, principle of liberty, Pareto improvements, difference principle, some I like, some I don't like, but they're all things he stuffed into the choice to begin with. He's not really proving or generating anything. It's you put a bunch of things in and you get a bunch of things out. And it's just his—

Excuse me.

His personal recipe. So there's no derivation. I don't think there's a case based on reflective equilibrium. There's not enough history. I would start with what are the countries people actually want to live in, and concretely, how can we improve them? And Rawls for me is far too much of a foundationalist and not enough of a historically minded thinker, at least in Theory of Justice. Now there's other Rawls books and articles. that are fairly different. And that's a more complicated story. But that would be my response to the roles that people mean when they usually talk about roles.

I'm curious to learn more about how you think about sort of career or how you spend your time. In one of our recent conversations over the years, I asked if you would want to start a venture fund, given you have so much great access and relationships in the industry, and especially because of what Emergent is doing, but also the other relationships. And you mentioned, you kind of said, hey, why would I do that? I kind of have the life and the relationships and the respect and the ability to do things that I have what I want right now. I don't need to do that. And it feels like you've been able to build up this influence in a, or those assets in a non, or in a kind of a circuitous way, in ways that other people haven't or couldn't emulate. How do you explain that? Or how would you edit my characterization? And, um—

What you say sounds true to me, and I think some of it you repeated from what I said to you, so it's no surprise I like it. Uh, how did I do it? I guess that means I'm really skilled in some ways. That's the immodest answer. Yeah, but I think people who act modest are actually not modest, and one of my New Year's resolutions is to not try to be modest unless I really mean it. So, I think that's something where I've had a lot of luck and other people have treated me very well, but I've been really good at it.

Is the algorithm of how you should spend— how you spend your time, what are you really good at and what do you enjoy and where you think you can make the biggest impact? I guess I announced today I'm undergoing a career transition and thinking about how to best utilize my talents and interests. What questions do you think I should be asking?

Well, what's worked for me, I'm not saying it works for everyone or for you, but congratulations, by the way, is to always pursue compounding returns in learning.

Hmm.

And I think that will work for a lot of people. But I'm in academia, that's a special setting. There's a thing called tenure you can get. And you can be granted long time horizons if you're willing to take short-run reputational lumps. A lot of other kinds of projects have budget constraints that don't allow that. And I'm not sure where you're going to fall on that spectrum, but that would be my starting point, compounding returns through learning.

You know, you wrote a book, going full circle here, your book is on the legacy of economists. You, of course, are also an economist and a broader public intellectual and have your own legacy. Do you think that the legacy is the both the depth and the breadth that you've been able to go into, not just economics, but also, you know, multiple fields and in public and kind of in the community you've built with Marginal Revolution? Or do you say, no, I actually want it to be these core ideas around the Great Stagnation or complacent class or what else?

I don't think I have much of a legacy. I'm not even sure what it means. I think the main thing I've done is show people a certain kind of intellectual life is possible. And that it can be fun and that it can have some influence. And I think people will still think about that for 10 or 20 years after I die, and then they won't think or talk about it anymore, and my legacy will be gone. I'm still very happy I can reach and influence a lot of people now and for some time, and that's very meaningful to me. But I see so many people who don't have legacies And I think I'll be another one of them.

Yeah. Do you, as you think about what to spend time on, does part of you think, hey, I should go deeper in this and create some sort of fundamental, you know, insight that, or contribution, or I should go broader, or I should just pursue what interests me? Or how bottoms-up versus tops-down is your sort of intellectual, you know, research or curiosity or how you spend time?

I don't have fundamental insights to offer. It's pretty simple. I wish I did. If I did, I would do it, but I don't. So just like I can be immodest on saying I set this life up very well, maybe that makes me more credible when I say I'm not foregoing or even weighing some option to say these like new extra profound things. It's like I'm empty in a way. Like I take stuff in and something comes out of it. But you're not going to get any more other than like the flow will continue for as long as I can.

And so, when you say the precise skill that you have, when you say that you're very skilled, is that what the precise skill is? This kind of unique style of intellectual sort of exploration and sharing?

Live life as an infivore, as I call it, but also do well in doing things practically. And show people the two can be integrated. I think that's a big part of it. So take on a lot of projects. Uh, they will succeed to varying degrees, but I've been happy with how most of my projects have gone, and they all have a practical side. And that's, that's part of the vision of how to live life a particular way.

If you could clone yourself— and we'll gear towards closing here— What's another project, intellectual or practical, that you would want to pick up? Or put differently, what's a— for aspiring Tyler or aspiring emergent venture candidate who's listening to this episode, what's a project that you want them to pursue that isn't being worked on to the degree that it should be, that would be important or valuable?

Well, I don't want them to listen to me, or for that matter, to you, Or any other particular person. So just that they can take some inspiration from the fact that one can be a, a thing or have a role that's not like any other previous role, and that that's really possible, is, I hope, something I communicate to a small number of people. And I don't want them to, like, be my role or pursue my priorities. So, that's another way to think about legacy. For a short window of time, you can show people that non-mold models of life are possible and rewarding.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's my belief that University of Austin is not going to compete with Harvard or Stanford, although I really respect the effort and I'm rooting them the best, but that if the Thiel Fellowship scaled up, and tried to compete with Harvard and Stanford, I think they could because the credential is so significant based on the talent level who's been inside of it. And I believe that what you've built with Emergent Ventures too, it has an alumni so impressive on a quantity or on a capital percentage basis that it could also compete if you wanted to scale up. But I suspect you don't want to.

No, it's not don't want to. I don't think You know, we can. So we have myself, Shruti, and Rashid as evaluators. They're both great. Uh, if we had a mix of more money, more evaluators, we could scale a bit. But it's the non-scaling. It's like saying, oh, I love the music of the Beatles. Those guys really need to scale. Well, yes and no, right? There's a lot of covers of Beatles songs. It's a kind of scaling. But at the end of the day, you know, you do your thing. I would add, I am optimistic about University of Austin. I'm on their advisory board, to be clear, but I don't have a personal stake in it. But I think they will get very good applications, and I'm not really privy to their plans, but I think they'll be a very good school.

I think so too. I think if— what I was saying with that is I think someone who's picking between Harvard or Stanford will likely— and UATX, Doesn't yet have better career opportunities if they go to UATX, but if they, they're a Thiel Fellow, they probably do, at least in technology or startups specifically.

Yeah, sure, that's true. But I think they'll get people who are equally talented as Harvard and Stanford students who, A, want something different, B, maybe were unfairly rejected or just rejected because not enough students are taken, and they just want a change of pace, and they're like anti-establishment in some way. And they'll go on and do great things. And they don't need that many people to fill the ranks. It's like, it's one school. Like, can you have 80 University of Austins is a much tougher question. I'm quite sure you can have 1, 2, 3. When you get to 10, I'm not so sure anymore.

Yeah. Well, we're over time. We'll wrap on that. The book is Who Was the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter? And people can read it on go@greatesteconomistofalltime.ai. Tyler, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you very much, Erik. And the simpler website is just econgoat.ai or Google Tyler Cowen goat. Thanks, Erik. Great to chat. See you next time.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and cognitive revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers. Like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week, and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co, and let's partner together.