A Vision for a Society of Free & Prosperous Individuals | Tyler Cowen | POLITICS | Rubin Report

Joining me today is a professor of economics at George Mason University, the host of Conversations with Tyler podcast, and the author of Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals. Tyler Cowen, welcome to The Rubin Report.

My pleasure.

Now, I did your podcast once, and I believe that the first question you asked me was, do I like being on the interviewing side or on the interview side? So I'm gonna start with the same exact question.

I spent the first half of my life being interviewed, the last fifth of my life being the interviewer for 58 Segments, and now I'm being interviewed. So for me—

So we've come full circle and then around, halfway around again, or something?

There's less preparation when you're being interviewed, so that's easier.

Yeah, all right, so I'm thrilled that you're here. I've wanted to have you on for quite some time. You are sort of, for so many of the people that have influenced me, you have influenced them. So I think there's a certain beauty to this, and we're gonna do a lot on economics and all sorts of stuff here, but I always like to start with sort of a little bit of background, just sort of where you're from and history before we get into the meat. So tell me a little bit about Tyler Cowen.

I was born in northern New Jersey. I was a nerd growing up. I played chess. It was then economics and philosophy. Now I teach at George Mason, live in Virginia, travel a lot, and I'm a kind of information omnivore.

Yeah, and you're a big basketball fan. We just did a whole basketball—

NBA fan, there's a big difference.

Ah, yeah, so me too. I'm not a huge college fan, why?

Nor am I, it's not good enough. So why not watch the best, right? There's enough of the NBA, especially with the internet and YouTube. And it's a way of thinking about talent evaluation, rules of the game, technical innovations, conceptual breakthroughs, how to get a group of people to cooperate. It's a kind of economics in a way. It's like a new laboratory.

Yeah, so when did you get interested in economics?

In economics, I was 13 and my father brought home like some magazines and periodicals. I started reading them. I then went to the public library, never stopped.

Yeah?

Yeah.

You went to the library, never stopped. And were you always interested in sort of more libertarian-leaning economics or did you read Did you read everything and then kind of figure out where you fell?

I read everything, but early on I read Hayek, I read Milton Friedman, some of Ayn Rand, Henry Hazlitt. That made a big impression on me. And I was, you know, then 13, 14.

Yeah, was that a weird thing for a 13 or 14-year-old to be into?

I think it was, and this was pre-internet, right? So people were not exposed. And I just went crazy and I read all of Plato's dialogues and I just thought, I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life. How can I find a way of always being reading, writing, talking to people?

Yeah. What do you like more, doing the academic side of things, teaching, or do you like podcasting more, or public speaking?

I don't think they're so different. Podcasting is the new education, right?

Yeah.

So think of it as an educational innovation, and you reach more people. The discussions are often smarter than in the classic classroom. So I view it as one and the same, really, kind of integration.

Yeah, so okay, so let's just talk about your economic beliefs in general. So basically, basically you're a libertarian, right? Is that—

Small L libertarian.

Small L, so what does that mean? 'Cause people say that all the time. I like defining terms specifically. When you say you're a small L libertarian.

I believe in freer markets, social liberalism, and I'm often skeptical of foreign policy abroad. That said, some libertarians simply refuse to admit that government can ever do good. I don't think that's the case. Anti-smoking campaign would be one good example of something that did people a lot of good. It was led by government. So empirics come first, look at the evidence, but I think overall right now people in our society underrate business and overrate the government.

Yeah, so is there any difference, any meaningful difference between a small L libertarian and a classical liberal?

When people say classical liberal, I think it confuses the listener. There's the word liberal in there, What does classical mean? It reminds people of the 19th century. I don't like any of these words. I feel I've written and done so much online, people can use search and see what I think on any issue. But I'll still go with small L libertarian. I won't deny I'm a classical liberal.

So I should probably be saying small L libertarian by your definition. I agree, it's gotten confusing. I'm trying to clean up the word liberal so deeply that it becomes hard to do that because people have such, associations with the word.

If I could just call myself liberal, as you can in some European countries, that would be my preferred approach. But here it just won't work.

Right, that's the problem. Well, this is listened to all over the world, so in England, for example. I'm a liberal.

You're a liberal.

I'm a liberal, that's nice. So light touch of government, how do you figure out where the right spot for government to do some things is? 'Cause I'm sure there's libertarians that maybe are big L libertarians that are going, all right, well, even if the anti-smoking thing worked, It's not the purview of government to do such things.

I believe in the power of economic growth, uh, the significance of just compounding returns over time. An economy that grows at 3% over time becomes much, much wealthier than an economy growing at 2%. So we need to ask, like, what are genuine public goods the government should provide? I think support for basic science, a basic social welfare state or safety net, obviously foreign policy. Then there are particular instances where governments have done good, but the presumption should be in favor of liberty. People do have individual rights. You just can't take all their money from them. We way overregulate most of our economy. We could be far more dynamic. We've had wage stagnation in this country for decades, and we are complacent about all that. I mean, that's my basic take on America today.

Yeah, and I think you know I'm pretty much on board of all that. Are you shocked at the amount of individual liberty that people sort of wanna outsource to the government? As you said, they wanna trust government more than markets right now.

On social issues, I'm fairly heartened. I don't think people should ever go to jail for smoking pot, say, and we're moving in that direction. I never expected that, say, 15 years ago. Gay rights, gay marriage, again, it wasn't clear a while ago that would happen. That's great. In those areas, people have been very protective and fought hard for good changes. But when it comes to economics, I see too much resentment and too much shrillness and just a belief that most, say, billionaires out there somehow didn't earn their wealth and it's our job to take it from them.

Yeah, which is becoming a huge theme right now, right? I mean, Elizabeth Warren just in the last week, she wants a billionaire's tax and she's upset that, who's the guy that got the yacht?

Oh, I forget, yeah.

You know, he got a yacht and she doesn't seem to understand that a lot of people were employed to build that yacht and all the resources that went into that yacht, but she thinks she has a moral right. That seems to be coming out of the left a lot these days. Cortez is doing this, that there's a moral right to take people's money who have too much.

I think a lot of it is just competition for the voters. So everyone wants either the nomination or more publicity, so they put forward crazy ideas to get traction on social media. The net result is to help Donald Trump, actually. I call it the Donald Trump reelection campaign. The more Democrats talk about taxes, it's ultimately a winning issue for Republicans. No matter what Democrats say, voters will never trust them more on taxes. It's like healthcare. No matter what your view is, when that's the topic, Democrats are more popular. Taxes, it's Republicans. So it's this weird paradox. Democrats pursuing their own individual interest and hurting their party.

Do you think that the, like when Elizabeth Warren or one of these people that always wanna tax more and more and more, Do you think they actually believe it's the right thing to do, or that they believe it's a cold, calculating political move, even though your argument is that it doesn't make sense politically? Like, I don't imagine them doing things that are against what they believe will work politically. I think you're probably right that it doesn't work, but it's hard to know if they, they know that it doesn't work.

It's a cold, calculating political move in my view. They don't quite think it's a disaster. They just think We need to move the debate in this direction about taxing rich people more. Talking about this for them will work in that way. So they have a broader notion of work than what an academic might have. And it more or less coincides with making a stink about it now.

Yeah, does it drive you crazy when politicians talk about economics?

No, I'm inured to that. I think I'm fairly detached as a personality type.

Yeah.

I don't like it, but at the end of the day, if it drove me crazy, I would be less effective. Communicating myself.

So who would you say, in the political sense, is talking about economics in a way that is roughly within a framework that you like? Is there anybody?

It's hard to think. So I'm pro-immigration, but with limits.

So that's a pretty centrist position.

But the center is pretty empty right now.

Okay, well, I'll go— let's lay it out for me and I'll see if we can figure out somebody here.

The liberal Republicans of an earlier time, perhaps. So Pro-immigration, definitely pro-free trade, which is running against a lot of the Republicans right now. Other than, say, climate change issues, I would deregulate most of our economy. I would have much more freedom to build in San Francisco or Manhattan. I would have radical reforms to K-12 education with much greater choice, just a lot more experimentation. I would never send people to jail for doing drugs unless they're selling drugs to minors. I'm not sure all drugs should be totally legal, but just kind of in a safe space off to the side. And I would welcome a not so polarized America where there's tolerance and a very strong center and some real belief about the importance of America's role in the world, but more about building alliances than being aggressive. I mean, those are my views.

Yeah, I mean, I'm there on everything you just said. And I do think that empty center that you just referenced is actually starting to get filled up with people that have had it with both sides, which is, I guess, heartening, but we've got our work cut out for us.

Yes.

Yeah.

I don't know who the candidate is, really.

Yeah.

You know, I write for Bloomberg, so I'm reluctant to say Mike Bloomberg of the Democrats, but he is in fact my favorite, with the caveat that I write for Bloomberg, so.

I appreciate the caveat. Otherwise, the YouTube commenters would have went bananas.

Yes.

You don't want to deal with their wrath. What do you think about just the two-party duopoly that we have right now and how hard it would be for, say, a more centrist candidate? Like even now, just in the last couple days, Howard Schultz of Starbucks is saying he may jump in as an independent and it sounds like he'd be a little bit more of a centrist Democrat, say, than the really far left progressives. But at the end of the day—

It's a futile endeavor. I believe in working through the parties. There's much about Donald Trump I disagree with, but he was effective. Because he decided not doing the Reform Party bid from the late '90s, but he would work through one of the two major parties.

Yeah, so on most of the issues that you talked about in terms of regulation and freeing the economy and things like that, you've gotta be pretty pleased with Trump.

On regulation, the administration has slowed the pace, but on carbon and environmental issues, I disagree with deregulation. I think we actually need to be tougher. So even there, that's a mixed record. Trump hasn't rolled back that much regulation. It's just hard to do. But the pace has been slowed. I'm happy about that. Yeah.

Is there a way, because our system is so huge and our federal government is so big, is there really a way to do a lot of this? I think people sort of hear the idea of let's roll back regulation, let's drain the swamp, all of these phrases that sound good, but then they get in office and they realize that this giant, federal monster that is just sucking money and employing all sorts of people that probably it shouldn't and all this, that it just doesn't change. It's just the system is sort of corroded.

Our best bet is to invent new sectors more quickly than they can be regulated. So let's say, for instance, that virtual reality were to really work and people would take to it. You could have schools within virtual reality. They would be unregulated, not out of any government tolerance, it's just No laws set up to really regulate virtual reality in any direct way. So parts of the tech sector have had a light hand of regulation, not through anyone's wisdom. They just started doing things no one had been expecting. And so there's a kind of race.

So do you believe, so you basically believe then that self-regulation within certain parameters does just happen. It just sort of happens itself.

I'm glad we let Facebook and Uber happen. And that no one had to ask permission. Do these companies sometimes make mistakes? Yes. Are they perfect? No. Are we better off having them? Absolutely. So if Uber had had to ask permission, imagine that. Oh, like 10 years from now we'll do a pilot plan where like maybe a fifth of the drivers in Seattle do ridesharing and most cities say no. And they just did it. I'm all for that.

Right, and it always becomes a giant government boondoggle anyway. If you look at New York City taxis, it used to cost about a million bucks just to get get one of those medallions, and then it's like, there's no competition, so.

I'm worried ridesharing will turn into that, but then there's always the new thing. And again, it's this kind of race where innovation has to outpace regulation. The nice thing about government regulators is they're a bit slow, right? They're very formalistic, it takes some time. Innovators can be very quick.

So is that the silver lining more than anything else? That's the silver lining. The regulators probably aren't that great, right?

They're mostly conscientious. I mean, they do the job they're told to do. There are countries with much worse regulation than the United States. We should appreciate what we have. But that said, if you look at, say, occupational licensing for barbers or beauticians or interior designers, in my opinion, none of that should exist. It should all simply disappear tomorrow.

So what would you say to the person who would say, well, wait a minute, what if I go to get my hair cut and this person hasn't been licensed by the state, now they stab me in the head with the scissor?

Well, murder's against the law, but I'm not sure the licensing stops that. The more competition there is—

You mean it's not just the license that's stopping people from stabbing people with scissors? Is that what you're saying?

There should be laws against scissor stabbing, in my humble opinion.

Yeah, so okay, so you talked a little bit about the tech side of this. Why is it that, it seems to me that the people that I know that are up in Silicon Valley, and the tech world in general, is very, very privately libertarian. These people wanna innovate, they want competition, they wanna do exactly what you're saying, stay ahead of the regulators, figure out new ways to do all sorts of things. But outwardly, these companies seem extremely left and extremely controlling and centralized.

Many tech companies are in California. A lot of highly educated California employees are very left-wing. Those employees pressure their companies. Also, a lot of tech companies have big contracts with the government, which puts them in somewhat of an awkward position. And the ideal stance for many companies, tech or not, is just not to be in politics. And I think most people in business would rather compete as a business or get a favor from the government. But the tech companies, one of the miraculous things about them is defense contracting aside, their core model has been to supply better products to users and not to curry favor with the state. And to me, that's highly admirable.

But are we entering an odd place where they clearly do have relationships with the government? At this point? Are we entering a phase where— I mean, this is where— this is the great debate right now in my world as a guy that's doing this on YouTube, is have these companies gotten so out of control that there is now a threat actually to the First Amendment because basically there is government involvement related to policing speech? And are they platforms or publishers? That sort of thing.

If I look at YouTube or if I look at Twitter, I think they have supported far more freedom of speech than they have hindered. And if you even ask, like, which set of views have been helped the most by YouTube and Twitter, I suspect on average it's a mix of, like, the right and some part of the radical left. But I don't think overall right-wing ideas— and that's not even the correct way to put it— but I don't think they've been harmed by these media. Quite the contrary. So I'm not as worked up about that issue as some of my friends are.

Yeah. But either way, you would— even if you saw more of a threat there, you would— Is there any situation where you ever believe the government should jump in and do something?

Any is a tricky word, but I feel at current margins, I would rather the government not regulate tech companies more.

Yeah, so just free 'em up and just keep— So you believe in human ingenuity more than anything else. I mean, I think that seems to be the—

Sure, enforce rule of law. I think the notion that a platform is not liable, say, for everything that platform is used for, as we set out in law in the 1990s, was a fantastic idea. It helped the internet grow as quickly as it did. That equity capital could fund new ventures without being obsessed with liability issues. No one even knew at the time what a smart thing that was to do. It's a genius of American government. Finally, we did it, kind of unintentionally.

Usually the good things are done unintentionally, I think.

Yeah, but, you know, tech companies are vulnerable. So people think Facebook has a lock and Young people don't necessarily want to be on Facebook. And there's always competition. So MySpace was once considered, you know, untouchable. They would rule social media forever. And American history is littered with the corpses of corporate giants that seemed untouchable and basically went under.

So if David can beat Goliath, then Dave can beat Google?

Yes. That's what you're telling me? Yes. All right.

I've got my work cut out for me. So I was on your website this morning, marginalrevolution.com, which I— first off, I love the name. But I want to get the tagline. "Totally right here, small steps towards a much better world." I thought that actually is pretty perfect for a way of looking at the world, that we need to fix things perhaps in the West with some small steps, with some marginal things on the outside. But it seems like there's a movement right now where people just wanna rip up everything as if nothing good has come out of the 200+ years of freedom that we've had here. Was that a little bit of why you—

Absolutely.

Came up with the tagline in the first place?

We need to start with where we are. It's not about designing society from scratch. And the West has the best heritage, the best ideas, most effective religion that I think our world has seen ever, and we should embrace and cherish those things and yes, modify them when appropriate. But the American Constitution is one of the great works of genius of mankind.

Yeah, so, How do we then, so what, let's say Bloomberg or somebody that's your guy, let's say.

But there's no one who's my guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but somebody who roughly holds these ideas is in office tomorrow. Now I know you don't wanna give too much power to the executive obviously because you're into the Constitution and all that. What does this look like?

Well, I think the presidency of Trump shows how little influence a president has. Trump is in most ways a weak president. Most of his policy agenda has not happened. The courts have overruled him, or Congress won't act. Now the Democrats control the House. So for me, the key is for ideas in broader society to change, to try to be like a personal role model for what you believe in. And just to have like your guy as president, your woman as president, there's no such thing. And if I were very happy about an election, I just wouldn't feel that good about it. I don't think it would matter that much. It's more about the broad sweep of history.

Yeah, so then is the key to that that we have to stop— I don't want people to become uninformed, obviously. We need to be informed. But the key might be stop this sort of endless obsession with politics right now. Does that strike you? It strikes me as dangerous that we've turned politics into the national pastime.

It's a blood sport now. And it's the way you take people down and insult people. So just the simple rule of how you treat people to their face or talk to them to their face that politics should be done by all those same rules. And just being genteel, I get that doesn't solve our national problems, but it stops some things from getting worse. And that's slipping away right now. Yeah.

What can we do? So you think it's just be nicer, sort of? At least—

Well, different people have different roles, right? So maybe some people, it is their role to be a kind of Paul Revere of sorts. But other people, you know, are role models and they should conduct civil intelligent conversations. And that is catching. I see that on the internet. So if you look at the best material on the internet, how smart it is, including a lot of podcasts and YouTube shows, compared to what people thought was possible in the age of network television, it's just astonishing, the intellectual level.

So I see right now, even sort of within my crew of intellectual dark web people, whatever this thing is, that there's sort of a split happening where there's a certain amount of people that think we have to, the institutions are changing, say academia and the media and New York Times and everybody else, that they're going through these massive changes and we're watching all sorts of layoffs all over journalism right now. And there's a split where it's like some people are just like, let it burn, it deserves to burn, it's time for it to burn. And then there's another version that's like, well, if we don't prop these things up, you know, who the hell knows what's gonna come on the other side. What do you think about that?

I would go back to this idea of small steps toward a much better world. Like, what can I do? So I can write on the internet, I can have my podcast series, and I don't have some big mega plan for what to do with the New York Times or the Washington Post. I'm genuinely not sure. Those outlets will have to evolve with competitive pressures in any case. I'm not wishing for the death of anything in particular. And I think the same set of people under different circumstances can do a much better or much worse job. So I root for institutions to succeed and not for their death. But again, I focus on the what's my comparative advantage, what do I see is missing at the margin, and really hone in on that like a laser.

Yeah, I mean, I like that and I think it's what I've tried to do.

It's what you're doing, I think, yeah. It's what I've tried to build here.

It's that I believe that Usually the things that I'm talking about here are the right set of ideas, and I don't mind having, you know, difference of opinion obviously with guests, but trying to keep it relatively civil. I'm worse at it on Twitter than I am in here. And hopefully people can start thinking for themselves.

But if I ask you like, you know, what should we do with the Rotary Club in Houston? I mean, you don't know, right?

Not specifically. You tell me.

Okay, I don't know either.

Well, that's an interesting point. What do you make of that, that everyone feels they have to have an opinion opinion on everything.

About everything.

Yeah, the second something happens, everyone knows everything about the nuclear deal in Iran. Everyone knows everything about what's going on in North Korea. And everyone knows everything about tax margins and everything else. It's crazy, actually.

One of the themes in my book Stubborn Attachments is on most issues, yes, you should do what you think is best, but the chance that you are exactly right is actually pretty low. And act and talk with that in mind.

So the first, I wanna get the first sentence right. The first sentence is growth is good.

Economic growth. Yeah. Personal growth too, but economic growth.

Yeah, well, in this sense, you were talking about economic growth, but in a way, you are talking about personal growth.

Sure.

When we talk about growth, so what does that mean beyond, okay, you can say the economy grew an extra percent this year, that sort of thing. Can you put that into some sort of more layman's terms— for the average person that isn't particularly interested in economics, why growth is the important thing that led off your book?

If you take a time period of like about 100 years and you had the American economy grow 1 percentage point lower over that time period, we would today have the national wealth of Mexico, not the United States. So in any given year, a percentage point of growth, like, maybe it's not that big a deal, but over time as it compounds It's the difference between riches and poverty. The ability to have a job where you're somewhat in control. The ability to have more scope for creative action in your life. The near certainty your children will not die when they're very young. Uh, to take care of your parents better, to have access to the best medicines, to be able to travel the world. All of these things, and people want different things. But wealthier societies do a much better job at giving us those things including sustaining democracy. So economic growth, in my view, is centrally important.

Why do you think so many people believe that that has not occurred here? Or something like, people don't want to accept— I see this at colleges all the time when I go to talk to colleges, and these kids think that they're oppressed and that something horrible is happening in the United States right now. And the only way that I've been able to break through to them, I always ask the same question, and I've had nobody argue with me. I say, does anyone in this in this room have it worse than their grandparents? And it has yet to happen where someone raises their hand.

Yes.

And now I'm sure it has happened where somebody's grandparents were super wealthy and lost it, but that would also be an argument sort of against leftist economics, 'cause it would show that you can lose a lot of wealth, which they would want because they don't want wealth to be accumulated. But why do you think this idea that somehow things haven't gotten consistently so much better, which there is so much empirical evidence of, why do you think that hasn't taken root, say, with younger people?

Some of it is myopia. Some of it, of course, is that younger people have not been on this earth for very long. Some of it is we have taught too much egalitarianism. Some of it is, I think, our society perhaps—

Wait, can you explain what you mean by that?

Egalitarianism is the notion that if one person has something and the other doesn't, that maybe that's automatically wrong. Even if the other person's pretty well off. Are well off by world historical standards. And I think that's very often a harmful ideology. I would do more to teach like win-win plus economic growth types of thinking. That America is a more secular society. I think it just creates a vacuum. I'm not myself religious, but I think religion plays an important role in giving us a framework. And when that framework is taken away, a lot of ideas enter the vacuum that can be harmful.

Do you see that happening right now, I do. Yeah, I definitely see that, and I say that as someone that's not particularly religious.

And especially on the left, which is less religious than the right.

So is that what's happening, that they've sort of traded religious thought or, you know, an unmoved mover or some sort of beginning of this whole thing, they've traded it in for a series of ideas that are just about, I mean, it sounds cliché, but how they feel now.

Not enough about a higher purpose of some kind. And one can have a purely secular vision of that higher purpose, which is how I see myself. But religion is a very easy, persuasive way for many people to get there. And we are secularizing finally in this country. That's one of my greatest concerns.

Is that funny for you as a secular person?

Absolutely, because I've never been religious. My parents were not religious. But when I look at the actual data— and also religious people tend to have more children I believe in a populous America that is not like a tiny country compared to India and China. And it's one reason why I would like to make immigration work better and take in more immigrants. I think we should be a strong country of 500 million, 600 million, if China and India are gonna be over a billion.

So I had, a couple weeks ago, I had Heather MacDonald in here, who you're probably familiar with. Sure. She talks about being a secular conservative. Now I know you're a Christian. 'cause you're a small L libertarian, if we're going with labels. But do you think there is room on the right for a secular movement to grow? 'Cause I think that would be pretty powerful, and I see some seeds of it actually happening right now. I know libertarians generally don't care what your belief—

Tend to be secular, yeah. I think there will have to be, right, in a secular society. So I think there's right now more intellectual ferment on the right. It strikes me, especially on Twitter, but not only. How much left-wingers attack each other. You know, people who support different candidates. This person's terrible. This one is evil. Joe Biden did this. I think that's much worse on the left now than on the right. And it's partly because they have fewer ideas to talk about. And I find to bring up an unusual idea, you will get further on the right currently than on the left. And that's actually a positive sign.

So what do you make of that? That positive sign because if you, I mean, I think you know, well, I know you know, you know a bit about my political evolution. I mean, if you would have asked me 5 years ago that most of the people that I agree with would be libertarians and conservatives, or at the very least, even though I'm still pro-choice and I know some of them aren't thrilled with gay marriage and I'm against the death penalty and a whole bunch of other things, that these people would be extremely opening, open to always sitting down with me and on the other side, there's almost nothing left.

It's a reason to be optimistic. If you look, say, at the 1960s, '70s, people on the right, I think, were more open or maybe even more talented than on the left. And they were at that time losing, but you then have '80s and '90s where some of the classical liberal ideas become much more powerful, communism falls. And then I think at some point in the '90s, there's actually a lot more talent and openness on the left.

Mm-hmm.

And the right sulcifies. Well, we beat communism, what do we do now?

Well, that's when they went after video games, right? Yes, and that was a big mistake. I mean, Lieberman as a Republican is attacking video games and McCain, and it's like, what?

And they embrace too many politicians who are intolerant or telling lies or just being irresponsible, and a lot of the right is still in that rut. But I think if you look at intellectual discourse, it's better on the right. That may well again be a historical leading indicator of change. Maybe not soon, but 20 years from now, I think there'll be a payoff.

Yeah, God, I, well, I think it's happening. I actually do think it's happening right now.

But in ugly, twisted, painful ways, right? It's never easy or pleasant.

Yeah, do you sense we're sort of in the death throes of something right now? That between the institutions kind of wavering and with all the free speech stuff on campus and just so much tension. You've mentioned social media a couple of times, that there's so many things happening at once. The way this is all speeding up faster and faster.

And we're reorganizing discourse around the internet, which is a good thing and will be a very good thing, but it's extremely painful for many people. I think that's one of the big changes going on. I actually think America is depolarizing. I'm not saying that's a pleasant process, but if you go to someone in Congress, like, "What do you think about free trade?" and you hear their opinion, right now you can't necessarily tell if they're a Republican or a Democrat. Or someone who wants to increase Social Security, government spending. They could be a Republican or a Democrat. And that wasn't the case in 2011 or 2013. So what people are calling polarization is the stakes are higher, what is possible through politics is becoming greater and grander, so there's more hatred, more mutual recrimination. But people are just all over the map in terms of what they believe.

Yeah, well, I do think it's, It's a rich ground for ideas right now.

But it's higher risk too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it could spin out of control.

Correct.

I guess podcast hosts have a lot of responsibility right now.

Well, we all do. Some sense of personal mission in the old standard American Protestant sense, even if you're totally secular, to take that notion of a personal mission upon yourself and go and do it, to me is just critically important.

Isn't that it? Like, to me, that's it. It's your life, grab it, go with it. Demand as much freedom as you can possibly pilfer out of this world and take it. And yet that message right now for young people, unfortunately, it's not catching on the way it should. Or maybe it is, to your point.

Yeah, but also understand we have some origins as a Puritan nation. I'm not saying be a Puritan, not at all. But that has given America a cultural strength and ability to support people who do this. In terms of openness and resources and the culture surrounding you, how much encouragement you will find, how big an audience you can build. So early things like blogging, now podcasting, just how American those are we take for granted. But it's a deep, fundamentally important truth that Americans, or sometimes Canadians, Jordan Peterson, have been the leaders in this area. I don't think we appreciate enough.

Yeah, is anyone else doing it better than America? Is anyone else doing it better? Doing basics of freedom and liberty and the type of economics that you're talking about? Is anyone doing it better?

Better is a tricky word. I think Australia and Canada as countries are in pretty good shape. Not with respect to political liberty, but in many areas. I'm a fan of Singapore. They have done economic policy very, very well and they have become overall freer than they used to be. You know, Western Europe in some ways has a wonderful lifestyle, but for me it's somewhat deadening and not that innovative. But for cultivating like quality of consumption and how to enjoy leisure, not really my thing in many ways, but they're definitely ahead of us and we should like value that and learn something from it.

What are some of the economic ideas or principles that we're not paying attention to that we should? If you're There's people talking about UBI now, there's people talking about all this stuff with automation. I mean, what should we be, if we're looking at the future now, what are things that we should be focusing on, learning about?

What I'm seeing is people forgetting a lot of basics. So UBI, I find a tempting idea, but I don't favor it.

Can you steelman it for those that don't know what UBI is?

Universal basic income. The notion, there's different versions of the scheme, but government sends everyone money to support them as a kind of social welfare.

So just like a baseline everyone's got and—

Yes.

Go from there.

Now I believe in some kind of baseline. So if you're disabled, I believe you should receive a significant baseline. If you need assistance, I think for the most part we should pay people to work, not pay them not to work. So we have the Earned Income Tax Credit. If you work and you're poor, the government pays you extra money. I think that has worked quite well. It attracts a better quality of immigrant. When you pay people to work rather than paying them not to work. Too much of Western Europe pays people not to work. So the forms of aid we give, they are cultural symbols and they are potent. And the idea that it is automatic and eternal, that you just get cash, it's telling people the main thing of importance in life is cash and you will get it no matter what. It's the wrong message to send.

And isn't it stealing the exact— idea that you've been talking about for the last half hour, which is sort of you've got to innovate in life. It's stealing that idea from the individual, right? We're just going to give you something, right? If you don't do anything, you'll be able to sustain at the bottom of the tower forever, even though obviously they're always going to want more and more for that, right?

That's right.

It's going to get UBI day one, and then it's going to be like that 3 years later. Correct.

But that said, we should find ways of helping the needy. I'm all for that. What's the right way to do it? I don't think it's UBI.

Yeah, what else that people should be thinking about that's popping up right now? Like when you're at economics conferences and things and people are talking about what's going on in the future, what should we be thinking about?

I'm not sure how to fix climate change. I think it's a very important issue. I very much favor nuclear power. I hope nuclear fuel—

Oh wait, let's do one at a time. So climate change, do you think this could be, I see a movement now, it's coming from the right actually.

Yes.

Where there are people saying there are ways to tackle this that could be done through private enterprise and not purely through the government. I know you said you want some regulation. That is a place where you see the government doing something related to the environment, right? But do you see some sort of partnership there, perhaps?

You also need to free up energy competition. So say you try to build wind turbines in different parts of America. Homeowners say, "Not near my house," right? There's a kind of NIMBY mentality. That should be much easier. I know it doesn't always look pretty. You drive from LA to Palm Springs, you see all the wind turbines. But it is cheap, clean, green energy, and if you really think climate change is a problem, you should jump on board. Nuclear energy, in my opinion, can be safe. France, Sweden have done it just fine. I'm optimistic about the prospects for nuclear fusion, which can be safer yet than nuclear fission.

And this is a place where you think the government should be leading, correct?

Or at least— Leading is a tricky word.

Yeah, yeah.

For nuclear power to operate, I do think nuclear plant operators need a special kind of liability insurance, which we've provided under the Price-Anderson Act, and that has a role for government. And I'm fine by that. I think it's much better than dealing with all of the secondary costs of higher air pollution. So I don't think it can be laissez-faire, But also you have to free up the market so entrepreneurs can do this, right?

Do you like— like, I've sat down here with a couple, uh, ANCAP people that really just want to, you know, disassemble the government altogether and enter their Mad Max phase. I really like the idea intellectually. Like, I like seeing how far you can take an intellectual argument, how much government could disappear. Do you like entertaining those ideas just purely for just purely for your mind, if not for practicality?

It's very important to entertain them or learn something from them. But again, we have to start from where we're at. There's a lot of things government does that probably they're impossible to undo, even if they're unwise. Americans—

Well, that's why I was asking you before that we have this machine that is so big that it's not like you should just come in and—

Something like Social Security, you may not have designed it from scratch the way we have it. But I'm not sure there's a way to back out and undo it all, because you're caught in a cycle where people have been promised payments, right?

Yeah.

So maybe, you know, just live with that one and try to fix some other things. Yeah.

I'm sort of all over the place here, but what do you think about crypto related to all this and a changing economy?

I think there's a 20% chance crypto will pay off big time, but not now, maybe in 20, 30 years from now. Just the way quantum mechanics at the time seemed weird, And much later it became essential for computers. But right now it seems to me the crypto revolution is failing. What was promised has not really come to us. I'm not upset that the price of Bitcoin is low. I see a lot of potential for the notion of self-executing market contracts in a crypto system. I just don't see that right now consumers have problems where they're clamoring for this as the solution. I could see us getting there.

Right, so in a bizarre way, If the problems of today exacerbate, then maybe that funnels this all to crypto answers.

And also crypto may need more infrastructure. So you look at a possible use of crypto, well, verifying individual identities. Possibly crypto is much better at that than you're with someone on the phone and they say, what are the last 4 digits of your social? Right, that's a crazy system.

But for crypto, right, we've just accepted that, we're giving it to all sorts to strangers, most likely in Asia.

Right.

Every time we pick up the phone.

Crazy, but it doesn't mean you can fix it quickly just by having crypto now. There's a whole system built that way with payments companies and government bureaus, and your personal data is encoded with your Social Security number, your tax returns. Even if crypto is the answer there, it will be such an awkward roundabout route. Just like for cars to be a big deal, well, you needed roads, you needed service stations, you You needed spare parts. It took about 40 years for us to put together, like, the network of cars to revolutionize the world. So I think a lot of people are overpromising crypto in the short run. And there is a very real chance it just dies out and doesn't work. But I don't think it's all some fraud or bubble. There's real potential there. We don't yet know if it can work. The rest of the infrastructure is not in place. Probably in the short run it will fail. But I still hold out hope.

I have to say, there's a certain pleasantness to everything you're talking about because you're sort of just telling people to take a breath for a second, right? I mean, that sort of economically, but personally, everything else, just kind of slow down a little bit.

For all of our problems, the world as a whole has never been in better shape than it is today, 2019. Never ever. So just keep that in mind. And, you know, gratitude is good for your personal development, like people who keep gratitude journals. It seems they're happier, they're more productive. My gratitude journal, I guess, is my blog in a funny way, or podcasts. But try to have some version of a gratitude journal in your life.

Do you think as an interviewer that you actually do learn every week? I think one of the things I'm most— I have most gratitude for is that I genuinely learn every week. And I forget that the average person doesn't get to learn every week, or maybe doesn't take time to learn every week. You could learn every week, but I mean, I sit across incredible people all the time, and it's like, wow, I learned something, or at least I sat with someone who knows something that I don't know. It's incredible. I mean, you get that same opportunity. We've had many of the same guests on over the years.

Prepping for interviews is right now the main way I learn, but most people now also have this chance to learn every week—podcasts, Yeah, other forms of the internet. Cable TV is much better than television used to be. Netflix. Yeah, so there's a lot more access for learning.

How do you decide how much prep you're supposed to do? Because I find sometimes occasionally I want to know a little bit less because I find that it'll allow me to explore during the interview more. Sometimes I need to know a lot of very specific factual information or chronological information. When, when I did your show, I was truly impressed how deep you had dug into my past and you asked me things that nobody had ever asked me before.

I go crazy overprepping. So for Agnes Callard, I read Plato's Symposium 5 times in a row. That's a lot of prep. Emily Wilson, she just retranslated Homer's Odyssey. I'll have read that 3 times. And she did Seneca's plays, and she wrote a biography of Seneca, and wrote a book on overliving, and a book about the death of Socrates. And I'll read all of those and reread some of the underlying texts. And her sister wrote a book on the history of the fork, which I've already read, and has some other books on food. I'm gonna read some of the books of her sister.

There's a whole book on the history of the fork?

And it's a wonderful book. It's called Consider the Fork. Forks are important.

They're a big innovation. I thought you meant maybe that's an economic term, the fork.

No, not crypto fork. I mean the fork. Dinner table fork. The literal fork. Wow. Yeah, so people's families, people have, you know, a sibling or a spouse who've done things, I figure, well, of course the person has thought about this, and they probably have interesting ideas about it that are not out there anywhere. Yeah.

So you'd rather talk about ideas more than anything?

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day— that's when I see all these people fighting over this policy, that policy. It bores me to no end at this point. It doesn't seem— it seems meaningless.

Overvalue it. It's overreacting to the most recent signal, and those ideas which are, you know, eternal will be with us and actually be more influential.

Yeah, so that's an interesting segue actually to college campuses because you're teaching economics. First off, has economics, at least from your position, been infected by a lot of what we're seeing in the wider sense on college campuses related to free speech, shouting down speakers? Because even if— I find this all the time— if People will come up to me after events and they'll say, you know, I wanna tell my boss or something, or my spouse, that I'm for low taxes, but if I say that, they're gonna say I'm racist. I mean, really crazy stuff. So as someone that takes the small L libertarian approach on this, do you find that some of these ideas are infecting— Not so much.

Economics is a much healthier field. It has a tradition of being, maybe more conservative isn't the right word, but more market-oriented. A lot of people disagree with me. So economists, I think, register as about 80% Democratic, but they tend to be more conservative Democrats. And I don't find that much just outright bias when I say things. I feel mostly accepted and indeed even welcome.

Yeah, now I know George Mason obviously is a certain specific thing.

But in general, when I visit other campuses, I just spoke at University of Michigan. To the philosophy department, but I spoke to them about economics. I'm going to UChicago. I don't expect any trouble at all. I don't think I'll say anything incendiary either. Just like my version of common sense. Right. Here's why you should have a more positive view of the world. Here's what we can do. Here are the small steps toward a much better world that we should embrace. I think it's gonna go fine.

Sounds pretty hate-speechy to me. Well, we'll see. I suppose we'll— What would you say is the best way to deal then? With what's going on on campuses, even if you're not getting it and maybe it's not happening directly in economics departments right now? I mean, we're seeing it leak into biology departments when we're talking about gender and all sorts of other things. What do you think the best way to push against this sort of corroding of academic freedom?

If I look at my own school, George Mason, we have a very good record in this regard. We have the highest free speech rating from FIRE, a group you know about. And our school, I think, has about more immigrant students or children of immigrants than any other major university in America. And their attitude is so different. They want to get an education to learn something and to make a good living, and they're very practically oriented. A lot of them are very curious. And to them, this is— political correctness is often a form of nonsense, and it seems to me a disease of kind of rich white kid schools. So I think we need to be more cosmopolitan and just less provincial. America has a long history of being provincial, and this is the new form of American provincialism.

Hmm. All right, so let's back up a little bit, 'cause you just mentioned immigration, but we started there before. Yeah. So lay out what a sensible immigration plan actually looks like.

I think that if you have a plausible graduate degree from a real institution, including from most other nations, you should be able to get a green card here. I think we should have completely free immigration from Canada. I would say we should have open borders with any country that has a more generous welfare state than we do. 'Cause then those people will not be coming for welfare. They'll be coming here to work. And I get you need to transition to that over time. And then I would still let in people from poorer countries. You need some of what is called unskilled labor. It's not actually unskilled, in fact, but the more skilled people you have, they need to work with people who can ease the burden of their time. So you have working women and they want nannies, or, that's fine. So I think we could increase both skilled and unskilled immigration in this country. We've done a pretty good job assimilating immigrants. Better than anyone in the history of the world, I would argue. Absolutely, so—

Is there anyone that's even close? I mean, I guess Canada perhaps, or—

They do a good job accepting immigrants, but they assimilate them much less. So they have a tradition, like, you know, Quebec is separate and maybe always will be separate. So they just let it be separate. So if you're a Sikh, Chinese, you move to Canada, maybe you'll stay separate. It works well. It's very peaceful. But they assimilate much less. I actually prefer assimilation, but that's okay.

So what do we do with the— what do they always say, it's 12 million people that are here illegally? Illegally right now. How do we fix this then?

I would cut a deal. I think they should be able to stay. And if the restrictionists, you know, want more wall for that, it's actually a deal I would do. I'm opposed to the wall. But, you know, the wall will not stop people. Most people who come, come by overstaying their visas. The net flow from Mexico has actually been negative by a small amount for a few years. I think Central America is a problem. The notion that you can be, say, from Honduras, and simply by virtue of the fact that you made it to the border, claim refugee status because, you know, there's a drug gang in your pueblo, I think that's a bad system. I do favor some version of refugee status. My wife was a refugee from Soviet Union, so I appreciate this. But just because, you know, things are bad in my country, I'm a refugee because I'm close to the U.S. and I made it to the border, I think it's a very bad system, it's very bad incentives, and it's overwhelming our court system. So some of what Trump says about that is true. Again, my goal is to find a way of taking more of those people in an orderly manner, but to encourage just rushing for the border, I do think we need to change that.

Yeah, well that's why it really does seem we have a match made in hell right now. Right. 'Cause you've got Trump wanting, okay, he wants a wall, and I don't think a wall is, I actually pretty much agree with what you said, I don't think a wall is inherently right. It may not actually work, and maybe there's all sorts of other ways to deal with it, but if the option, if the other option that people see is that you've got people screaming for open borders, then I don't blame all the people that want the wall.

And we have a wall right now.

Right, and if that's the way the argument's gonna be framed.

Right, so to enforce immigration more properly but let in many more people would be my preferred solution.

So when you say cut a deal on the people here, so if let's say you're throwing, the Republicans the idea that you're gonna get some more of a wall or something? What's the deal on the other side? That what, these people—

The Dreamers get to stay and we adjust the quotas upward and say tech companies can hire more skilled people on work visas. And we also redo NAFTA so Canadians have the right to simply come here. You might wanna limit their ability to claim welfare. I'm fine with that. And over time, think about with what other countries can we have free movement. The European Union has does this, has done this within the European Union. I get that there's a political backlash. I'm not sure we should have open borders with Bulgaria and Romania. I understand that probably doesn't work.

We've also got a, you know, an ocean.

Sure, but the idea that 15 years from now we could have open borders with France and Germany, to me we should be working toward that. I understand it's not easy.

So I think when people hear the phrase open borders, they think that means that you can automatically come here and become a citizen. But that's not what you'd be calling for, right?

Well, work rights, but we have a rapid path to citizenship, which I favor. It's one of the things that makes us good at assimilation. And you know, both political parties at different points in the past, they always go crazy like, oh, all these people are gonna come, they're gonna vote for the other party. I don't think we really know 20 years from now. What immigrants are gonna vote for or why. So, you know, Asian Americans, will they remain as heavily Democratic as they are right now? I don't know.

I don't think so. That one's gotta be changing, just the pure economics of it.

Same with Latinos. I just say it's an open question. So the partisan fear that like the they who come will be on the other side, I think we just need to relax a bit on that.

Yeah. Are there any topics that you shy away from talking about? About? Because I'm—

you have to keep on asking.

I guess I can keep on asking because I've got a whole lot— I haven't even looked at this, but I've got a whole lot here about economics. Okay. But it seems very obvious to me that through an economic lens of looking at things the way you do, that you really could talk about anything.

But also, I interview people a lot, as you do, and I'm used to talking about many topics.

So what else is interesting to you right now that maybe isn't purely within an economic lens or even a political lens?

What What's sort of piquing your interest these days besides forks? The question of how to find more talent in the world. So I think there's a relative surfeit of capital relative to talented laborers. My view of the world is if you have an incredibly talented person who is good at execution, that person can get so much done. The world as a whole is underexplored from this point of view. So you go to Nigeria, how many talented people are there? Well, they're about as talented as United States. They just don't have the opportunities. Look at how much talent has come from India in the last 20 years, right? China, phenomenal amount. And so 40, 50 years, people like that didn't really have a chance. Yeah. So how is it, say you were to go to Nigeria and try to mobilize Nigerian talent, what should you look for? What should you do? What kind of cultural training is needed? What ought to change in Nigeria? How can we recruit that talent? That's maybe the biggest question in the world today, and we're not good at it, and we don't really know what we're doing.

So I think what's keeping the twinkle in your eye actually is the fact that technology has led us to be able to explore all these ideas right now.

Absolutely. Yeah. And talk to people about them. Yeah.

That's pretty cool. It is. Yeah, I guess we are doing something fun.

And these other countries are, except maybe North Korea, but they're connected to the internet. Yeah. So you go to a random place in Africa, or I was just in rural Ecuador. A guy was driving me around and I asked him, "Do you listen to YouTube?" He's a Quechua-speaking fellow. I asked him in Spanish. He's like, "Of course." I went to my Ethiopian travel guide in Lalibela. I asked him, "Do you listen to YouTube?" He's like, "Of course." I say, "What do you listen to?" He said, "I'm a big fan of Armenian church history." And he can speak articulately about movements in the Armenian Christian church in medieval times because that's what he does on YouTube. A guy in rural Ethiopia. That's phenomenal. People don't get how much of that is there, what a difference it's going to make. A lot of people outside, "Oh, YouTube, that's like cat videos." Well, yes, there's those too. Some are pretty good, actually. But it's also medieval Armenian church history in rural Ethiopia. Yeah. Like, how can you not be excited by that?

And just the amount of people that are thirsty for, for a little of this.

That's right.

A little of this.

Yeah. Pretty great. And they're basically all smarter than the mainstream used to think. And the innovators who just talk to them and try to be like as smart as they can be, they're attracting those audiences. My goodness, that's exciting. Yeah.

I don't know how to end an interview better than that with a little excitement. That's pretty good. It is. You feel good about it? I do. How'd I do as an interviewer? Wonderful. You did fine as a guest.

Thank you very much.

For more on Tyler, check out his website, marginalrevolution.com.