Ep. 32 Tyler Cowen on the complacent campus

Freedom of speech.

Fundamental rights.

Freedom of conscience. Academic freedom.

Freedom of press.

And the right to listen.

You're listening to So to Speak, the free speech podcast, brought to you by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Hello again, I am Niko Perino, and this is So to Speak, the free speech podcast, where every other week we're taking an uncensored look at the world of free expression through personal stories and candid conversations. 2 weeks ago, I was joined on this podcast by my FIRE colleagues, Will, Sam, and Joe, to discuss emerging trends surrounding free speech on campus. We covered a lot of ground on that show, but one thing we didn't consider is the possibility that there is a growing complacency among Americans that serves as a sort of secret engine driving much of the recent campus discord, and that helps explain concerning student attitudes toward free speech. Our guest on today's show recently wrote a book that makes this argument. He contends that college campuses are home to the most complacent among us, and that this is a fact that can't be ignored if we want to understand the free speech on campus debate. Tyler Cowen is our guest today. He's an economics professor at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center. In February, he published the book The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream, and in it he theorizes that the mindset modern comforts that make many of us Americans enjoy life so much have sapped our sense of urgency and made us weary of change and challenges. He says we are increasingly making decisions that, while at first blush seem like they are in our best interest— the decisions, of course, are rational and benefit us socially and financially on the individual level— however, if we observe how these decisions play out at the macro or societal level we see significant consequences. For example, you might think we live in an age of great innovation and entrepreneurship, but according to Professor Cowen, if you look at the data, the rate of startups forming has trended lower and lower each decade since the 1980s. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Google are the exception, not the rule. What's more, established older companies are sitting on stockpiles of money rather than pursuing new grand projects. The stasis or stagnation in the economy, works for those within the established companies, argues Professor Cowen. But the slowing rates of entrepreneurship denies the sort of creative destruction necessary for innovation and dramatic rises in GDP and the standards of living. Also consider how online services like Match.com and eHarmony are connecting many of us with the perfect mate. Good on the individual level, right? Sure, we can see more easily now how we can find partners that are just like us, but on the macro level, Professor Cowen argues this generates more power couples, which boosts income inequality and increases segregation in a ton of different ways. And what about polarization, which many see as a big driver of the increased discord on and off campus? Professor Cowen sees this as the result of more of the aforementioned sorting or matching. Which, as he writes in the book, makes liberal areas more liberal and conservative areas more conservative. We can increasingly find comfort now in gathering our news from outlets that confirm our biases, and we can live in neighborhoods that look like us and share our values. Again, this is all well and good on the individual level, but this better sorting manifests itself, for example, in who we elect to Congress and makes it harder to find compromise in an environment of more contentious and polarized debate. Tyler Cowen says the truth is that peace and high incomes tend to drain the restlessness out of us, that as a result, he wonders how much we are slowing down, digging ourselves in, and investing in stability. Importantly, he spends a significant portion of his book explaining how complacency manifests itself on our college campuses, and that's of course what I wanted to focus on during today's conversation. To help me explore that angle of the story, I enlisted the help of recurring, so to speak, guest FIRE president and CEO Greg Lukianoff, who kindly took a break from writing his new book to travel to George Mason's campus in Arlington, Virginia to interview Professor Cowen with me last month. Professor Cowen is a Renaissance man whose area of expertise isn't confined just to economics, as anyone who reads his blog Marginal Revolution knows. Notably, he's an expert foodie who wrote a book entitled An Economist Gets Lunch, and he publishes an extremely popular dining guide called Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide. So Greg, being a foodie himself, took the opportunity this podcast provided to quiz Cowen on food. So in addition to complacency and free speech, of course, you will also get Mexican barbecue and Korean fried chicken. I mean figuratively, of course. Now that I have you all hungry, I shall censor myself and present George Mason University Professor Tyler Cowen.

All right, Professor Cowen, thank you for joining Greg and I on the show today.

My pleasure.

So you've written the book The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. And in it you say you've coined the phrase the complacent class to describe the growing number of people in our society who accept, welcome, and even enforce a resistance to things new, different, or challenging. And you say that most Americans don't like change very much unless it's on the terms that they can manage and control. And that now we have the resources and the technology to manage our lives on this basis more and more.

And you argue this is to the country's long-term collective detriment.

You also say that we've lost our Pioneer spirit reflected in rates of entrepreneurship, innovation, economic mobility, our standard of living, where we choose to live, who we choose to marry, how often we change jobs, how we use the internet. Now this is a free speech podcast hosted by an organization that does free speech in higher education. You yourself are a professor, so we're gonna ask you some questions about how this thesis plays out in the university context. And I know Greg has a million other things he wants to ask you about. You say in your book that campuses today are among the segments of American society where the complacent class exercises its strongest influences. And as I said, you're a professor, so presumably you know a little bit about this thing. Why do you believe campuses are home to the most complacent of the complacent?

There's a high degree of political homogeneity on campuses, but I think also there's a great deal of data that when professors get tenure, Their behavior does not change. They don't take more risks. Arguably, they take fewer risks. And I find this stunning. You're given what is literally the greatest job ever in the history of mankind, even if it's a relatively low salary, and all they do with it is more of the same. And this to me suggests there's something fundamentally wrong with the filter mechanisms, because why is it that people's behavior doesn't change when their incentives change? Well, it has to be the filters that determine who gets to be a tenured professor, so select for certain kinds of behaviors and personality types and sets of views, that even when the incentives flip, you still get same basic results. That to me is shocking, startling, and we ought to think about it more closely.

Do you think— I'm assuming you're a tenured professor yourself.

I'm a tenured professor, and I've been so for a long time.

And do you think it's affected your willingness to go out there and explore controversial ideas at all?

I hope.

I've been a kind of maniac in my career. So one thing I did a long time ago was to just start working on a field called cultural economics, which at the time didn't exist. But then after that, I devoted myself essentially full-time to blogging and then writing for the New York Times and now doing podcasts, not just this one, but my own series. And I mean, those are not chances in the sense that if you have tenure, yes, it's safe, but they're chances relative to what other tenured people have done. And I've tried to keep some kind of cutting edge. We're doing this podcast from a studio where I make free online videos and don't get paid anything for, but I view it as part of my personal mission in this, like, deep American Protestant sense to do something for the rest of the world. But it's tough because you're in an environment where the default is an extreme degree of complacency.

And do you see that before professors or lecturers get tenure? If they're on a tenure-track position, I walked in here, we're in Mercatus today, and I noticed that you share a building with the Institute for Humane Studies, which trains people to enter academia or supports them when they enter academia. What are the concerns that they're expressing on the path toward tenure?

I wouldn't speak for them, but I can tell you my own view. I think a lot of the flipping goes on in graduate school. That people want to become academics because they're interested in some topic, like how does the economy work, or what did the American Revolution really mean, or, you know, do people have free will and what can we learn from neuroscience about this. They're interested in and excited by big questions, which is great. But then they get into the incentive structure, which encourages specialization. And I feel that's probably the most extreme bias we have in the system. It's not political.. It's just people being careerists and wanting to do well, and they should want to do well, and they should want to do science, and that does involve a lot of specialization. But somehow there's no intermediate point, and you can have either, you know, too little or too much specialization, and we've ended up with too much, and we're stuck in that. But I think of graduate school, the first 2 years, as for a lot of people where that tipping point occurs.

What about for the students themselves? You write in your book, millennials are are too part of the complacent class, and they are also its finest product and its most committed ideological carriers. Do you see complacency among your students as well?

Well, I should stress, my own university, George Mason, in my opinion, is one of the least complacent in the United States.

Also a green light institution by FIRE's rating of speech codes.

That's correct, and I thank you for that, and I can say my school has always treated me very well., and I've never felt any undue pressure here or had problems. And I'm not just saying that, quote unquote. It is true, and one can look at my record, I think, and see that. But what's special about George Mason is how many of our students are immigrants or children of immigrants. And my general view about this country is immigrants are our least complacent class. They take more chances. They start businesses at higher rates. They're often of different skin color, different religion, different culture, different whatever. Even if they're from Canada and they realize you come here to make and build some new life for yourself, that's the default assumption. So they're very willing to change. There's no expectation things will be handed to them on a silver platter. So I'm working at the school that I think it was rated second or third for most international school in the country. So it's like going to the United Nations and people want good jobs and they're upwardly mobile.. And it's not the traditional environment that sometimes is described as a bunch of spoiled rich white kids. I wouldn't myself call it that, but just to refer to the cliché, that's not what George Mason is about. It's a wonderful place. People will debate anything on campus, including like, should women wear the veil? And this will be done with openness and seriousness. And it's very diverse, and there's not one political spectrum but dozens. And it's one reason why I'm very happy being here. But that said, at many of the more expensive schools, that is those filled with spoiled rich white kids, things are not the way they are in Fairfax and Arlington, Virginia.

Yeah. You see the language and you talk a lot about— and Greg, feel free to jump in whenever you want. I know you're itching for it.

Sure.

Yeah, I'm itching for it. But you talk a lot about protests in your book and how the nature of protests has changed.

I wanted to ask that one. There's a lot about free speech in it and it was actually in some ways I was really psyched to see someone who wasn't a lawyer looking at how much we sort of tamed free speech primarily through time, place, and manner restrictions. But can you talk more about what you talk about in the book?

Well, most discussions of free speech today, they center around the First Amendment, and that's very important, but I feel that's been covered plenty by other people including FIRE. So I focused on the right of public assembly, which has not been taken away by any means, but it's been so bureaucratized. There are so many permits you need. There are so many reasons for telling people no. There are so many NIMBY forces, local homeowners, "Oh, we don't want the protest here," or "There's a national security reason we can't do this on the Washington DC." Can you define NIMBY for our listeners? Not in my backyard is NIMBY. And it's not just backyard, it's like not in the backyard, 3 backyards over, or 17 backyards over from that. So there are many fewer protests. If you imagine today's politics, no matter what you think of Trump, existing in say the late 1960s, right now every week there would be massive pro-impeachment marches. Whether or not you want to impeach him, it simply would be a fact of life and they would be significant and have force and be on the evening news all the time. And the first week or two there were some events. There's still a bit of a trickle, but it's remarkable what to some people is such an inflammatory president and then the response being so pacifist, really. So passive. And I think that's getting at this underlying complacency in American life. People can't imagine that they could change things so much. They do plenty on social media, which I view as mostly ineffective. The idea that physical space is the medium that really matters, and you get out there and do something and signal, has vanished from our minds. And the general notion that we can't imagine a future so much better than the present we have The way we imagine a better future is to take a city and gentrify it, which is fine. I'm all for that. But like, that's it. Compare that to 1950s utopian science fiction and building roads to the moon and jetpacks and flying cars and whatever else. And we're like, oh, we gentrify cities and oh, there's a new Laotian restaurant on this corner, which I'm a fan of, but that's the whole vision. Very strange, and it shows up in our politics.

So in preparation for this, I read 4 of your books and I read The Great Stagnation, Average Is Over, Lunch, what is it?

An Economist Gets Lunch.

An Economist Gets Lunch. And I hope I don't offend you by saying this, but do you consider yourself a pessimist?

Well, relative to what?

That's exactly right.

I'm a pessimist relative to the people who think nothing is wrong. And most libertarians consider me a pessimist, but I actually think I'm an extreme optimist. That I have a framework that recognizes the problems and also sees them as manageable. So relative to reality, I'm an extreme optimist. But of course the pessimist always says that.

I describe myself as a Russian optimist. That basically means I expect really horrible things to happen and I'm often pleasantly surprised.

That's my wife, who grew up in Moscow.

Actually, I wanted to ask you about that too. Did I get it right that you met her through Match.com?

Correct. 14 years ago.

That's great. And she's politically liberal, right?

I wouldn't call her liberal. I mean, liberal's a tricky word. For one thing, it can mean classical liberal or modern. Sure. If you took, you know, a person from the Soviet Union who hated communism and was Jewish and who felt uncomfortable with rural America and guns and gave them a set of views, that's her.

That sounds like my dad.

I'm not sure exactly what to call it.

Yep.

A lot of her friends are what you might call liberals, but that's not the best description of her either. And she's become a federalist now that Trump has been elected. And she never ever was in the past. She used to think, oh, federalism, it's absurd. Why do we have it? I just would say, you wait. You're not gonna believe me now, you wait.

It's been funny watching the discussion of California seceding and watch what people really mean by it. It's like, well, actually what we're saying is we want more autonomy for it. I'm like, you're arguing federalism whether you know it or not.

Yes, like the Scots who want to secede but still keep the British pound and the Queen.

So I noticed a really big switch And one thing I think that you do that's so impressive is you do a lot of predicting and it's interesting watching how many of the things came true. But in Great Stagnation, you were pretty skeptical that there would be some kind of revolutionary type shift. And even though, but by the end of—

You mean in politics?

Yeah, in politics. But in the end of Complacent Class, by the time I finished that, the last section of that, the last 10 pages of it, it sounds like we're in trouble. You see violence increasing and really had a some sort of major societal shift.

Yeah, you call it a reset.

Yeah.

You might call that pessimism, but another way to look at it is simply to think America will go back to its historical norms, which have included wars against Native Americans and the Civil War and Reconstruction and Great Depression and civil rights in the 1960s, and that's what we are. Some of that is quite bad, some of it is good, And we had these funny two decades, the '80s and '90s, that somehow reset all of our expectations. Like, we all became progressives, even if we're libertarian. Like, everything will just get better, the world will be more democratic, incomes will grow, maybe not as quickly as we'd like, and yes, trade should be free or whatever caveats, but there was some new peaceful era that was perpetual. And I now think that expectation was a complete mistake. Those two decades were the trick. What I'm predicting for the future is actually some version of the past. I don't view it as a radical prediction. The fact that people think it's radical is in fact a sign of complacency.

Yeah, I'm a child. I was born in 1990.

Oh, wow.

So I don't remember the '80s, and I have this sort of romantic view of the '60s and '70s, and I was really struck in your book when you talk about how there was one year, I think in the early '70s, where there were 2,500 bombings.

Typically very small.

Yeah.

An amateur, but nonetheless.

But 5 a day.

Yes.

And when you talk about campus protests during that era too, you're talking about takeover of buildings, violence in many cases, and now we see a situation at Berkeley and it's headline news, and we're asking what's happening to our college campuses. So this is an education for me as well as to, I've been acculturated to this new norm.

Yes.

And do you see this concept of safety, which you see permeating everything that's happened in American society, also permeate campus?

Absolutely. Safe spaces, literally the word, but not just that, the whole culture of political correctness, the norms about what you can say. So what people, were able to say in the 1960s through the 1970s was just remarkable. To have Black Panthers on campus or people advocate violent overthrow or the worst excesses of Maoism or on the other side of the spectrum various extreme, you know, right-wing views. I'm not saying everyone liked it, but it happened all the time. The debates were contentious. They were nasty and brutal and unpleasant, but it was in some ways a marvelous age where the space of intellectual options on campuses or off them was much larger than today, and there's something fundamentally healthy about that. I'd like to nudge us in the direction of getting some of the good stuff and not all of the bad.

Yeah, well, I mean, some of the bad was some of the more violent reaction to what was happening in the world on campus. But now it seems as though protesters have less skin in the game than they might have in the '60s or '70s. I'm thinking back to the story at Yale from just a week or two where It was a group of student teachers who wanted to renegotiate their contract and went on a hunger strike, but they didn't, it was a fake hunger strike.

Hunger strike with food.

Yeah, when they—

That's kind of a hunger strike.

When the hunger strike was affecting their health, they rotated in new people so that they can go out and presumably have a meal.

And that seemed to be like once every 6 hours.

Right. So I wanted to ask a little bit more about safety. John Haidt and I are working on a book, and we're gonna be, discussing the sort of obsession with safety among parents in sort of K through 12. Do you think that's something that just gets worse as societies get more wealthy? Because you talk several times about sort of obsessive safety— concern with safety in a couple of your books.

It increases with wealth, but I think it also increases as women have more influence in society. And keep in mind, safety is a wonderful thing. We all seek it. It's good. Dying is bad. Most risk is bad. But feminization, I think, is the underrated variable here. There's plenty of evidence, say, from finance that women with their portfolios are more risk-averse than are men, and that you can measure quite exactly. And that our society is far less violent and better and nicer and more tolerant and safer. A lot of the credit of that goes to the feminization of society, which is maybe the number one trend and biggest positive trend of our age. But These things to some extent come in packages and some of what maybe we don't like with extreme political correctness or safe spaces, which are overrepresented in majors that are relatively female, I might add. Much weaker in say engineering. That's part of the package we're getting.

Pinker gives a lot of credit to why he thinks things are improving in terms of violence to feminization and I like his description of what he thinks political correctness is, is basically just an overcorrection that's brought to sort of an absurd degree generally.

I don't think it has to go on forever. I think we don't know. Uh-huh. But my view of history has become more cyclical.

Yeah.

So you already see the election of Trump. There's a lot more kinds of nasty speech going on, not always on campus, but it's there. It's on the internet. People read the internet while they're on campuses. And I'm not sure that's going away. So there's already a very nasty kind of backlash, and then there's a backlash that's not nasty, just people wanting more freedom of expression in the very best sense of that word. Like why can't we talk about these legitimate ideas on my campus?

Yep. Talk to me a little bit more about polarization because you mentioned the word polarization sometimes, but sometimes you're referring to Fiorina, who's a scholar who actually says we're not as ideologically polarized, but usually when I use the term polarized, I'm talking about what's known as effective polarization, where we might not actually be that far apart on actual political policies in many cases, but we hate each other.

That's what I think's happening is effective polarization.

Yep.

And geographic polarization. So say Clinton voters who didn't know a single Trump voter. It's less likely to have Trump voters who didn't know any Clinton voters because of service professions.

Although my parents said they didn't know a single Clinton voter.

Yeah, they won't know many.

They were from South Chicago.

Wow. They won't have them as peers. They may know some.

No one that they had talked with said they were voting for Clinton, at least within their community. But my parents aren't like us who live in the DC bubble, who talk about politics very often. They go to work, they have their job, and then they come home and watch the news. That's right.

And Clinton and Trump voters are less different than they might be here because they're more theoretical near Washington, DC, which is our blessing and our curse, is all that education. But when you have less theory and you just look at like, different groups want to do with the budget, in spite of the budget Trump just put out, I don't think it's actually that different in most cases. Most people buy into some version of what the current federal budget looks like, no matter what party they belong to.

There was something that you said that— a point obviously I've heard repeated, but you really explained the stakes to me about how much of the economy is actually on autopilot and what that actually means for democracy itself.

Yeah, we vote all the time, but we don't change our mind on the expenditures. We don't even consider changing our mind on them. So what are we really voting over? It makes politics more symbolic. That increases effective polarization. It makes discourse on campus worse because people think with tiny symbolic disputes the stakes are super high, like, oh, this is about millions of people starving, this is about the whole history of racism, and it's not.

Yeah. So what do you think— so definitely one of the things I loved about Average Is Over was your extensive discussion of chess and talking about how, you know, people have to— there's going to be a lot of opportunities for people who actually can interact with machines in a clever way. Could you talk more about your history in chess and how you came to be such a fan?

I started playing chess seriously when I was 10. I watched the Fischer-Spassky match on TV in 1972, and I played very intensely for the next, like, 5 and a half years. I was pretty good pretty quickly. When I was 15, I was New Jersey state champion, not just for kids, but like New Jersey state champion. And I worked very hard at it, but I was also getting interested in economics, philosophy, social sciences. And one day I just quit, and I thought, you know, let's try to do something like this. But in social sciences and sort of take what I learned through chess, which is like absorbing feedback, being meta-rational, don't make excuses when you lose, and try to use that learning to build a career in something else.

Oh, and I love the term meta-rational. Can you explain to the listeners what that means?

A willingness to admit when you're wrong or have been wrong, and great chess players or even good chess players need to have it because if you don't, you just commit the same mistakes over and over again. And there are very few excuses on the chessboard. You can't blame it on the referee or say the sun got in your eyes. You really do need to learn from your mistakes or you're done.

Well, it sounds like the characteristics of a good intellectual as well.

It's tricky though because a lot of the most successful intellectuals, they do well by presenting themselves as infallible. And they have a shtick and they put it forward and they repeat it a lot and that gets attention.

Right.

So I think you find a mix of both approaches amongst top intellectuals.

Yeah, well, you have more skin in the game, I guess, in chess because the potential outcome is that you lose, whereas what is the outcome if you lose an intellectual debate?

You can be wrong in predictions, but people forget or they didn't know to begin with. It's amazing in a sense how little people know about most intellectuals and the accountability mechanisms, which actually I don't necessarily think they should be so strong. But they are remarkably weak. You say something that's wrong and typically you get away with it for better or worse. So that makes it all the easier to just deny you made mistakes.

Yeah, and The Rational Optimist, it was interesting seeing Matt Ridley just flat out express his anger at being in an environment in the '70s where basically he just took it for granted we're all gonna be dead in 10 years. And basically nobody felt like they had to recant on the apocalyptic predictions.

And Paul Ehrlich, he's still famous. I don't know if he's still at Stanford, but he was at Stanford for a long time.

He was at Stanford when I was there.

Yeah. You talk a little bit in your article, we talked about professors and we talked about students. Let's talk about their parents. You mention the phrase coddled parenting in your book, and you expand on it a little bit, but not too much. What do you mean by that, and how do you think that plays into what you're seeing in your book? With a complacent class.

It seems that especially for the middle class and above, parents don't let their kids play outside anymore. So the old norm was, go play outside, come back by dinnertime, and that was the end of the story. Of course, no cell phone.

It was pretty great.

And it wasn't like, you know, write a tweet so I know you're fine. That was it. And if you wanted to look for your kid, maybe you walked around the block and you shouted. And those were more dangerous times than today. And now everything is scheduled. Parents who let their kids play outside, even in very safe communities, at times they've been arrested or brought to police stations for questioning. And I do get that now it is a safer way, but I think safer only in a limited sense. I think in the longer run it's making society riskier by making us less dynamic, less able to respond to other catastrophes, because we think of life as something that should involve no loss. No costs, no privation. Ben Sasse talks about this in his new book, which is an excellent book on a lot of these issues, by the way.

Do you remember the name of the book? I think I've seen it in some of the—

I don't wanna say it incorrectly, so I won't try.

This is Niko here with a quick post hoc editor's note. The name of Ben Sasse's book is The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance.

Uh, but it just came out this week. It's been the number one book, and his is the best guide I've seen as to how to raise children so they are not complacent. It's not mainly a politician's book. It's a book about education. The main source is Rousseau's Émile, and he's writing like an answer to Émile based on his great books education from St. John's, his time as president of Midlands University, and of course being a US senator. Very stimulating work.

That sounds like a phenomenal book. I actually— while I was reading your books, I took a diversion to read one of the books you mentioned in Complacent Class, which was Foolproof, which was a very— a book that I didn't even know about previously.

Greg Gress.

And I thought the— you know, the book is essentially about how much we can put ourselves in much greater risk by trying to be safe all the time. We're basically just pushing off some greater calamity time and time again.

Yeah. The parenting issue, have you seen that manifest itself in how students behave in your classes over the past 25 years?

Not that much. Again, I'm at George Mason. I've been here more than 25 years actually. I see a lot of evidence at other schools which I visit regularly, speak at, have many friends at. Typically the better the school in terms of rankings, the bigger the problem would be. I'm not saying it doesn't exist at all at George Mason, but again, I feel I'm in my own special bubble of a quite rare kind here.

What concerns do you have about resegregation or this idea of resegregation even if it's happening unintentionally?

There's segregation across multiple variables. The key driving one I feel is segregation across income. So this country is more segregated by income since the early 1990s. Rich people and poor people are more likely to live with other rich and poor people respectively. That in many but not all instances gives you more racial segregation. We definitely have more segregation by education. We call the same thing gentrification, a nicer word. We call it matching, a nicer word. It's a mixed blessing. I benefit from it personally. I live, you know, in a great neighborhood. It's very multicultural, but the people there, no matter where they're from, I feel in some way they're like me. Like they work for the World Bank and they're from country X, and I can talk to them about things I want to talk to people about. This is limiting mobility in our country, in my opinion. It's giving people the sense that they actually are protected from the travails of people with lower education or lower income or different social habits, and actually they're not. They are in the short run, but no one is in the long run. You know, in the long run, Physical space will triumph over either information space or just your neighborhood. So none of these segregations really will endure forever as cultural forces.

Interesting. So, John Haidt, my co-author, actually had two questions he wanted me to ask you. Sure. One just is generally, what do you think the biggest taboos in economics are? Like the arguments you're not allowed to make?

Economics is a relatively open field. For one thing, it's of the social sciences the least left-wing by far. A clear preponderance of economists are Democrats, but they tend to be pretty conservative Democrats. I think that's changing. Economists are shifting to the left quite a bit and becoming more what you might call progressive, but that's very recent, just the last few years. The biggest taboos, the biggest Taboo is just against, you know, being general, I think, and specialization is encouraged and speculation is discouraged. So not wanting to be vulnerable or make mistakes is the incentive, and that obviously it's good. Mistakes are not good, and it has significantly improved the quality of work people do. But at the same time, discourse feels narrowed, and there never will be like another Milton Friedman or another Paul Samuelson. Someone who integrates or synthesizes such a breadth of things, and that's a loss as well. But Milton made a lot of mistakes, you know, so did his peers on the Keynesian side, precisely because it's really hard, even back then, to synthesize things and get it right. It's very— it's not easy to estimate one coefficient and get it right, but it can be done to estimate a single coefficient and produce a faultless paper. And that's what our top 10 schools are producing. But the taboos of the humanities, they're not— it's not the same in economics. A lot of them just aren't questions for us. And there's been like an active debate about the history in economics of slavery, people staking out all kinds of positions. They'll get attacked and criticized, but you don't see people's careers being ruined, as far as I'm aware.

Yeah, it's definitely, you know, we're on the front lines of all this, and we rarely get people from economics departments getting in trouble.

Well, when you have the situation like you had at Yale with the Christakis's and you see the letter in support of them, it's signed by faculty almost entirely within the STEM fields. Yeah. And then you look alternatively at the letter that was written to condemn them and it was signed by faculty members within the humanities. So there seems to be some sort of ideological divide or divide in the way that these faculty members approach the issues that comes to bear on the free speech issue as well.

Oh, and so I wanted to turn around a little bit and obviously some of the stuff I read shows that you also get excited about science and that kind of— Sure, sure. So the Great Stagnation left me kind of like, oh no, what do we do? Is there a technological breakthrough that you think could really be a game changer that's actually on the horizon?

It's better than that. Keep in mind, in the very last chapter of Great Stagnation, I say the breakthrough we've needed is already here. It's the internet. It will take us longer than we think to convert that into huge success. But that we've done it, and people asking me, oh, what should we do, what should we do? We've done it. What we should do is set up DARPA and have all the seed money for crazy ideas to protect ourselves against nuclear exchange and have a few of them grow into marvelous things we hadn't anticipated. But that said, people connect the internet with social media. Social media are overrated in some ways. And having the internet change and improve our physical world, that project is actually not that far along. But I feel like the tough stuff, we're mostly on the other side of the barrier. And even things like driverless cars, you can imagine a lot of legal and regulatory obstacles. But I'm pretty sure we'll get through them. It will just take us longer than we should.

Yeah. You say we don't have as many grand projects today.

Correct.

As we did. Do you think—

But the one grand project is giving everyone a smartphone, and that's been great, and it's pretty much succeeded. It's not completely brought to fruition, but basically.

But I mean, was that a collective project in which society had banded together to make it happen in the same way that the interstate highway system was, or that in the same way that getting to the moon was.

Not in the same way, but the very fact that we did it so quickly and with so little debate meant it didn't feel like the same way. But having to put up all those cell towers and all the different advances that went into the smartphone being good and building the international supply chain, how much that required, it just was so scattered and decentralized and hidden and not discussed. It's in a way all the more impressive because there's no ribbon-cutting ceremony for everyone having a smartphone. But we did it, incredible. How many years did it take? Only a few.

We've been talking on this podcast a lot with some of our previous guests, Eugene Volokh, who runs the Volokh Conspiracy, and Bob Cornrivera, who's an attorney with Davis Wright Tremaine, and they think that virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence might reshape our world in very significant ways. Do you see that as well?

Virtual reality, no. I remain to be convinced. I think it would be historically unprecedented for people to spend so much time wanting goggles essentially attached to their eyes and ultimately their brain. I think there's a problem with dizziness and equilibrium, and it seems to me what people use their smartphones for is something super low-tech, which is like pecking out silly text messages to some other human being And not wanting it to be that vivid. In a way, they want interaction to be less vivid. Take away the phone call, give me the text. So on VR, I say no, at least so far. Artificial intelligence, that's typically ill-defined. I would just call it smart software, and then I'd say we already have it. It's just going to grow an enormous amount. Again, it will take longer than we think, but we're already on the other side of the barrier.

Well, there's two sorts of artificial intelligence. I forget the way they're defined. One's like a soft intelligence, which is, you know—

The cash register.

Yeah, the cash register. The other one is the one that has the ability to think in a way similar to the way that humans do.

I'd say never. It's all the cash register. It's context-specific. We'll make the cash register better and better. First they win at chess, now they win at Go. They can write journalism articles and, you know, referee sports games, and it will progress. But the idea that, you know, Skynet goes live, never.

Never?

Never.

Interesting.

We'll kill ourselves before the machines kill us.

Excellent. So I really just wanted to get to An Economist Gets Lunch. What led you to write that book?

A lifetime of eating and thinking about food critically as an economist and seeing how much was done applying basic microeconomics to food was close to zero and I thought, "Hey, I'm in a position to do this." And I know I should be pitching Complacent Class, which I absolutely am.

You should go out and read Complacent Class, but when you're done with that, definitely get The Economist Gets Lunch. I've been recommending it to everybody even though I think I'm getting the title wrong consistently.

That's the right title.

And learning about places like Great Wall, different Chinese food stores. Also, you had a little adventure, culinary adventure down in Nicaragua. Me and my wife like to go to Brazil, but every so often we are reminded that it's a fairly dangerous place if you go off the beaten path. But I imagine—

Even on the beaten path is the most dangerous part of Brazil.

Yeah, oh right, right. But Nicaragua, I think it actually even has higher rates.

Nicaragua is pretty safe. Honduras is maybe the worst.

Oh, I think that's what I'm doing.

Then El Salvador. Guatemala has gotten much better. Mexico depends on the region. Nicaragua, because it was communist and kind of insulated from the drug trade, violence there I believe is upticking, but it's entirely manageable. And you can go there without concerns. It's like Costa Rica, maybe.

Oh, really? Costa Rica felt so— I mean, it was wonderful, but it felt so safe and tame.

Same level of safety and tameness, but much poorer, less infrastructure, way less touristed. It feels like a sleepy Central America from 1957 or something.

Well, that's on my list to go. So tell me about Mexican barbecue.

Mexican barbecue is the world's best barbecue. I would say it's strongest in Central Mexico, and people cook it literally under the earth overnight, and then they dig it up and they distribute it to vendors in Mexican cities, the best ones being in mid-sized cities. Anywhere you might go in Central Mexico, they'll probably run out of barbecue by noon or maybe even 11 AM. Peak time to go is maybe between 9 and 10. Unbelievable sauces. These are just outdoor places, maybe with an awning, not really a restaurant. They get their shipment of barbecue, they sell it. It's some of the world's best food. It costs only a few dollars, and you can do that silly for days and days and never get bored. But by 1:00 PM or sooner, it is gone and not coming back, and you've gotta do something else with the rest of your day.

Just bask in it, I think I would. I always go on this tirade about quote unquote Mexican food. Because it's such an incredibly rich food culture and it's so incredibly regional. So when people just sort of paint with a broad brush, oh, I don't like Mexican food, I'm like, which kind are you talking about?

And Mexican barbecue you don't get in this country at all. There used to be parts of South Texas where you'd get a version of it. I believe they don't exist anymore. Maybe somewhere deep in rural areas there's still someone, you know, burying barbecue, like south of San Antonio or, but You don't know food in Mexico until you go there. And just the corn, the vegetables, the squash, unbelievable.

I've had some of the best meals of my life there. But I have a very serious culinary question to ask you. You mentioned Bonchon, which is one of my—

Korean fried chicken.

Korean fried chicken.

My favorite fried chicken.

It's amazing. Have we been defeated? Is there a fried chicken gap? Have we lost to the Koreans in terms of American fried chicken versus Korean?

We've lost to the Koreans, and we are far, far behind And Korean fried chicken in Korea is even much better than banchan here.

It's almost impossible to believe.

And don't go to the chains, say, in Seoul. Just ask around. You will find standalone Korean fried chicken places. And you know they're good if it takes a long time and they only serve fried chicken and maybe beer. And the sauce is much, much better in those little places.

I am torn.

And they're not in the center of town.

Just like go out a bit, not too far, but Yeah, your discussion about barbecue, I'm torn between what is the greatest food technology of all time, and I'm definitely more of a fried chicken person, but barbecue at the same time, there's so much love and passion that goes into it.

How about corn? Central American corn?

Yeah.

Bred out of a silly weed.

Yep.

Almost from nothing by people who in a sense had no formal science, and it's arguably the world's greatest and most important invention after fire.

Yeah, wow. That's a great point.

Tell this to my uncle who used to be president of KFC's America version, but he said fried chicken is super popular in the Middle East and in China and Egypt especially. I mean, they were smuggling fried chicken in the tunnels between Egypt and neighboring countries just because they loved it so much.

My dad's Russian and my mom's British, and I actually really like the fried chicken in Eastern Europe. It's generally sort of pounded and fried, But I always felt like American Southern fried chicken was the best in the world, but definitely having tried some of the Korean, and some actually—

Taiwanese fried chicken is the new trend. Have you been to Maketto?

I have not been to Maketto.

It's in D.C., it's on H Street. Taiwanese fried chicken there, amazingly good. Better than Bonchon, in fact.

Better than Bonchon?

Better than Bonchon.

This is very exciting. Okay, so to switch gears, I wanted you to leave us with some advice. We want to pick your brain on things that only you would know about. Did you contribute to that John Brockman book, This Idea Must Die?

Refresh my memory, but it doesn't ring a bell.

Every year or so, John Brockman does a book where he asks like Steve Pinker—

Oh no, I didn't contribute to that.

John Brockman's a literary agent.

Yes, I know who you mean now.

Who runs The Edge, and he did one called This Idea Must Die, and I think it's a wonderful question. In terms of economics or in terms for that matter anything as far as public policy, is there a philosophy or education, is there an idea that you just think is terrible and should just go away?

I think most ideas are underrated and they have hidden virtues and trying to see what's good in them even if it's like pissing you off or making your world worse on a daily basis. There's still something in that idea to learn from. So I would try to push people in that direction.

That's a great answer. Common economic mistakes that we make on a macro level?

Well, who's the we? You and I?

The country.

Well, I think monetary policy following the Great Recession was too tight. We should have had more activist expansionary monetary policy. We would have had a much quicker recovery. People have been afraid of a higher rate of price inflation because of the 1970s. It seems to me that was a mistake. I think a lot of economists overrate how much fiscal policy matters. I don't think fiscal policy budges aggregate demand very much. It can a bit. I would sooner evaluate government spending just like how good is the project.

Right.

There are projects worth doing and then use monetary policy. I don't believe there's a liquidity trap. So my views are pretty different than some of the Keynesian views. But most economists out there, they're not Keynesian with a capital K, they're eclectic. I don't feel they're like badly off the track. I'm just telling you what I think and how at the margin it would differ from some. I think free market economists overrate tax cuts, I can say that. At least for the US, maybe not for Sweden or France. But at our level of taxation, if you cut taxes, which for some rates I do think we ought to do, but I don't actually think people will work that much more, and I don't think it will pay for itself.

Getting back to the complacent class, I want to end by presenting a question to you that my dad presented to me when I was telling him about your book and that we were going to have this conversation. He said the zeitgeist in his office and amongst people his age is that millennials are anything but complacent. He looks at me, I've moved to I've lived in 5 different cities in the past 5 years in 5 different states and he thinks that millennials can never stay at the same job, that we are easily distracted by new ideas and the gig economy. Your book does a pretty good job of using evidence to suggest that that interpretation or that belief is wrong. Is there a way in which he's right as well?

The numbers clearly show young people are living at home for longer. They're less keen to own cars and be mobile. To some extent, there are substitutes, but I don't think it's just that. They have higher student debt, no fault of their own, but it does in some ways immobilize people. They're starting businesses at lower rates. And the average tenure at jobs— this is for everyone, not millennials per se— is somewhat higher than it used to be. So that's what the numbers are telling us. Now, is it possible millennials have absorbed some non-complacent influence and in the years to come they will blossom? It's possible. I think reality may force them to do that. You can only be non-dynamic for so long, and at that point you hit a wall, and plenty of millennials will be around then. And I'm actually pretty hopeful. I think they're an exceedingly kind and generous and tolerant generation, and that won't go away. So we'll see, but so far it hasn't happened yet.

I do have a related question though. And it sounds incredibly simple, but I've been amazed how many different answers I get to this question. Why does college cost so much now?

It's funny, I'm planning on asking Ben Sasse that when I do a podcast with him. I feel it's poorly understood. So the standard answer is high administrative costs. It's partly true, but somewhat it's begging the question, why are students willing to pay? How contestable the market really is, I'm not sure. I think there's a third-party payment problem. So your kid wants to go to School X, and your willingness to say, "No, we're actually going to send you to School Y," is not that great for parents of higher income. It is for parents of lower income. So there's a kind of captive market effect. But it still seems to me universities siphon off rents for themselves in inefficient ways relative to, say, how a corrupt system would operate. And I don't think it's understood very well. Why are endowments so high? If you think there's something screwy about universities, why don't they just pay themselves more out of the endowment? They don't, which I would say is a good thing, but it also means we don't quite understand the system. We don't understand The functionality of endowments, higher education itself, how does it teach people things? How much of it is like networking? How much is social contacts? How much is we're just giving you time to mature and keeping you away from the troublemakers for 4 years?

Right.

And that's the biggest benefit compared to working in a factory. So we don't even know what the product is. So I think it's a sector with more questions than answers. I get nervous when people have very dogmatic views about higher ed. I do think it's probably priced too high, but until we understand it better, you know, I would be cautious when it comes to reforms. I don't feel I know how to set things right, and I've worked in the sector my whole life, and I've dealt with the administrative side, fundraising side, a number of different sides of it, and if I as an economist find it so puzzling, I think we should take that seriously.

Yeah, okay, good. An average is over, I think. You talked— you showed some enthusiasm for MOOCs, for example. There's been— people have kind of soured on them to some degree that I've talked to since the original heyday of MOOCs. Do you still feel optimistic about the potential of MOOCs?

Well, there's online education and there are MOOCs. I'm more optimistic about online education. I think of MOOC as a specific thing where it's synchronized and large numbers of people do it. And there's a kind of boring video session that you partake in and they hope to whip up some collective enthusiasm about poetry or something. It seems to me those are actually a mature product. It covers a lot of people. It's great. It's free. I don't think I'm a pessimist on it, but I don't think there's an extra there there. The market has gotten to where it ought to be with MOOCs. But online education, just take the internet, forget what we call online education. Which is typically just a bad product. Already you have more people a day, like, reading blogs and blog-like content, podcasts, than are taking an intro class. So economics education in this country is right now already more than half online. And we don't have clear ways of doing, like, randomized control trials, but I submit it's working remarkably well. The problem is not enough people care. So online ed already, it's way more advanced than people think. They're just not willing to call it that because they think it has to be in someone's catalog and be called a course and you click on a thing and you fill in the form and at the end you get a certificate which, you know, fine if that can work. But most of online education is already happening and again it's like everyone getting a smartphone. It's gone 10 times quicker than anyone thought. It's been a huge success.

I was excited to see you mention Jane McGonigal because I got to see a talk by her where she was talking about this blockchain EduBlock idea where essentially you could Basically like for FIRE, for example, we're always looking for people like us in the sense of people sort of obsessed with First Amendment and free speech law.

Right.

And with that edublocks idea, basically you'd have a little block indicating basically every book you've read. And I know that pretty much everybody who would want to work for FIRE are the kind of people who would have that ledger entirely full of things that they just did voluntarily. Have you heard anything about the edublocks idea or—

No, I've never looked at it. Here would be a big question, I think. As education becomes online more formally, in the sense as would be done by Georgia Tech or Arizona State, I think there's actually the risk of there being less de facto free speech. The product becomes more corporate. There could be like 5 or 6 suppliers or maybe even 2 or 3, like there's 4 major cell phone companies. It will be much more along the you can't possibly offend anyone lines with anything. And professors, when they lecture, even just through body language, when and how they smile, they communicate all kinds of information that may be even just slightly transgressive in a humorous way that they can't be called in on the carpet for. But when it's all written out and static and sold to the whole market, I worry about that in some ways.

Yeah, I think that's fair. And can I ask 3 more questions?

You can, yes.

It's your podcast.

Well, it's your time, so—

Well, yeah, are we going past? Continue. Just, you know, because I'm so fascinated by everything you do, I'm a huge Pinker fan, so I got to— and he's on our board of advisors. Oh yeah. I loved your podcast with him. My wife is a speech-language pathologist. That whole section on grammar that you opened up with was just so much fun. So you're the kind of person I want to ask these kind of questions to. Name a book that I probably haven't read that I should read.

I don't know what other books you've read, but how about Elena Ferrante?

What, what, what?

The 4 novels. On Naples in Italy.

Nice. Writing that down.

They're the greatest fictional achievement probably over the last 30 or 40 years. I would say equivalent in quality and significance to any of the great novels of the past. But the trick is, at least two-thirds of the first volume, the first time you read it, it's not that exciting or interesting. It takes a long time to get into. There's a big entry barrier. When you go back and reread it, it's like, "Oh my goodness, this is awesome." But most people, they read like 200-300 pages, eh, overrated. And I mean very smart literary people. But like, that's the thing, the 4 volumes of Ferrante and the 2 volumes, first 2 volumes of Knausgaard, My Struggle, they're the greatest fictional works of our time, I would submit. And fiction today is radically underrated by smart people.

That's a great suggestion. Okay, so recommend music.

Music, again, it depends what you already know.

Like for me, for fiction for example, I always— if you haven't read Lolita, you should read it. I have my short sort of answer for everything, but do you think there's an underrated band or—

I think the music market is actually remarkably efficient. But if you don't know, say, Monteverdi or Stravinsky, all of their diverse works, I find a lot of smart people who know music well may not know those composers. The 5 or 6 main Mozart operas, are still underrated and just remarkably beautiful and diverse and witty, including many of the libretti. Bach organ music, Bach keyboard music for various media, you know, piano and harpsichord. Brahms is somewhat underrated, like the late chamber music. I would say some of the songs. 20th century music gets a very bad rap. Schoenberg, clearly one of the greatest composers. Moses Aaron, A total masterpiece. It's actually fun to listen to. Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach, songs from the trilogy. People sneer at it, "Oh, pop minimalism." No, I think they're absolute masterpieces. He became boring, you know, after some of those early works, but the peak Philip Glass works are really monuments of achievement, like New York culture of the '70s at its peak.

And as a foodie, do you have a single favorite restaurant?

Uh, no, I don't, but I most enjoy eating in China. And going to China, especially the southwest Yunnan Province and then also Sichuan Province. I'm going to Yunnan this summer again. It's to me the most interesting food in the world. It's even hard to describe. You probably can't imagine it. It uses herbs and honey and vegetables, strange taste, some of it spicy, some of it sour. It's different in every part of the province. Imagine a mix of like some Sichuan, some Burmese, some Vietnamese, Laotian influences Keep in mind that province is tucked right over Myanmar, and just incredible food, and it's not a polluted part of China. So I would tell anyone, that's like the world's great travel secret. Go to Yunnan Province. And China is like the other super important country in the world. You need to know China, even if just for fun. China, China, China.

Yeah, well, I was up in New York last weekend, and I might be saying it wrong, but you talk about Flushing actually in your book, and there was a place called Jian Noodles.

Sure, famous food, it's a great place.

That started in Flushing, and I was, I got their, what was it, cumin lamb noodles, and they were phenomenal. And I imagine they're even better there.

And that's from Xi'an, the city where the Terracotta Warriors are.

I want to close, yeah, I want to close by asking you 3 pieces of advice that you'd give to your students to not live a complacent life. And then to piggyback on that—

It depends who they are, but I think a lot of people, you know, they're better off living complacent lives. That's why there's so much complacency. So whether they should be non-complacent as sacrificial lambs for the public good, I'm not comfortable necessarily urging them to do so. But I do tell them, travel as much as you can, learn another language if you can, and avoid the approach to ideas that I call devalue and dismiss. If you see intellectuals, your teachers, or student peers, whatever, practicing devalue and dismiss, start getting very nervous. Look for people who are good appreciators, who can appreciate even that which they disagree with and bring out the best in it and like explain other points of view and try to see the good in things.

What do you mean by devalue and dismiss?

Like you point to a person like he or she made this mistake or has this bad motive and you then downgrade or dismiss their entire body of work. The left does it, the right does it, actually centrists do it. They do it with quieter filters often. But the whole world is playing this game of devalue and dismiss. And the intellectual profit opportunities are to be found in doing the opposite of that, including in music, in food, and in so many other areas. You can go to Yunnan Province and for $3 get a better meal than in a 2-star Michelin in France for $200. So why not do it? You could play devalue and dismiss with yunnan. Oh, they're just peasants, whatever. They've never studied at this cooking school. It's just some grandma, right? But no, it's awesome. Learn to be an appreciator. That's my one big piece of advice for everyone today and every other day.

That's great. That's absolutely phenomenal advice. I actually have been somewhat darkly joking about the fact that just in the past 5 years, it's as if we're using all of this collective IQ on college campuses to figure out new excuses to not have to listen to anybody you disagree with.

Yes.

I think that's a great place to end on. Tyler, thank you for joining us today.

Tremendously fun.

Thank you for coming by. And check out your book, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

Thank you both. Thank you.

That was George Mason University professor and Mercatus Center General Director Tyler Cowen. His book, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream can be found on Amazon.com along with the other books of his that we've referenced during today's show. And if you use Amazon Smile when you place your order and select the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as your charity of choice, a portion of your purchase will be donated to FIRE. You can find Amazon Smile by going to smile.amazon.com. And if Greg and Tyler Cowen's discussion of Mexican barbecue and Korean fried chicken has you hungry and you live in the Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C. DC, Maryland area, check out Tyler's dining guide for some restaurant recommendations. You can find the guide at tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com or just by Googling Tyler Cowen's ethnic dining guide. Before I close out this show, however, I want to correct a misstatement I made in the last podcast that was pointed out to me by a smart listener. During our discussion of disinvitation attempts on campus, I suggested that the calls for disinvitations were more or less evenly split by political ideology, that calls for disinvitations from people one might describe as left-leaning are of the same frequency as those from people one might describe as right-leaning. This is wrong. What I meant to convey, but did so inelegantly, was that a significant number of disinvitation attempts do come from the right, more so than people think and news reports suggest. But as a listener pointed out to me, FIRE's own disinvitation database shows that 63% of disinvitation attempts since 2000 have come from the left, and only about 28% from the right. When you look at successes, about 53% of disinvitation attempts from the left were successful, next to 36% from the right. I regret suggesting a more equitable share of disinvitation attempts than the data bear out, But of course, we at FIRE have publicly noted this disparity before. In our own 2014 disinvitation report, we wrote that the data show that speakers with perceived conservative viewpoints have faced a majority of the backlash. Successful disinvitations from the left of speakers are nearly double those from the right of speakers, with nearly triple the total number of disinvitation incidents. Again, I apologize for this mistake, and I'll do better to speak more precisely next time. This podcast is hosted, produced, and recorded by me, Nico Perino, and edited by Aaron Reese. To learn more about So to Speak, you can follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/freespeechtalk or like us on Facebook at facebook.com/sotospeakpodcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts. And if you have feedback, we can always be reached at sotospeak@thefire.org. Listener questions can always be called into 215-315-0100. And I, I realize I haven't fleshed this out well in the past, and I wanna do so now. When I say you can call in a question for a future show, I mean that you can call 215-315-0100 and leave a question in the form of a voicemail. The answering machine will explain what you need to do, and it's super simple, and there's no talking to a live human required. And of course, we welcome any free speech-related questions, and we will try to answer them in future podcasts. And with that, I will part from you all, and I'll catch you all in 2 weeks. Thanks again for listening.