The Torch of Progress - Ep. 2 - Tyler Cowen

Uh, thank you everybody, uh, for attending. My name is Jason Crawford. I am a co-creator of the Progress Studies for Young Scholars program. Um, before we dive in, let me just tell you a little bit about this series and some of the upcoming events. So, uh, this is our speaker series for the high school program. Progress Studies for Young Scholars is an online summer program in the history of technology aimed at a high school level. We also have a lot of interest from older students and adults, and we are working on putting together something for that audience. So if you're interested, um, and you're, and you're beyond high school, go ahead and sign up and apply anyway, and we'll have something for you. And, uh, this speaker series goes along with the program. The program itself is a 6-week, uh, course with daily, uh, discussion and reading assignments. It's about a 2-hour-a-day commitment on the student's part. And this speaker series goes along with it, is not tightly tied to the program content in terms of the sequence and the topics, but sort of tightly tied in terms of the theme. And this is a chance to get into some of the just sort of broader themes of the course. The course itself is very much focused on history of technology and invention. We've got a number of upcoming events. So we're doing about one of these talks every week. Next week, we have Patrick Collison. That is on Wednesday, June 17th at 5:00 PM Pacific. The week after that, we are going to have Max Roser of Oxford, who created the Our World in Data project. That is on Wednesday, June 24th. And the week after that, we've got Deirdre McCloskey. That is going to be on Thursday, July 2nd. And after that, I believe we have got, um, Joel Mokyr, and I don't have the date for that in front of me, but please follow Progress Course on Twitter or sign up for our mailing list or follow us on Facebook and you'll get these event announcements. All right, so please welcome our guest, Tyler Cowen. Tyler does an amazing number of things all at once. Uh, so he's a professor at George Mason University. He also runs an extremely popular blog on economics called Marginal Revolution, where he posts like multiple times a day. Uh, he also runs a very popular, uh, podcast series where he interviews people, uh, called Conversations with Tyler Cowen. He also runs this thing called Emergent Ventures, which is a fund where he writes checks for all sorts of projects. In the interest of full disclosure, and also as a public thank you, Tyler wrote me my first check to, uh, for the Roots of Progress program. Thank you, Tyler. I will be eternally grateful for that. And then, as part of, uh, or in conjunction with Emergent Ventures, uh, he's also launched another program called Fast Grants for, uh, science funding, particularly for COVID-19 funding. Um, Tyler, I don't know how you do all these things all at once, and you're still a teacher, and then you show up for things like this. So It's pretty impressive. Uh, so let's go ahead. I would like to dive right in with some questions around, um, uh, progress and stagnation. Um, so let's just start right there. For the audience, especially people who are not familiar with it, could you just sort of briefly recap, uh, the stagnation hypothesis and kind of what's the status of the, of the debate around this in 2020?

Great, thank you Jason, and hello everyone, and thank you for the very nice introduction. Let me address that first question. If you look at the data on economic growth, it appears in the published numbers that economic growth slowed down considerably around the time of 1973. But before 1973, it was typically the case in America living standards would more or less double every 25 years for several generations. And those were times of great upward mobility. Also, our lives changed a great deal. If I think of my grandmother, she was born, I believe, in 1905. Back then, most Americans lived on farms. Most Americans did not graduate from high school. Certainly no cars to speak of. No radio, airplanes no, completely different world. By the time she's 50, fast forward to 1955, there's electricity everywhere, flush toilets, cars, airplanes. It's not a world we know, certainly no smartphones. A huge change, and America is pretty wealthy over the span of 50 years. Now, post-1973, that progress seems to be much slower. So if I take my own life, I'm born in 1962, that makes me 58 years old. I remember being 8 years old, it was 50 years ago. If I walk into a room today and think about how is that different from a room 50 years ago, other than computers, it isn't that different. So in the view of the stagnationists, progress, economic progress, upward income mobility, has slowed down. Just to be clear, these ideas are debated. There are many diverse points of view. That's the basic claim made by the stagnationists.

Yeah, so there's always this thing when this is discussed, there's always, uh, other than computers, right? How do you get away, quote unquote, with saying other than computers? Like, isn't it, isn't it sort of always the case that at any given time there's one area that's got more progress going on than other areas? So So, like, if you just cut out the top area of progress, how is that a fair comparison to previous times?

Well, I think if you look at the early 20th century, you see massive progress in basically all areas. You have to wonder, if computers are so important, why haven't they brought more progress in all these other areas? I watched a movie the other night from 1968, showed an airplane. It's the same airplanes we fly today. Actually, the inside was nicer than what you would get today. Cars definitely are better. They're definitely better because of computers. Basic car experience is actually only marginally better than it was, say, 40 years ago. So computers are great. Obviously, we're using them right now. They're especially great during a pandemic. They haven't quite been the game changer. That most people want to believe haven't made education much better yet. Healthcare, somewhat. Healthcare is vastly more expensive. It's not obviously getting better at a quicker rate. You look at so many other areas. Gains from computers may yet arrive. A lot of the biggest gains are just like leisure time. Fuck is fun. You know, I speak to my grandma on Facebook. It's all very real. In my view, it is not comparable to the game changers of earlier eras.

Yeah. In your book, The Great Stagnation, which is almost a decade ago now, you were talking about how a lot of the computer companies and technology are not revenue generating. Do you think that has changed recently? Now, we have Uber and Airbnb and a lot of companies that are based on technology, but, you know, seem to have these revenue streams. Not to mention, obviously, even in the companies like Google and Facebook that are free to users are generating enormous amounts of revenue.

That's correct. So my book was published in 2011. It was written in 2010. That is 10 years ago. The tech companies employ more people, typically at pretty high wages. They have a much bigger positive impact. Amazon and Facebook 10 years ago were really fairly negligible in a lot of ways. And you would never say that today. So I think the positive impact of tech is much greater, certainly pre-pandemic, but especially with COVID-19. What it has enabled us to do, I find truly impressive in a way that actually wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago. Mm-hmm.

What about the hypothesis that science itself is slowing down? We're making less progress there. How is that part of all this?

I wrote a paper on that with Ben Southwood, a collaborator of mine, and I think that's the mirror image of the view that economic progress is slower. A lot of economic progress requires new ideas, new inventions, advancements in underlying scientific ideas, and I think in many ways the early 20th century you have huge advances, things like nuclear power coming along or just electricity really working and being distributed in a way that in practical terms you don't quite have the same advances today. How much crop yields were getting better in earlier times. We moved from a world where a lot of people starved, sort of the wealthy countries, no one starved. Now today we moved from a world where no one starves to a world where Well, the bread tastes better, or you can get like regional Thai food instead of just dishes from Bangkok. And that's wonderful. I love that. At the same time, I don't think we're seeing the scientific breakthroughs of earlier eras. And there are different ways you can try to measure the progress of science. Here's one way to put it. We just have many, many more doctors, biomedical researchers than ever before. In this country, around the world, the rate at which life expectancy is going up is not advancing. It's actually sometimes declining. So, per doctor, per researcher, yield on that research seems to be lower.

So, this all makes sense. So, the way that this is measured sometimes— so, there's certain arguments that say, yes, maybe we're making even exponential progress in certain areas like Moore's Law and chips or, you know, various other things. But in order to do this, we also have exponentially more researchers, you know, and research dollars going into, you know, pushing that constant percentage, you know, increase each year. Therefore, productivity is going down. What do you think about that?

The rate of increase of productivity is going down, but yes.

Okay, you're saying the actual percentage increase in these things You're looking at slowing down.

It's still positive. Chips are not getting worse, right? Yeah. They used to get better at a faster clip. Now we're really kind of eking out those marginal gains. Yet more and more people, smart, smart people do this. These incredible chip companies, Samsung in Taiwan, uh, can't fault the talent, but somehow it's getting harder.

Yeah.

What do you think about Dietrich Vollrath's thesis in Fully Grown, the book? Is slower growth actually optimal for us right now?

Well, right now we've had strongly negative growth. So, I'd love to have some more positive growth. The more positive growth you've had, the bigger a cushion you have for disasters. Also, the more you can help the rest of the world, the more you can try to fight poverty, alleviate inequality. Fund science, make education better. So, you know, right now, US median income, depends which set of numbers you use, say it's around $60,000, it's a fair guess. If we had maintained earlier rates of economic growth past 1973, it could right now be a little above $100,000 rather than $60,000. It's a big difference for most people.

Okay, but just to play devil's advocate on this a bit more, to make all that progress, people have to work long hours, right? There's a lot of money going into investment instead of consumption. At a certain point, as society gets richer, does it— is it actually optimal for us to just ease off the brake and take it easy a little bit more?

Well, I think we could have much higher productivity and wealth and still have nicer, longer vacations. I don't feel the core problem is that Americans are taking too long vacations. By global standards, we still have quite short vacations. So insofar as you want more leisure time, I think more growth would get us more wealth and more leisure time. So the problem is not that we're all a bunch of slackers. Some of us are, to be clear.

You're saying we're not on the efficient frontier of leisure. Of growth and leisure. We're not at the Pareto optimal point.

That's correct.

Yeah, okay. Um, I want to run through— so I brainstormed, and, and in conjunction with my Twitter followers, a list of a couple dozen, you know, potential hypotheses as potential factors to explain some of the stagnation. I just want to rattle them off, sort of run through them, throw them at you one at a time, and have you give brief comments on each. You know, how convincing are they to you, or what do you think? Okay. Ran out of easy technological innovation.

That to me is a major factor. What we did early in the 20th century was take powerful machines, fossil fuels, put them together, did everything we could with that blend of technologies that revolutionized the world. These days a car is a car, it's better slowly, and I think again, it's not The problem is not our lack of talent, we're facing harder problems precisely because we've had a lot of big successes in the past. I give that a very high rating for importance.

Okay. End of Bretton Woods agreement?

Irrelevant. Bretton Woods had to end, it didn't last for that long anyway. It wasn't that good a system, it restricted capital flows, it had these jerry-rigged fixed exchange rates. Uh, not a factor. Zero. Zippo. Nada.

Failure of STEM education.

I'm never sure what that means when people say failure of STEM education. I think for the upper third, U.S. STEM education is really pretty good, maybe exceptionally good, even compared to other leaders around the world— South Korea, Singapore. Our bottom third, most of our education, STEM or not, is pretty bad. It's a big social problem. I don't want to minimize that at all. I'm not sure how much that is the cause of scientific slowdown. I would say, is it a problem? Huge. Is it the cause of this problem? We don't know, but probably mainly not.

The Bayh-Dole Act.

It's one of these, like, squirrely things, universities, property rights, intellectual property. You know, most wealthy countries around the world have seen their rates of growth slow down, unless they've been selling resources to China. So it's near universal. It can't be something that small and trivial. I say close to zero.

The university tech transfer process in general?

Again, same, it's all screwed up, it's too bureaucratic. I work in a university, I face this myself. It's a problem, it's far from being one of the top problems. And again, the fact that you see the slowdown in every country means it's not going to be something so particularistic.

Yep.

What about bad incentive structures in academia generally, like the focus on citations and stuff.

And I think that's an issue. I might put it like at the bottom of my top 10, which is somewhat significant. Your ability as a university researcher to start a company, hold some equity in that company, own some intellectual property— I know that will be taxed by your university, taxed by the government— your ability to do that today, it's like not the worst it's ever been. So, our universities are still fairly productive in the natural sciences. I think it's that when it comes to implementing ideas, there are many more roadblocks, and we've exhausted the previous technology of the fossil fuels and the powerful machines, so the low-hanging fruit is gone. And then we have a generally more bureaucratized society with more roadblocks in implementation. If you read science magazines, like every issue, it's phenomenal. Like, oh my God, they're doing this, they're doing that. How can you say there's no progress? I mean, that's true. You read about CRISPR. I sometimes say, like, I want to go to the CRISPR store and buy something to make my life better. And right now I can't do that. The final implementation is like a huge issue. And that's one of the other very biggest problems. Scientists are still smart and productive.

So you said there are roadblocks, like what are the roadblocks?

Again, it will depend on the area, but let's say you want to get new structures built. You want to create a new city or start a new suburb or make living in an existing city cheaper or give people upward mobility through cheaper apartments. Getting approval for that building in say the Bay Area, parts of New York, the high rent districts, it's very, very hard. Just hard to get things done. You want to build a new bridge, you want to build a new tunnel, you want to improve the New York City subway, it takes many decades. That is insane. It only took a small number of years to open the whole New York City subway system. In what, was that 1906, 1910? Do you remember the year, Jason?

I don't remember.

Around then. Now to get like one line built with a bunch of stops, the Second Avenue line, they kind of started that in 1970, it opened the year before. Took almost 50 years. That's crazy. So the final get things done, get everyone to say yes, get all the papers signed, all the permissions. And that I give America like a D minus. And I get if you read the science magazines, it all sounds great. Those are not lies. At the same time, what you can get from this stuff, I think we're totally failing.

Mm-hmm.

Another potential factor. What about just the increasing sort of cultural risk aversion and focus on safety?

I suspect that's high. I wrote a book on it called The Complacent Class. I do think it's a hard claim to prove. I think there's many data-rich areas you can look at, like how people raise their kids. It used to be your kid could just go out and play, and parents would say to their kids, like, be home at dark, be home by dark. And if you were home an hour after it got dark, they'd yell at you, but no one really cared. Now it's like every hour is scheduled. There's always homework. Like moms and dads flip out if they don't know where you are all the time. If you turn off the cell phone, it's like a huge crisis often. Not everyone is brought up that way, but a lot of people are. Earlier, basically, you know, no one was or no one could be. It wasn't possible. So I think there's a general attitude, craziness about risk. A lot of people not wanting to take chances. And I do think that's a factor. Cultural, not anyone's fault, but it's how we are.

Yeah. Loss of optimism about technology in the future.

I think that's the flip side of the cultural issue about risk aversion. In a way, it's the same point. People today imagine a future bigger, brighter, grander, more exciting than the present they know. I don't think they do as much as they did in the 1950s or '60s. And then there was talk of sending men to the moon, building space colonies, energy being free or cheap, transforming the whole world. It was not all realistic. The common cultural emphasis was what we can do and how quickly we can do it. Whereas now I feel the notion of progress, it's a bit like, well, I'd like some more nice restaurants in my neighborhood, it's gentrifying, you know, they need to clean up the park a bit more. I mean, all that stuff is fine, but it feels less ambitious to me. And if you look at literature, movies, there are so many more dystopias rather than utopias. So to me, that's, that's highly relevant.

What do you think about Peter Thiel's concepts of definite versus indefinite optimism and pessimism? Do you think we need more definite optimism?

Well, I think we need more optimism of all kinds. Definite. And indefinite.

So he's got this idea, right, we need to do the— we need to have these big ambitious projects like Apollo and, you know, these things where we set these huge goals a decade out and then we just go after them.

I agree with that. It's my hope that the coronavirus, for all of its tragedies— it is a terrible event— I hope it will rekindle that somewhat. People say We need to beat this back as quickly as possible. I actually believe they can and will do it, though it's not yet proven, that this will create a new mindset. So I have some optimism in this moment, at least potentially, because we have a new challenge, and now that may revitalize us. The fact that risk is now ever-present, and it's a, a net terrible thing, it may change people's attitudes towards risk. If you can't avoid risk altogether, people may grow more accepting of risk. Again, at least there's a possibility there will be a cultural shift back in a more dynamic direction.

Hmm.

What about the environmentalist movement?

Well, it depends. I think the environmentalist movement overall has been a very good thing. It has meant that some forms of progress are not visibly economic. Rather than having a lot of new jobs in dirty, polluting factories, you have cleaner air. In my view, that's a very good trade-off, I think, with a lot of evidence supporting that view. It does mean you will have fewer well-paying jobs in a lot of cities, places like Detroit it really harmed. Worth doing. So environmentalism has shifted the forms of progress. Again, I'm glad it did so, but I would just point out We've had clean or cleaner air for quite a while now, and our economic rates of growth are still low. The main reason we're not growing faster is not because we're still at the margin in making all these great investments in cleaner air. In fact, the carbon challenge, global warming, we're failing that one miserably.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Um, okay, great. I've got Lots more of these, but I'd like to move on to some other types of questions, so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna cut it off for now.

But we covered the main ones in my view.

Okay, good, good.

Implementation and lack of low-hanging fruit, then a cultural element. Combine that all, those to me are the biggies.

Yeah, interesting. Um, if you had, if you were given a large budget to build a new type of R&D organization that was actually going to go out there and create some of this progress that we need, like a new DARPA or something like that. How would you, how would you be thinking about organizing it and structuring it?

Well, working with Patrick Collison and a number of other people, I have very recently built a new institution to fund science. It's called Fast Grants, part of the Mercatus Center. And we don't have a huge amount of money, but we have well over $20 million. And our emphasis has been on getting grants to scientific researchers to fight COVID-19. And typically, right now, we polled researchers, they'll say, "Oh, I have this project. It will take me 6 to 9 months to get money," assuming they even get it at all. When so many people are dying, when economies are falling apart, that is truly insane. So with our FAST grants, we have rigorous refereeing, but we also can make grants and do make grants within days. To speed up the rate of scientific progress at a time where speed matters most. So, it would be weird if I didn't cite what I'm actually doing now. It's the main thing filling my time. And I want to do more of it. I was on some other calls today trying to raise more money. We'll see how that goes. I would like to extend that and have a lot more money to fund research quickly. I think it's very, very important.

Okay, that's a great segue to some other stuff I wanted to ask you about. So it's been about 2 months since the launch of Fast Grants, and I was just looking it up, it's been almost 2 years since the launch of Emergent Ventures, uh, more, more broadly. Um, give us a bit of a retrospective on these projects. How have they gone? What have you learned?

Emergent Ventures is kind of the mothership for Fast Grants. Emergent Ventures is designed at discovering and supporting talent was previously undiscovered. So it's mostly focused toward young people. Often it's people in other countries, but not always. And it's people with strange projects, people who are outsiders or not wanting to go the usual route and who need some support or some certification. And the way Emergent Ventures works, it's essentially a one-page application. We never ask you, like, what college did you go to? We never ask for a vita or CV. We don't ask for letters of recommendation. I speak to people who have promising ideas, and if they can sell me on the idea, we will fund them. There's only one person who can say no, and that's me. So my hope is that lowers risk aversion. We take a lot of chances. We've now supported over 90 people. As you know, Jason, you are one of them. And we'll see how it all goes. A lot of projects have been interrupted, of course, by the lockdown. But I'm very optimistic about the program.

Yeah. What have you changed your mind about, or what has surprised you, you know, since the launch of this a couple of years ago?

Well, the thing I didn't understand at first is that publicity will be bad for the program. So we've deliberately kept it, not secret, it's fully publicly out there. You can Google to the website, you can talk to people who've received it. There's zero advertising, zero attempts to run after media, which could be done if desired. Notion that learning about Emergent Ventures is itself main part of the application process. I hadn't understood that at the beginning. It's a kind of puzzle, like can you find your way to this thing? And realize that you ought to apply for it. And that's the best filter we have. If it became too well known, I don't think it would work that well anymore.

Huh, interesting. Um, when you launched it, you proposed that you might do it for a finite period of time, and you talked about the program scaling by other people copying it. What are your latest thoughts on, are you now going to do this forever, and how would you scale it? Do you still think it would be scaled that way, or?

If I could do it forever, that would be a truly great deal for me. I would take that one. We raised initially $4 million, which was kind of the initial challenge from the Thiel Foundation, from Peter Thiel. And my vision then was, well, I'll spend down the $4 million, and then it will be over. Now there's over $6 million, not additional funds I asked for that just came in the door. And my vision is I will spend down the $6 million, but I've also created scouts. I have two scouts who are out there, younger than I am, and they find people and they make their own judgments. And as Emergent Ventures becomes better known, scouts will become better known because the scouts are still obscure. So that will keep some of the vitality of the program It will keep me from getting stale, make it not so dependent on just my judgment. The scouts have the ability to just make grants without needing my okay. So the future of the program is scouts. A lot of foundations have talked to me about copying Emergent Ventures or incorporating elements of it into what they do. They've said they want to do this. I wouldn't say I doubt them, but I'm not really sure how much they have. I think it's very hard to copy. You need one person really spending a lot of time on it, and both caring about it, not giving a damn too much about what other people think, and I'm not the only person like that.

That does seem to be a scarce resource.

It's a scarce resource.

Yeah.

And I'm not paid to do it at all, so. I do think it will have an end. Before the end comes, it will evolve into being very Scout-driven.

Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, that's an interesting scaling model. Okay, great. I would like to open it up in about 10 minutes, let's say, to sort of questions from the audience. So folks, just go ahead and put questions in the chat, and we'll just do it that way. Moving on, so let's talk about progress studies. So you and Patrick Collison put this article out in The Atlantic last year, and you coined this term progress studies and sort of called for more attention on this. So in my perception, since that, you know, you kind of talked about it as— you put it out there sort of an academic discipline. Since then, I've seen a you know, kind of a community grew up around it, and there's something of a progress movement now. Um, and, and I've seen that, you know, some of the, the axioms of progress studies are around the things like progress is real and it's important and it's worth studying, but there seems to be almost a whole advocacy sort of effort that is needed around those basic points. So, like, what's your thought on this? Is there a need for progress advocacy or sort of a movement in you know, and that versus the studies or academic discipline?

I'm never sure what one means when one says a movement. Like, are we a movement? I don't know, it seems to me like we're more just a bunch of people raising awareness of the idea that scientists, academics should study much more how to improve science, how to improve science funding. And this was all before COVID-19. I think the case for progress studies now really looks very strong, and a lot of people have sort of been converted. They may not even know it's like this thing called progress studies. They just feel like we need better science and we need it very quickly. So a lot of that battle, I think, if you would call it that, has gone very well. I've never viewed it as some kind of movement like some particular set of people own. It's a general idea that can suffuse all thinking, like the notion that people have human rights, or a certain kind of equal treatment, you know, under the law is very important. That progress matters, it's an idea. It will be embodied in particular movements. So far, I think it's done well, it's gotten a lot of attention, but I don't want to institutionalize it too much, that's also limiting. That said, I'd love to see more particular institutions working on it, but there are more.

Say more about that, about institutionalizing it and especially sort of progress studies inside academia versus outside.

Well, I think you need it both inside and outside. But within academia, it's still the case a lot of the best science is done in academia. If you ask like who understands the Industrial Revolution, better than anyone in the world. I would nominate people and they're both gonna speak to you. It's great. One is Deirdre McCloskey and the other is Joel Mokyr.

Yeah, I'm really excited for those.

Yeah, they're phenomenal. And the fact that they're professors is not an accident. It's like their full-time job to understand that thing and some other things. So you've gotta keep that, but I would like to see more people in academia study economic growth, study the growth of science, Then if it just stays in academia, that's also a waste. Academia doesn't rule the world. I certainly don't want it to rule the world. It has to get to actual thinking, living, creating, doing people. So the two are complements. Social media, of course, are still relatively new, super important. The progress studies idea very actively alive on social media. I find that very heartening. Because something people feel is needed. They're a bit sick of kind of left-wing versus right-wing and a lot of the standard political issues. Maybe they have their views, you know, fine. They're kind of solutions-oriented, I think. They want something a bit different. It's not just polarized back and forth, insults, whatever. And I think Progress Studies provides that.

Yeah, yep, totally. Where would you like to see it go from here? What are some of the next steps?

Well, I would like you to do much more with this course and set up programs you've started. That's one of my biggest wishes. I'm very bullish about that. I think in the academy there's been a resurgence of interest in economic history. That was already underway. That's a good thing for progress studies. Decline of status for people who just do pure theory. I think that's a good thing. So I see some positive academic trends. I think too many academics, they're still just narrow careerists and not thinking big picture enough, not working enough with the rest of the world. And I would like to see nonprofits have more special dedicated programs on like, how do we improve the funding of science? How do we speed up the rate of progress? And I'm not seeking to push like any single particular answer. If I had all those answers, I would just argue for the answers, but I'm quite sure I don't. They seem to me undervalued questions and among the most important questions. Yep.

Okay, gonna wrap up with a couple of, uh, final questions. What's a book that no one has written that you would love to read?

Biography of a very smart person written up to the age of 20. How the person actually was formed. Now, John Stuart Mill did write such a book, his autobiography. That was a long time ago. It's one of my favorite books. I would like to see more books like that. To me, that would be interesting. Autobiographies, totally honest, stopping at the age of 20.

Stopping at the age of 20.

21, whatever. The important stuff happens early.

Interesting. Yeah, that seems to be the kind of thing that an autobiographer could get that a biographer has a hard time getting into. The earliest part, I find the early part of biography is always the boring parts. He was born in a log cabin and his father was a doctor and his mother was a da-da-da-da. And that stuff, I find generally doesn't tell you very much.

Correct. And it is boring. But it doesn't have to be. And how people actually got to their ideas, figured out what they were good at, how they dealt with the conflicts or boredoms of school. By the time you're 20, I mean, I hardly think you're set. You've been through so much and your capabilities are often quite formed, even if you still need to be trained. That's what I would focus on. Yep.

Um, all right, and last question before we go to the audience. This is especially for our high schoolers, uh, in the audience. What advice, uh, that is commonly given to teenagers do you think is actually wrong, and what would you say instead?

Well, I'm not sure what advice is commonly given to you, like what your teachers and guidance counselors tell you. I'm genuinely very unsure. As to what that is. I would say this— probably you're told this already, but I'm not sure it's ever made that important to you— work your way into a small group of very smart friends whom you interact with all the time. That's critically important. And find one or two really good mentors who are typically going to be older and will help you out and actually care about you. And again, I doubt if that's totally new advice to most or any of you, but I think those things are at least 5x more important than they're usually made out to be. And all this like obsessing over what school and this, I don't know. I mean, yes, you should care, but all that advice seems a little overrated to me. Oh, you've got to be on the lacrosse team, or I don't even know what to tell you. My goodness. I think it would, might horrify me if I heard Cool, and I'll just put in a plug.

If you want to meet a bunch of other high schoolers who are interested in progress, sign up for this Progress Studies for Young Scholars course. The first group of students, which I'm personally instructing, has been just great. Tyler, by the way, a few of them heard about the course because you posted about it on Marginal Revolution. They read your blog. So, so it's been, it's been fantastic. All right, let's go to some audience questions. We've got a bunch of stuff in the chat, and I'll just pick some to read. I'm going to privilege some of the students in the course. That's one of the benefits you get. Alex Kaysen asks, with China expanding their influence in the world, Belt and Road Initiative, more lax regulations on science, et cetera, growing domestic tech industry, could you see China possibly overtaking the US in leading human progress?

I think China, in a few areas, will be quite strong. Some parts of biomedicine, possibly artificial intelligence, and then controlling human behavior in ways that I find actually somewhat nasty and unpalatable. Their ability to throw a lot of resources at a problem quickly exceeds ours, but they have major disadvantages: lack of free speech, critical discourse back and forth. They're much weaker. Their universities are far more politicized. Just their core institutions for evaluating and debating ideas are much, much weaker than ours. Their rates of plagiarism and fraud are through the ceiling. So them displacing us overall to me seems quite far off, probably never, insofar as you can use that word. But you know, is it possible they'll have a good coronavirus vaccine before we do. It might even be likely, not just possible. So they're going to have their triumphs, and we should applaud that and learn from it.

Sam Enright asks, would higher or lower growth rates be better for lowering global catastrophic/existential risks? And maybe I'll just ask you to comment more broadly on sort of the question of existential risk, something the effective altruist community is very concerned about and its relation to progress.

When people refer to existential risk, usually they mean the world ending, which would be bad, right? Hard to think of anything worse than that. In my view, the main existential risk is nuclear weapons. I think we should think about nuclear weapons much more and how to limit their use. Since they have not been used in a long time, this has become a non-issue. I view that as a major mistake. Economic growth being faster or slower, it's not obvious to me that that lowers or raises the risk of a new nuclear war. Probably neutral as far as I can tell. So I'm not worried about higher growth making that existential risk worse. Another set of existential risks are things like asteroids hitting the Earth. We may not ever have an option of true defense, but more economic growth would give us some greater chance than we have right now. A big risk, I don't think it's existential, it's not going to kill us all, but it's still a very big risk, would be climate change. For that we need a lot more progress in science, better batteries, better solar power, whatever the other innovations are going to be. We need a lot more creative thinking. We're not gonna just like burn all the factories and cars and live like hobbits. So we need to figure out ways to do these things that are green. I think finally we'll get there. I want to get there more quickly. For that we need more scientific progress. If we just get the growth and not the scientific progress, obviously carbon emissions could be worse. So I think we need the science too, not just like making more plastic toys in a dirty factory somewhere.

Yeah. What about the hazards of technology itself, especially as for sort of catastrophic or existential risks? You know, people talk about bioengineered pandemics or artificial intelligence risks or things like that.

Well, as we all know from history, pandemics were a very, very high risk to begin with. The Black Death killing a third of Europe. So I think science on net It's a big improvement there. We're going to drive out malaria. We've basically driven out polio. Smallpox is done with, we hope. Science beat it back. It'll be science that beats back coronavirus. Is there new residual risk from science itself? Of course. But it seems to me there, on net, science is a big plus. Now, could it be Elon Musk thing? We like building AI. Skynet goes live. It enslaves us. Turns us into paperclips or something.

I don't know.

I'm not a specialist in that area. It seemed to me like stupid humans are by far the bigger risk, not super smart machines. And just stopping stupid humans from being stupid with each other, like World War I, World War II, but with more powerful weapons. I'm like 100 times more worried about that than I'm worried about like Terminator.

Yep.

Okay, moving on. One of our high school students asks for general advice for someone going into undergrad economics with regards to long-term goals and what to focus on.

Well, don't assume what you're going to end up doing is what you think you want to do. That's advice for everyone. You know, I started off as an academic, I'm still an academic, but I spend really a big chunk of my time managing projects I don't even know if the word manager is the right word. I don't exactly manage them. In some way I lead them, I raise money for them. I've been a kind of innovator in communication space. So my actual life now, at least two-thirds of it, is not like directly an academic job in the sense that I started it with. I don't think you really know what you're going to do. I would again stress this point to find mentors early on who gives a damn about you, and get your small group. And I would just repeat that advice kind of mindlessly, double down on it. Get your small group, have them be good, learn from them, get your mentors, doesn't have to be a lot. I think that's good advice for most people.

Another question from one of our high school students. How much is progress studies— and I'm not sure if this actually meant progress studies or just progress— dependent on societies holding a Jewish/Christian view of progress?

Very good question. I've thought about that a lot. If you think about much earlier eras, quite a bit more progress came from China than came from the West. I'm not sure we understand why that was and why it ended, but clearly things like paper, gunpowder, a lot of—

Pre-Industrial Revolution.

You know, came from China. Then in medieval times, the Arabic world had better science than the West. That ended. You can debate why. Ask Deirdre and Joel, their views. But it seems to me it doesn't have to be the West. Now you have Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, other places making real advances. It's not just copying. They're very creative, innovative societies, including in music and the arts. So like, why should it just be the West? I think humans are capable of it. You need the right conceptual matrices. I actually think historically Christianity has been a help, but it doesn't have to be Western or Christian.

In what way has it been a help?

I think the notion of the individual is brought to the forefront in Christianity. The idea that the individual with the highest status was a victim of state power and violence, rather than a conqueror, has been instrumental, or at least extremely helpful, in building up Western democracy, rule of law, individual human rights, the very foundations of the religion. Great benefit. Christianity has had other negatives that may have Philosophy of imperialism also, right? But we have that out there now, so it's just not restricted to Westerners, Christians, Jews, whatever. It's there for everyone. You look at the innovations now coming from India, South India. I mean, there are some Christians in India, but that's not why it's happening. A pretty phenomenal just surge of talent, and they're gonna ride that. That's gonna be amazing to watch. And it's not really mainly a Christian thing at all.

Yeah.

Okay. Another question from one of our students. Julia Shore asks, uh, so there's low-hanging— there's a lack of low-hanging fruit in traditional topics like chemistry or physics, but isn't there low-hanging fruit in newer subjects like robotics or AI?

I would say yes. Now, you can debate which are the fields with low-hanging fruit. I fully believe we will get out of what I call the great stagnation. It's a matter of time. When I say time, I don't mean 10,000 years. I mean it will be well within your lifetimes. And I do think robotics, AI, and biomedicine are some of the leading areas. It's worth arguing about what are the leading areas. I don't think it's self-evident. My picks are pretty close to yours. And some of the areas I think will surprise us. Like before lasers, and radio were done. It wasn't obvious those were going to be big breakthroughs. It's not like 40 years people worked on radio. How are we going to get radio to work? At some point it sort of happened and then people did it. So I think we're going to have breakthroughs in areas we don't really see or predict well at all. Yep.

Um, Sorry, I'm reading a question. I'll just throw this out there. This is from Juan David Campolargo, who's one of our students. One cause of stagnation might be the focus on fake growth and not real growth, encouraging tech and science. What are some tactical strategies we can do to achieve real growth? I'll just let you interpret that.

Well, as a tactical strategy, I would like to see us debureaucratize society. Our government, but also the private sector, also nonprofits. There are too many different layers of approval for almost everything. And our ability to move fast on so many issues has dwindled over the decades. So that would be my main tactical thrust, is to look at particular institutions, try to come up with ways of doing what they do. Uh, we just mentioned India. Indian hospitals have been phenomenal innovators, say, in heart surgery. The idea that you take individual doctors, have them do the same thing hundreds or even thousands of times in a row, same operation, and just completely master it and supply that service way cheaper, higher quality than you'll get in most Western hospitals. And they did that because they were not tied to an old model. Of a Western hospital where everything has to go through approval from all these boards and all these regulators. Of course, some approvals were needed, but to some extent, Indian medical institutions just did this, and it works, and it's better than a lot of what the US is doing. So that would be one example that, you know, we have now, but mostly it's in India.

Question from Miranda Carger, uh, is there a finite or infinite amount of progress that can be made?

Oh, that's a deep metaphysical question. You know, I don't think mankind will conquer the whole galaxy. My best guess is we have some number of thousands of years on this Earth, and then nature itself will do us in. Volcano, asteroid, supernova, I don't know what. I think it's finite.

All right, class, take that as a challenge.

Way past your lifetimes. Like, don't— But do I think like 80,000 years from now we'll be sitting around talking like this? I don't. I think it will all be dust.

Well, these things matter to some people. Some people take this very seriously.

Yeah.

Okay. Question from Benjamin. Suppose we were to reach accurate conclusions about the factors that trigger progress. Will we need to maintain constant speculation? That is, will these factors change and mutate? Essentially, he's sort of asking, is progress studies going to have to keep going forever because the answers will keep changing over time?

Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I think I mentioned my book I wrote in 2010. It's only 10 years ago, but every year I've just had new ideas or discarded old ideas, seen things very differently. So I don't see why there should ever be a stop to just having to revise and update. The world surprises me in so many ways, especially 2020, right? But other years too. So always be a fallibilist, always be open, always revise. Where people who like are telling you like, these are the bad people, these are the stupid people, uh, be open.

Uh, from Long—

Jason, you got cut off. I'm not hearing you.

Looks like Jason is frozen.

If I speak, do you hear me?

Yep, we can hear you.

I'll try to invent what question he might have given me. Uh, what did he start it with? I don't even remember.

We have one that says, what's in— from Alex, what in your opinion on Nick Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis as it relates to technological progress?

Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at Oxford. I think he's one of the smartest people today. He's a great person to read, and he sort of thinks, lives, breathes like a philosopher. And he's one of the people who've popularized and developed this notion of existential risk. A lot of people think there's some way to make our world invulnerable, like to settle space colonies. Uh, more skeptical than they are. I'm not against their people trying. I'm very happy to see Elon Musk say he wants to die on Mars. I wish him the best of luck. At the end of the day, I suppose I see the speed of light as a barrier that's difficult to break, outer space as extremely inhospitable, and I don't think we will succeed in diversifying our prospects for life on planet Earth across a much larger area. Moon colony, Mars colony may well happen. But if Earth is wiped out, I suppose I think it's the end of it. I'm not sure that's what the question meant, but it's the answer I decided to give you, because it's the answer where I have an opinion. Kaysen, are you back?

May have lost connection.

I'll try another question from the group.

OK. We have probably time for one more. So I see one from Trey. To what extent is government intervention in the economy and other sectors a hindrance on growth?

Well, it's a hindrance and it's an aid. Governments do many useful things and they do many harmful things. I don't want to give you a partisan answer, inflict upon you my exact view of how large governments should be. It just seems to me the balance of harmful versus positive has gone way too far in the harmful direction, especially in the United States.. And we could do a much better job, have much better governance. And this is just a totally pressing need. And you see it. I mean, coronavirus was in China. We had 2 full months to prepare. And we failed that miserably. And I know people want to blame— Democrats want to blame President Trump. Republicans want to blame the governor and mayor of New York. I mean, I think both of those blames are true and deserved. Ultimately, in the final analysis, blame falls on almost everyone. Very few of us reacted with any kind of urgency when we could have, even if other institutions were not doing their part. You know, the great hero here actually was the NBA. They shut down the season when most other groups were doing nothing. Cost them a lot of money. They had the guts to do it. But we should have been doing things like that in January, not mid-March. So I think right now a lot in our country is badly broken. And you can feel that way whether you think you're left-wing, right-wing, progressive, libertarian, some other weird thing, whatever. It just seems at this point self-evidently true to me.

Hi, I dropped off, now I'm back.

Ah, good.

Hello. All right, unfortunately we only have time for a few more questions. One from Peter Hartree: In an interview with David Perel, you said, "The real scarce input is the preacher, the moral leader, the inspirer, the mentor, the role model. That is what is scarce in our world, and we don't even know it." Can you just comment on this? Why is this scarce? Why is this so important?

If I recall correctly, that was in the context of discussing education. I think less and less Do you need your teachers to shove facts down your throat? We already had Encyclopedia Britannica. Now we have the internet, Wikipedia, YouTube, right? Phenomenal resources. Your teachers don't actually have better information. I'm sure you figured that out a long time ago. What they can do is help you figure out what you care about, what you're good at, motivate you, get you interested, direct you, maybe bring you together with other students. Teachers have never been more important as role models, sources of inspiration, kind of showing you futures you wouldn't have imagined otherwise. When it comes to just like facts, I mean Wikipedia and YouTube, my blog for that matter, kick your butts. So don't appreciate them less. Look to them for different things. The notion of a smart teacher who's memorized a lot of facts, It's just not valuable the way it used to be.

All right, maybe the last one. I like this one from Juan David. What do you believe is true, even though you can't prove it, about progress and stagnation?

That there is an objectively correct answer as to what we should do and what we should not do. You know, a future that is bright and prosperous and relatively free is possible, and that is in some sense embedded in the objective furniture of the universe, that that is something just better with a capital B, maybe is an irreducible thing. You don't have to back it up with a religion or with a God, but that there's such a thing as better and we can strive for it and achieve it. And I know I can't prove that, but yes, at the very bottom of my heart, I believe it. And that is now me.

—in creature.

No information in that one. Just preaching.

No, I think that was great. I agree with you, and I think that's a great spot to end. If, for the people who don't already follow you in some way, what is the best way for them to follow you and keep in touch?

Marginal Revolution is my blog. I've blogged every day for 17 years. I think that's better than following me on Twitter. But I am on Twitter. I don't like tweet that much my thoughts. I retweet a fair amount. I would say follow my blog. I have a podcast, Conversations with Tyler.

All right, excellent. Tyler, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. Everybody, I'm really sorry we didn't get to all the questions. Tyler, we really should have scheduled twice the time if we could have.

Thank you so much, Jason. I'm a big believer in what you're doing. Honored to be supporting you and look forward, you know, to the next act. Thank you so much.

All right, have a good one, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Till next time, everyone.