Tyler Cowen

Tetragrammaton— Tetra gram matum?

There's an optimal speed of revelation for this stuff.

Right?

If you learned it all on one day, like in The Matrix, oh, it's the matrix, you go crazy. But if you learn 2% over the course of 2, 3 years, maybe you can handle it.

When do you think you first started waking up?

13 or 14. But waking up then was very different from now. It was all different set of charades. Like inflation then was high. People thought there was no way it could be brought down. Pretty early on, I realized, well, that was wrong. You just needed the will to do it. And of course, we did it.

How did you know that it was wrong at such a young age?

Well, I read a lot, talked to some people, but you make your best guess at that age. And there's no internet, so it's just very different standards. You can't ever track down all the different points of view on any topic the way you can now.

How do you judge incoming information? How do you verify it?

I ask, how does this fit in with broader lessons from history? First of all, it's not that exceptions get ruled out automatically, but they face a higher bar. Whereas if I read a tale of politicians being corrupt, like, I'll challenge the details, but it's like, okay, I'm ready to believe this. You look at the source. You look at who else is promoting it. You look at the actual quality of the argument. You look at what you might call the documentation or pretended documentation. You can wait a bit of time and see what the responses are, the criticisms, and you make your best guess then.

How would you say your relationship to what a trusted source would be have changed over the course of your life?

Oh, a lot. I mean, media, mainstream media, I used to I don't know if I used to trust them more. I used to mistrust them in different ways. So now I think it's more likely in many cases a kind of cover-up, whereas back then I think the Walter Cronkites of the world believed it all. And that's different. So Cronkite was late to realize the Vietnam War was going poorly. But I have the sense that was pretty sincere. And today, like, oh, there's no Kamala Harris press conference on today's Black Monday. There's no chance that's sincere. Like, she's not too busy, or they just decided, like, cynically, well, she's not ready to give a good press conference. We can't do this. And that's pretty different. I think foreign policy, the lies have been more consistent. Like, something like Gulf of Tonkin. Leading to the Vietnam War. I don't think that was sincere. I think that was just a kind of scam, say. But domestic policy, I think there was a lot more sincerity in earlier times, albeit with a large number of mistakes.

What were the moments where it really started shifting?

I think with the internet becoming widespread, you can see up close experts and politicians and you properly become more cynical about them. But that proper cynicism, it also makes the equilibrium worse because when no one trusts anything, confusions are very hard to clear up. So the actual quality of what people believe deteriorates as well. And I think that's where we are now.

Tell me about the theoretical versus the real world in general.

The world of theory is alluring because you can mold it. You can turn it off. You can look at it when you want to. You can play in it. You can make it nicer. You can use it as a talisman to protect you against your worries. And it doesn't really bite you back because it's the world of theory. So it's a way you can learn many things, but you need to realize you've been learning them in this somewhat dangerous play world, precisely because there's no feedback. You can learn a lot of dangerous things that aren't true. The real world comes at you very fast and very muddied, and it's typically quite confusing unless it's some very simple event. And you start thinking about it, and then some other thing has happened very quickly. So that's harder to deal with. And there's some kind of just balance you need where where both worlds keep on defeating you. But if you can weigh them off against each other a bit, maybe you can narrow the scope of the epistemic defeat you face every day. Like the last month, we're talking in early August 2024, so much has happened, just hard to keep up with. And today, between after breakfast, before lunch, well, there was a coup d'état in Bangladesh and we talked about like 6 big world events of the day, and that wasn't even one of them.

Wow.

And that's over 100 million people. And we're still not sure, like, how good or bad that will be. The initial accounts, people were just saying, this is bad. Now there's some people saying, well, maybe this is actually good. The woman who was in power, she had abused her station. Maybe the army will behave responsibly. I don't really feel able to judge that, but you can just see the stories evolving.

You remember when we were young, if you heard that someone was an academic, you knew not to take what they said so seriously.

It's not what I was taught. I just didn't hear that much about academics till I started discovering it on my own.

I see.

Yeah.

I remember in childhood that there were like the people who did things in the world and then there were the academics.

Yeah.

And you listen to the people who did things in the real world because they got the experience of the reaction of trying these things, whereas the academics were more living in a fantasy of what could be, but often wasn't.

I think I agree with that, but I view it more as checks and balances. So if you think of politicians as the ultimate doers of things, if you only listen to them, you would be quite ill-informed.

Do you think of them as the ultimate doers of things?

Along with interest groups, bureaucracies, militaries, yes. So it's somehow you need to aggregate all of these highly incorrect sources of information. And I think like a knowledge of academic history is useful for just understanding what has gone on in our past. And there aren't that many doers you can easily get that from. There certainly are. Many doers who know a lot of history, but it's not the efficient way to learn history. I still think reading history books, mostly written by professors, not always, is the best way to learn history. And then talking to those people and then just visiting historical places is useful.

Isn't that idea, though, the history always being written by the winners, something to be considered?

Oh, sure. But if you had to side with what's written by the winners or the losers, I'd take the winners. Not in every case, Like World War II, there are Nazis around who've written Nazi histories of World War II. I'd take the ones written by the winners. That's an extreme case, but I think on average, the winners are winning for good reasons. Not in every case.

My understanding is that Russia won World War II and the books are not written by the Russians.

Well, there's plenty of Soviet books about that, and it's still disputed how much the Russians won World War II. So without American Lend-Lease, I don't know if they would have lost, but I'm not sure they would have won. So it is a truly joint effort. And the Russians, in a sense, won the war by losing so badly and causing so many German troops to pour into the Soviet Union that then America and other places, you could open up these new fronts. So they won in a funny kind of way, just by losing so much territory. It's a very ignoble way of winning.

So, uh, and so many people, they lost so many.

Yeah.

Tens of millions.

Yeah.

So yeah, I do think you should read sources on a major war from a bunch of different countries, but Western historians will tell you the Soviet Union had a major, major role in winning World War II. I don't think that's held as some secret.

In the years since we spoke last, have there been any countries that you've noticed do particularly well and any that have done particularly poorly? That was not so clear last year when we spoke?

Well, I visited El Salvador a week ago and I spent 4 days there and seemed to be doing well a year ago, but I hadn't been in about 10 years. And now I went to see. And if you look at crime rates, they have the lowest crime rate or murder rate, rather, in all of the Americas. And murder is the easiest crime to measure. The economy is harder to tell, like measured GDP growth is not great. But if you look at measured growth and what is called consumption, like what are the people buying, I suspect there's a lot of off-the-books enterprises. The people are earning more than official GDP numbers indicate. So I came away with a pretty positive portrait.

Is that a good or bad thing when people are earning more than the GDP indicates?

Well, given that it makes sense to have an off-the-books business, it's a good thing. But ideally, you want your tax and regulatory regime to be such where people go and make the business legal and pay their fair share of tax, but they're poor and you can't blame them if going legal means big burdens on you and they stay off the books. Maybe it's a pupusa stand, you know, in the central square, and that's not going to be reported as income. So you can't blame them, but you are better off in a setting where many more things are legal. So El Salvador is doing better than I had thought. A bunch of countries are doing worse, like Ecuador and Peru. They seem to be seeing collapse of governance. Bangladesh had its coup d'état this morning. We'll see how that develops, but they probably are doing worse. So there have been a lot of changes, I would say.

Let's talk more about Salvador since you were just there. Tell me the experience of being there, what you saw, what it felt like energetically. What did it feel like and how did it feel differently when you were there 10 years ago?

When I was there 10 years ago, I spent months researching the safety conditions. Where was it safe to go, not safe to go? And I went to a pretty safe part. I felt pretty safe there, but I was extremely cautious about my movements. And when I walked downtown, which I did on the last day of the trip, I knew I was in a very dangerous area, and I was quite scared and walked hurriedly and looked over my shoulder and It was okay, but I knew I was in the midst of trouble. I went back, did the same walk downtown. This time it felt like being in, you know, Toronto or something. Zero fear. Women walking alone, kids out, people laughing. Seemed pretty good. So that was a direct test. Went all over the country to different parts with basically zero prep. In terms of safety. Talked to a lot of people. I asked them, like Uber drivers, "Oh, is it really safe here?" Everyone said yes. It just seemed obviously safe. Now, this has come at a considerable cost, but El Salvador had to do something, and so far it's succeeding.

On the list of things when you go to places to look at, is safety a consideration?

I'll go almost anywhere. I won't go to North Korea. There's places I'm not allowed to go or places where I would just be captured immediately.

Where are you not allowed to go?

Iran. I mean, technically I'm not allowed to spend money there, but in essence, that's the same thing.

And why is that?

Well, right now there's a war about to break out. But even before this war was imminent, there were US sanctions against Iran. I see. So my credit cards don't work if I spent dollars there. Well, maybe I wouldn't be caught, but it is against the law. It would be hard for me to get there. There are ways I could do it, but it's just not going to happen. So there's some places like that. But, you know, I went to Lagos, Nigeria, supposed to be very dangerous, walked around at night on my own. It actually was fine. So usually I'm willing to go, but I do put in a lot of research when it might be dangerous.

What are the places that you go to that feel dangerous as opposed to You're told they're dangerous.

Well, you're told almost everywhere is dangerous, and that's usually a lie, right?

Mm.

You go to so much of Africa and you're supposed to feel it's dangerous, but just so often it's not. Well, if you're an American, there's associations of race and crime. You're supposed to be more nervous. There are some African cities that have very high crime rates, but so much of Africa is extremely, extremely safe. You know, close to zero crime against outsiders. But you have to know where that is. And even Lagos, which is supposed to be one of the worst places in the world, just common sense tells you a city with that many people has a lot of normal life, a lot of business, a lot of people in the streets. And if you approach it with some modicum of common sense, there's a safe enough trip you can do to Lagos. And I did it. And it was fantastically exciting. There's a snap, crackle, pop feeling in the streets, like a bit like the older New York. You could hear great music every single night without even having to work at it very hard. Wonderful art scene. So all that directly or indirectly also contributes to safety. But there are some places like if I went to Port-au-Prince, Haiti now, I'm pretty sure within 2 hours I would just be kidnapped and done. And I'm just not going to do that. So you have to pick and choose. But most people think they can't go most places when in fact they can. And I think it's partly what we're supposed to believe, like where we live, wherever that may be, is so wonderful and special. These other countries are so backward. But you need to break free of those illusions somewhat.

Tell me about some of the most different places you've been, and you can go from place to place. Let's start with Lagos, compared to Lagos, what would be the polar opposite of Lagos in the places you've been?

Well, one very different place I went to, I think this was 1997, was South Yemen, which is now where these rocket attacks are coming from, the Houthis. So Yemen then, and I believe now, is literally a medieval society. So at the time—

And where is it located exactly?

Sort of below Saudi Arabia.

Below Saudi Arabia.

And at times there have been two Yamens. Even when there's one Yemen, there's typically some kind of civil war brewing at some level. And Yemen can be very dangerous or very safe. In terms of the natural underlying rate of crime, it's very, very low. It's a highly traditional society. But in the past, now we're talking about the past before the current war, every now and then they would go on kidnapping binges. And also take foreigners just to get publicity. In most cases— this is now earlier on— they would treat the foreigners very well because the foreigners were kind of guests. But still, you don't want to be held by Yemenis for 9 months, no matter how polite they are to you. Things have since heated up. I mean, you just couldn't go at all. But to go to a society where there's so little modernity— all the women wore veils, all the men carried daggers, Maybe 80% of the men chew this leaf called khat, which they were addicted to. I believe that still goes on.

What is that leaf? What does it do?

It's a stimulant. It's like coca leaves in the Andes. It gives you a high. It's not like snorting cocaine. I've never done it, but you're not in a normal state of mind. So you have a country where like 80% of the men do this every day. How's that country going to develop? It's going to be weird, to say the least. But to see that and see the big piles of cot leaves in the markets and then people chewing them all the time and being somewhat high, very bizarre. And I stayed in the nicest hotel in the center of town of the capital city, Sana'a. And even the clerk at the desk did not speak English back then. There just was no English and no way to easily use the internet to translate for you. So you just dealt with it. Whereas you go to Lagos, so much English there. Of course, it's one of the languages of Nigeria. And there's this attempt to be hypermodern in certain ways, even though it's very poor and very corrupt. Whereas Yemen was making zero attempt to be modern in any way whatsoever at that time.

What's the most interesting island you've ever been to?

Can I say Japan?

You can. That's an island.

Yeah, it's been a nation state in a mature way for so long, it's also incredibly, incredibly safe, and it feels very safe. And the first time I went to Japan, it felt like the future. It was the most exciting place I had been. This was sort of at the peak of the boom years. And you go there now, it feels like an old folks' home, which does an amazing job catering to tourists. So it's still fun, but it's lost the sense of thrill. It feels like a very gracefully managed decline, done perfectly, that the whole world will envy, but a decline nonetheless.

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Tell me the story of the Japanese boom. What happened?

There was a bubble of sorts. So just to go back in time, obviously Japan loses World War II. They adopt a constitution imposed on them by the Americans. This is conducive to economic growth. They have a lot of good economic policies that enable their electronics, auto industries to develop. Japan starts becoming wealthy. By the time of the 1980s, Americans are obsessed with Japan and people are believing, "Well, the Japanese will take over the global economy." This to me was never a credible view. It would be one of those earlier views.

It's a tiny country.

Tiny country. Smaller population. Very productive people. A lot of strengths. Anything that has to do with design or quality or refinement, arguably they would be the most advanced culture in the world. And that shows up in their industrial products both then and now, but not obviously the most innovative place in terms of new products. And Japan kept on getting rich, so there was all this liquidity and they had a very high savings rate. So a lot of countries, when they grow rich, the ability of people to spend the money does not catch up with how quickly they're earning it. And we saw this in China more recently. So savings becomes very high. There's this big liquid pool of resources which then gets invested in things. But you have a tendency for bubbles to arise. So that kind of financial capitalism is relatively new to a lot of these places. Asset prices rise. It's viewed as a get-rich-quick kind of scheme. People pour more and more money into these markets. How something like Tokyo real estate, it could be like a single parking spot in a Tokyo building at that time could be worth more than a Manhattan skyscraper. Wow. That was just insane. And at the time I'm thinking like, well, you know, this can't last. I don't see the Japanese as innovative enough. I don't think they'll ever catch up to America. And it turned out that was right. And then there's this point in time where the bubble bursts. Stock prices plummet.

But why did the bubble burst?

At some point, you know, the system is reliant on new money being fed in all the time. Everyone's expecting prices to go up a lot each year, and if they don't, they'll panic and pull the money out. But at some point, there just isn't enough savings or liquidity there to sustain very high price increases in asset markets, real estate markets. The $2,000 melon in the Japanese supermarket, all those anecdotes we all remember. At some point, the money isn't there. And then it's like, "Whew!" It's that old Road Runner cartoon where he notices he's pedaling his feet but not standing on anything.

Yeah.

So Japanese economy falls. But one thing they did manage, they avoided high persistent unemployment in a way that Western economies often have not avoided. That's to their credit. But they kept alive all these zombie companies, these zombie banks that actually probably should have gone under. So they just stagnate. And starting around 1990, I think it was the year, Japanese economy, it gets into this groove where it's basically growing sort of 1% a year. And then after that, their birth rates fall. So their current, it's called total fertility rate, it's about 1.3%. So that means, you know, two parents will create on average 1.3 kids. In the longer run, that's a disaster. Your country loses people, there's fewer consumers. Talk about supplies of money savings and liquidity.

So the older people die and nobody's there to fill those slots.

Yeah, say 1 kid a family, 1.3 on average. So that also just keeps the economy in this rut, this state of stagnation. And the Japanese tried very hard to get out of the stagnation, so their government kept on borrowing money and spending it. With the view that, oh, if we just spend more money, we'll get back to the glory days. But that was never going to work because their real problems are structural, like they're not innovative enough. Top companies such as Toyota and Sony, you know, were of the past. Toyota is still a very important company, but they're not really a product leader. They just make very good cars. So their companies are stagnating. They're borrowing too much money, sort of paving over Japan, putting down a lot of concrete. So the Japanese government debt is extremely high, like ratio of government debt to their GDP, it's I think about 200, 220%. That's higher than it should be. So their attempts to prime the pump didn't work. They're still hanging in there, but we're now at the point where a place like Poland, which 40 years ago was a very poor country, is about as rich as Japan. Poland did catch up and has more energy and vitality. And if you go to Poland, you feel it on the streets. So Japan, the currency value became much lower, and as we're speaking, it's in the midst of a financial crisis. So the very day we're talking, equity prices in Japan fell by 12%.

Wow.

I think that's the most ever, or it's close to the most ever, and we'll see how that story develops. I actually think they'll take the blow and just move on, but I could be wrong.

What was the original breakthrough in manufacturing that came from Japan?

I think it was processes they had had for a long time. So if you look at older Japanese art and painting, there's something perfect about it. Or traditional Japanese music, something about it sounds perfect. They're very good at refining things to a kind of perfection. And once they had the opportunity to apply those same techniques to higher margin items like cars. They just did a great job and still do a great job. They're not about to lose that. And that's a big part of their GDP. But they've made some bets on new ideas. Like Japan has been the number one investor in hydrogen as the new form of green energy.

Has it been proven to work?

It has not been proven to work at a cost we can all afford.

I see.

Now, could the Japanese turn out to be right? Of course. But so far they're not looking right. And solar costs are falling every year. So that probably was a big mistake. They moved away from nuclear, given the earthquakes. It's understandable why they did it, but it doesn't make life any easier for them if they can't do nuclear. And then the hydrogen bet is not paying off. So they're super dependent on the Middle East for oil. We're now on the verge of a new larger war in the Middle East. Japan possibly could be a big loser from that. So just a lot of things have not gone their way. But again, they're hanging in there. Like, standard of living there is not so bad. Social conditions, excellent. You could leave your wallet somewhere, like on a park bench. The person who might steal it would be the tourist, not the resident of Tokyo.

Can a small country with a small number of people have real global impact, or is the volume a necessity?

It's close to a necessity, but you do see cases where small countries have global impact. So we're here in Italy. You can debate like what exactly was the country back then, but Florence and other parts of Tuscany, including Siena, they spread what we now call the Renaissance to much of the world. So through ideas you can, but in terms of military power, there was a brief window where the Dutch Republic and Portugal through shipping had an outsized influence because they did colonialism pretty early and pretty rapidly and took over places that weren't ready. So that would be an exceptional period of time. But for the most part, it's difficult. An example today would be Taiwan, which makes these very high-quality computer chips through TSMC. And everyone's afraid of that going offline. It could lead to a global recession. So people are very focused on Taiwan, in part because of those chips. You wouldn't say they rule or control anything. But they take on this outsized importance. And Taiwan obviously is a very small place. You can go like north to south, what, 4 or 5 hours? But it's rare for an input like that to be in so few places. So there are good chips made in South Korea. The Japanese are gearing up their chips production, which I think they go very well. And actually a bunch of companies in the US are. Which in a selective way will probably go well.

How did Taiwan become the chip place?

Partly corporate leadership, but I think they got lucky. So those chips are very important because AI is turning out to be so important. And I don't know that the Taiwanese saw that at the time. Maybe they did, but it wasn't obvious. They just thought, we're going to make these chips. It's a small country. There aren't that many other things you can do. So a lot of the top talent in Taiwan wanted to work in manufacturing. It would be as if a lot of the most talented Americans who go into finance, tech, or entertainment, like, wanted to make cars, which is not how our country has evolved. But it's going to mean your chips are really good. It's why these Biden attempts to spend all this money on catch-up chips— our talent just doesn't want to do it. They don't want to work in a factory. And earn, you know, a manufacturing wage, whereas in Taiwan they did. So I think that's a big reason why. Luck is a big reason why. But keep in mind, Taiwan was a Japanese colony for quite a while. So, so many aspects of life in Taiwan feel like Japan. So this Japanese sense of perfect, near-perfect quality refinement, the Taiwanese had some of that to begin with, picked up more of it from being so connected to Japan. And then when the time came to do chips, they had a clear lead and just built on it.

Do you know if the Taiwanese feel more connected to Japan or China?

Depends who they are. So if you are what they call native Taiwanese, which means you were there before people left mainland China during and after the Communist Revolution and your first language is Taiwanese, there's a very good chance you're pretty suspicious of the ethnic Chinese, including your own country people, and that you might side quite a bit with Japan. A very good chance of that. But the normal ethnic Chinese who came from the mainland in the late '40s, 1950s, they would be more sympathetic toward things ethnic Chinese. And it's a real division in Taiwanese society. And opinions on Taiwanese independence unification with the mainland, they depend a lot on whether it's native Taiwanese or those from the Chinese mainland and their descendants.

Have you spent time in Taiwan?

Oh, a bunch of times. It's a great country to visit.

What's it like? Describe.

Everywhere is crowded, but in a way that's exciting. Food is amazing. There's something about this heightened sense of Asia where there's signs everywhere or neon or lights and traffic and people and motorbikes. That I think Taiwan delivers to you more consistently than any other part of Asia I've been in. And it's also completely safe, high standard of living, everyone's super nice. I worry they're too nice to defend themselves.

Does it feel like a big American city?

No, it feels like a mix of Chinese and Japanese and other independent influences. The infrastructure looks very Japanese. So visually, when people arrive, they'll almost think it's a Japanese city. Now the lettering won't validate that, and culturally it's pretty different, but just the way, like, traffic lights look, street intersections look, architecture looks like the newer parts of Tokyo. I don't mean the contemporary parts, but parts that were built right after the war. Taiwan will look like that. And like, there's very, very good sushi in Taiwan. People don't expect that. That's again, Japanese influence and people there enjoy it. So it's sui generis as a country. There's incredible scenery. The bus ride down the east coast is one of the best trips I've ever taken. And then you go to the middle of the country, there are all these marble gorges. It feels very exotic. You're surrounded by marble and these canyons. It's pretty amazing.

When you would go, would you go just for curiosity or for a purpose?

I mean, curiosity is a purpose, right?

Yeah.

So I just moved to California and I thought that was my chance to do a big Asia trip. And I first went to Taiwan. I guess that was 1988. And I spent like a good 2 weeks there, really went around a lot. Just blew my mind. I'd never seen Asia before.

Pre-World War I, from then to now. How have the allegiances around the world worked and how have they changed?

Well, pre-World War I, obviously you have colonialism.

Tell me the story of colonialism first.

I would define colonialism as the attempt by various powers, typically European, to take over foreign lands and turn them into territories or being ruled by the mother country. So Britain did this, the most. At one point, the British Empire was a quarter of the globe, which is amazing. But earlier to it actually were the Dutch and Portuguese, because in terms of having the ships to get far, they got going before the British did on a larger scale. And you also had these companies set up. So like the British East India Company, the government didn't have the tax money or the resources to do this all themselves. So they'd say to a private company, we're going to charter you make you a state monopoly, part governmental but also commercial. We're going to let you farm these territories for your own profit. And in turn, we expect you to bring them under the flag in some way and make them British or Dutch. Or actually, I think the first company was from the Muscovy Company. And that's how colonialism got started, was with these companies. But as the governments grew, populations grew, more tax revenue. The governments did it themselves. So the British government, the Crown, ends up taking over India.

Tell me the thought process behind it. Was it just about manifest destiny? Having more land was better?

In the case of the British in India, the British very much believed that what they were doing was good for India.

Mm-hmm.

Some of that was self-deception, but it was also good for Britain. It was a new market for British goods. India had to be open to British goods in a way that Britain was not open to Indian goods. And Britain also thought, somewhat correctly, well, if we don't take this, some other country will, and they'll do a worse job of it. So the British colonies on average have done the best. You see this in the data. So when the British took India, it's not something I would approve of, but I think it's a very understandable decision. And there were significant benefits, some of which persist this day, most notably the English language. But at first it's the British East India Company. But in the 18th century you have a series of incidents where the British East India Company acts very brutally and also itself does not have the resources to manage India. A lot of the big problems behind British colonialism in India was the money they would spend went basically to defense and maintaining order and never to developing the human capital of the place. So they would put in infrastructure, canals, waterways, trains. But in terms of education and skills of the people, they did very little. In some ways even held people back or set different groups against each other. So India didn't develop that well. The British were unhappy, so they decided to take control away from the East India Company and put it properly under the crown. Just to say, America was under the crown, not ruled by some British company per se. And they thought, well, this is going to go better for us to put it under the crown. Maybe it was better to put it under the crown, but India still didn't grow very rapidly. And a lot of the 19th century Indian per capita income, it even goes down under British rule. So there's some investment in the future with railways and the language, and maybe like building it out as a more coherent nation-state, but it doesn't end well. And after the British leave, India grows at a higher rate than it did when the British were there.

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Was there anywhere where colonialism was a happy story for everybody involved?

Well, not everybody, but look at Singapore. That was a British colony, right? Singapore right now is one of the richest nations in the world, richer per capita than the United States. Social conditions are very good. Singapore was doing pretty well early on. The British Navy used it as a major base that helped Singaporean GDP.

Without Britain, the Singapore of today would not be possible without colonialism.

In my opinion, yes. So I think if you take a small area, which is what Singapore is, and you cultivate it intensively to develop it, that can succeed. So the parts of India that did best under—

Is Singapore still part of Britain?

No, it's totally independent.

And when did that happen?

So the British leave, I could be off by a year or two, but I think that's 1961. And Singapore is part of Malaysia. So Malay was a part of the British Empire and Singapore and Malaysia were together. The British leave and they leave those two together in the same common boat. And then the Malaysians were afraid of civil war because that new unit had about an equal number percentage terms of Malays who are typically Muslim and Chinese who are not Muslim, and then also some of Indian ethnic background. So Malaysia kicked Singapore out of the union so the Malays, the Muslims, could be a majority because they wanted to be in charge and basically control things. So Singapore was on its own. They were terrified. A lot of Singaporeans thought, we'll never survive. Chairman Mao will take us over. Indonesia will take us over. But they had incredible leadership under Lee Kuan Yew and a whole talented bureaucracy, which actually the British had helped to build up. And they pulled off one of the most amazing economic growth performances in the history of the world.

Is that the only one, or there are others you can think of?

Oh, there's some others. So take Puerto Rico, which first was Spanish imperialism, but more importantly was seized by the United States in the Spanish-American War. This is now the 1890s. Puerto Rico, because it is part of the United States as a territory, is much richer than other parts of the Caribbean, say Dominican Republic. And that's the case. Colonialism had some high costs. Different people were killed, imprisoned. That was bad. But overall, Puerto Rico has done much better as part of the US. And of course, many more Puerto Ricans just come to the US and have automatic privileges as citizens.

How would you compare the European Union to colonialism?

Well, it's sort of like colonialism but with no one in charge. And maybe that was a bit like colonialism. There's nobody in charge?

The EU has nobody in charge?

There are people in the bureaucracy, but it's never clear where actual power lies. It's the kind of Things get regulated but without accountability.

Is that a good thing?

No. I think the EU has been great for Eastern Europe, which otherwise faced catastrophe. Places like Poland, as we said, have done incredibly well. But it has led to far too much regulation, say, on Italy or most of Western Europe.

When did Poland get into the EU?

I don't remember the year, but that was fairly early on that they met the criteria. The Poles, because they had the tradition of the Catholic Church and they had labor union opposition to Soviet rule and occupation, came out of communism pretty ready to actually be a functioning capitalist democracy. They had shock therapy. They got the transition away from communism over pretty quickly because of their long history of being slaughtered by the Russians. They wanted nothing more to do with looking back in that direction. So they just leapt into the arms of Western Europe, did the capitalism thing, did the democracy thing, were ready to join the EU pretty early on. And they basically, since then, since, say, 1990, they've had 4 to 5% growth, not counting the COVID year and so on, but typical year, like 4 to 5% growth every year. And if you do that, they're now close to as rich as Spain and Italy and Japan and Like 2, 3 more years, they'll be there, or maybe they're there now, depending how you measure the things.

Who are the other countries that did well from the EU and who did poorly from the EU?

Well, Slovenia did very well. So keep in mind, they were part of former Yugoslavia, which had a very bloody civil war in the 1990s. There would always be the danger that some parts of the former Yugoslavia would seek to reimpose their will on Slovenia. The EU just stopped that. Slovenia now is a pretty wealthy nation, fully democratic, quite stable. It's small. It's dull, you could say, but it's a beautiful country. It's like a total success. And you would credit the EU in large part, in addition to the Slovenians themselves. But man, you look at Western Europe and it's all just too much regulation. We were talking earlier about food regulations on Italy, making it harder to grow and sell. Natural foods, but that's just one small pebble in this huge mound of excess regulation. So you'd like to get the good side of the EU and not the bad side. I worry that when the East is really caught up, which will be soon, a lot of it, that there might just mainly be a bad side. 'Cause Poland will be rich enough to defend itself. They might even build or buy nuclear weapons. So at some point the East won't be in any danger of being reabsorbed by The Slavic peoples are Russia to the east of them. And then they might just be like an overly regulated place and not really have the benefits anymore.

We were talking about the allegiances around the world since World War I, what they were and how they've changed.

Oh, yeah. Well, it's so crazy in those earlier times. So the allegiances just keep on shifting. So when 1914 comes and Britain and France are allies in the First World War, this is a shock to many people. Because they had been historic enemies. But basically, Europe is not stable across any of those years. It wasn't like the bipolar world order. We have nukes, USSR has nukes. That was bad for many people, but it was pretty stable. What we have now may not be stable, but you have all these European powers forming, reforming alliances, trying to get a leg up on the other powers.

Tell me some of those alliances that changed over the years, just so we could picture the shifting sands.

Well, you have Napoleon, who takes over France and then decides he wants to take over more parts of Europe. Many of those parts aren't even nations at the time. So a significant number of non-French Europeans welcomed Napoleon because it was freer for them than what they had had to begin with. The most notable example of that would be the Jews, but not just the Jews. Parts of Germany, parts of Italy, it's like, hey, this is better. And in the back of their minds, people thought, well, if Napoleon helped turn France into a real nation, eventually he'll be gone. He did that first too. And we're going to become a real nation as well, but we needed this transition stage. So nationalism starts arising in many parts of Europe, including Italy. You could say most of all Italy. So by 1860s, 1870s, like most of Italy as a nation is somewhat in place. But again, there's not any real loyalties across these countries. So they fight over colonies. That's often British versus French, like who'll get there first or who's going to push whom out. Germany didn't have the navy, so they had few colonies. They had what we now call Namibia.

What was Namibia called then?

It's a good question. Was it Southwest Africa? It's had so many names. And then the British took it over. And it was consolidated under some kind of South African general ambit along with other parts of Southern Africa. So it had a British affiliation for a while, and now of course it's truly independent. But I'm told there's still like German-style buildings in Windhoek, which is, I believe, a Dutch word, but German-style buildings there because it was a German colony. But there just weren't many German colonies. So you have all these mini wars and conflicts, like in the early 1900s, over places like Morocco, or you have two Balkan wars. You know, the first one, like Bulgaria takes some parts of the Balkans, and then some of the other Balkan nations reorganize. They had been historic enemies, but they have a temporary alliance to take things back from Bulgaria. But then, you know, two years later, World War I starts, and there's a whole different set of alliances altogether. Countries like Italy, Turkey switch sides over time. It's sufficiently complicated. I can't give you a super clear narrative as to who is on whose side when. But think of it as there's just a lot of different powers. It worked best when Britain was fairly dominant and kept a lid on things. But with the rise of Germany, that was slated to end and it turned into two world wars. And probably, you know, was going to even without Hitler. Hitler made it much worse, more evil, more brutal, but I still think you would have had some kind of Second World War without Hitler.

Who were the other countries that switched sides?

Estonia has a complicated history. So Hitler liberates them from the Soviet Union. They had been briefly independent, were then taken over. Hitler liberates them, but they realize pretty quickly it's not such a wonderful liberation. But they're still always trying to play both sides off against each other. How can we be independent? As Stalin starts winning the war, they see the Soviet troops are gonna take them back, and of course that's what happens. So they're always just readjusting their position. Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary have various flirtations with Hitler. And fascism, which are not permanent, but like, you know, recur. And their records are not as good as people sometimes think. So a lot of people sided with Hitler because they hated the Soviets. And they didn't yet understand that Hitler might be even worse. But I think maybe one thing they did understand, and on this they were correct, they knew the Soviets or Russians were there forever. And Hitler was not. And that for them, even if Hitler was more brutal as a killer, maybe it was something easier for them to deal with because they could look forward to Hitler going away. And Russia's not really ever going to go away.

Tell me about the fall of the Soviet Union.

Well, that's a period you could say it's like 1989 through 1992. And a number of things happen. I would say a fundamental development is just the Soviet elites themselves stopped believing in their own system. So too many of the winners realized that if they would just leave the Soviet Union and live a middle-class life in Switzerland, never mind the US, that they'd have a better life. And when the evil people who are benefiting themselves are not benefiting anymore, your system's in a lot of trouble because who's going to hold it together? And on top of that, you had the United States with Reagan spending a lot more on defense. Basically, well, we're not going to let you beat us. We're going to stay ahead of you. US had high economic growth in a big part of the '80s. And then the bottom falls out of the price of oil. So Soviet Union was a major oil exporter. And you could say that was the approximate cause, not like the fundamental cause.

And why did that happen?

More supply comes online. So you get Mexico, you get Venezuela, you get more discoveries in the Middle East. North America, more is discovered. So just more supply because the price was high. '79 and '73. So the Soviets relied on that money and it was gone, at least for a while. Some of that came back and that bankrupted them. So you have a bankrupt system, can't outspend the US, you're not going to win any wars, and the elite don't believe in it anymore. So Gorbachev pulled out the last brick when he just said, "I'm not going to play along. I'm going to let these Eastern European nations free." I mean, let them cross the border instead of giving the order to shoot. In a way, that was so shocking. I remember this clearly at the time. I thought, wow, this is great, but the Soviets are going to give the order to shoot and it will be this terrible tragedy. Thousands will cross. There'll be this bloody massacre. And no one shot. And of course, by that point, you figure a lot of the soldiers themselves, like, they don't want to shoot. It's like it might be their cousin or Their brother even, and some of the soldiers escaped for that matter. So once the doors were open for Eastern Europeans to migrate, East Germans come to the West. I think Hungary was the first place you could get out of quite easily. It was just all over. And then in Russia, people are like, hey, you know, can we go? And Gorbachev just said, I'm not going to do this anymore. There was an attempted coup d'état against him. That coup failed. Whole thing to me still seems mysterious. At the time, I remember thinking, well, this coup will succeed. I read all my media about it. You asked me earlier on, how do you make a judgment? I made the judgment, oh, the bad guys are going to win. I was wrong.

And how did that impact the rest of the world?

Well, Eastern Europe changes radically. A lot of it, such as Poland and Slovenia, really decide they're going to find ways to maneuver to become part of the West. That takes them some time. It also meant Yugoslavia starts to fall apart. That leads to a bloody war there, which is terrible, that eventually is resolved mostly by NATO and the United States. China, instead of a more powerful Soviet Union, they can start to see a future with a weaker Russia.. And that has been realized where now we have this Dragon-Bear Alliance, but China is by far the senior partner, and Putin is the one who has to take orders from Beijing.

How long has that alliance been?

As a powerful thing, I think it's quite new. So it's something you read about, say, 7, 8 years ago, and then all the smart people said, well, this is not going to last. These countries have been historic enemies. Getting back to shifting alliances, But so far it's lasted.

Have they been historic enemies?

Oh, of course, because they're both militaristic, they're next to each other. There's a fair amount of territory, especially in eastern Russia, that has very few Russians living in it, and the Chinese move in as merchants, as they tend to do. And some of these parts of eastern Russia have more ethnic Chinese who are Chinese citizens also living in them than they do Russians. So at some point, if you're China and you're richer and you're stronger and you have more than 10 times the population, you're like, hey, why isn't this ours? That may yet happen. But China thinks about it and Russia worries about it. So I guess I don't think they'll be allies forever, but it's held up pretty well so far, better than the academics with their theories were telling us.

What do you think caused them to align?

In the case of Russia, I just think it's desperation. So they needed money. China had a lot of excess reserves. China has very few allies, like Cambodia. That's not real— not really worth anything as an ally. North Korea isn't actually their ally, it's more a thorn in their side. Pakistan at times pretends to be an ally, it's not really. And with nuclear weapons, China cannot push them around as much as they would like. So here's an actual ally that will help you geopolitically counter the United States. So there was convergence of interests.

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For a long time, didn't it seem like China and the US were aligned on their interests? Didn't the US really help build China?

Of course. And Nixon went over there, as you know, in the early '70s, and Kissinger. And there were all kinds of verbal deals made. Maybe we'll never know the exact truth. But I think basically they said, well, you help us by siding against the USSR. Which China did. They kept their end of the bargain, and we will in turn do a bunch of things to help you. We still don't know what was promised exactly, but we did a bunch of things to help China with trade and the WTO and recognizing them, downgrading how we treat Taiwan, many, many things, protecting Middle Eastern oil for them, which we do free of charge, I might add. So some set of weird bargains But those have not been eternally in the self-interest of either country. But clearly at first they were. That's why we did them.

It seems like over time when the landscape changes to rethink what worked in the past and change according to the changing conditions seems like a natural way to proceed.

But you've got to stay fresh. It's very hard for these people. They're surrounded by other bureaucrats. If you're, say, president for the US, everyone wants to be in your good graces. So they don't want to deliver you the wrong kind of bad news. You have to stay well informed. That's hard to do. And there's so much internal politics that to keep a clear vision of what you can do externally, I don't think any of these countries—Russia, China, or US—have really succeeded at that. The internal stuff is too strong. That's a recurring theme in world history. I mean, the guy who kept an external vision was the most evil one of all, which was Hitler, who had his goals, which were like the worst goals ever, but he didn't let internal German politics get in his way. He said, "I'm willing to go down and lose to see through these goals." So that has its own dangers. But it's striking how much Hitler bent the bureaucracy to his will. In bad ways. And in these other countries, it's much harder. It's hard for our president to have a new and fresh foreign policy vision, no matter who is our next president.

How has or how will the war in Ukraine impact the rest of the world?

Well, it depends how it goes, of course, and I don't have a good prediction for that. But if Ukraine is perceived as losing, which is slightly different from saying it's lost. But if it's perceived as losing, many other places will try to grab territory. And you already see, like Venezuela trying to grab the oil-rich part of Guyana. US had to give them a stern talking to. Brazil had to raise its hand. But they tried, and they know that we noticed that. And like, who was thinking about Venezuela and Guyana? But it turns out there was some old colonial agreement between England and Spain and they said the agreement was unjust. Like, who even knows or cares anymore? And that's just all going to come out of the woodwork around the world. That may happen even if Ukraine is not perceived as losing, but I think that will be the main effect. And then China will say, well, US started to try to defend Ukraine, but they quit in some way, and so we're going to move on Taiwan. And that would matter a lot for Asia, of course. South Korea, Japan would build nuclear weapons. The chance that Taiwan would lose, I think, is fairly high. If you go to Taiwan, they're not a very militaristic people. They're so nice. It worries me. Like, you go to Finland, they're super nice people, wonderful country, but they all take defense very seriously. And if it were them against Russia, Finland would put up a damn good fight, and they have in the past, and they held their own, held their country. People perceive Taiwan as a squish country. I hope it's not true, but all the people I know, like, who live there, they tell me it's true.

Tell me the story of Venezuela going back in history. I've never been to Venezuela.

I've been afraid to go for quite a while. Post-World War II, for a lot of that time, It was the wealthiest country in Latin America, and it was very pro-American, and they drove big cars, and people had a lot of hope for them.

What allowed that to be the case?

Some of it was just oil, but I think also being positioned on the Caribbean/Atlantic, better access to the United States at a time where just not everything was a long-distance flight. That helped. Some of the education system was decent. It was a pretty worldly place. They just had some things going for them. Some of it surely was luck. It's relatively consolidated as a country compared to some other parts of South America. So a lot of it is bunched toward the north and a lot toward the bottom is Amazon and it's not that much part of the country. So it It was an actual unified country earlier than, say, Colombia had been, and then it was wealthier than Colombia, but now that's been reversed. So they somehow got too much corruption, uh, chose some bad leaders, which is their own fault, but also has to just be some bad luck, had a flirtation ongoing with Cuban socialism and Fidel Castro, like, worst decision ever. But it's still somehow inexplicable to me.

Why was it the worst decision ever?

They nationalized their most important sectors, most of all oil, and everything became governmental largesse and they stopped producing things and it all became about handing out candy to the voters. And it became not just corrupt in the people raking off oil money way, but corrupt in the entire electoral system became itself fully corrupt. And they had both corruptions, still have to a very high degree. And the place was several times richer than it is now. I guess you look at, say, the '60s or parts of the '70s when they peaked. It's not that it's grown slowly. It was several times richer than it is now. It's one of the world's biggest disasters, maybe the biggest.

When these things happen, is it always a matter of corruption or can it be something else?

A lot of times it's bad ideas, and they had both. So it was like the perfect negative storm. You know, corruption's in every system, but some places control it and other places don't. So corruption is a bit question begging when people say it, but I would just say, you know, when you go to theory, a lot of times we don't know, like what ultimately drove the collapse of Venezuela. Yeah. I would say at least I don't know. And the books I've read on this, it's not clear to me. There's a lot of answers that are correct but somewhat question begging.

Other than corruption, what tend to be the key bad ideas that lead to bad outcomes for governments?

Politics is the salvation of human beings. Elevating poverty should be the immediate priority of a poor government. In reality, the immediate priority should be law and order and incentives for people to produce things, not alleviating poverty. You'll alleviate a lot more poverty that way, and that's what Singapore did.

Tell me more about incentives.

You need to know if you're going to set up business in a country, you can do it quickly, predictably, and then the stuff you produce won't just be taken from you. And Venezuela lost that. Many places have lost that, like Cuba didn't even allow it to begin with. And the places that have really grown, like Japan, Singapore, South Korea, you know if you start a successful business, you'll be allowed to see it through. It's pretty simple, but to have the will and discipline that the government wants to see it through and the citizens support them and turn their back on the short-run grabs— a lot of countries don't do it. We hope El Salvador is doing it now.

We'll see. Given declining birth rates, how do you see a shift of global economic power in the future?

Well, a pretty big chunk of the world's population will be in Africa. Within a few decades. I forget the exact numbers, but just the Atlantic Delta centered around Nigeria will have many hundreds of millions of people. And whether or not it will grow well, its economic importance will be much higher. And just as a source of talented migrants— Nigerians already are quite in demand as talented migrants— as a source for music, It's already again, very important, as I'm sure you know, that will only grow. So it's gonna shift a lot of balance of power to that one part of Western Africa and a few other parts of Africa. Most of Africa's pretty underpopulated and empty, but not that part.

Where else are birth rates level or going up?

Tanzania will be one of the largest, most populous countries in the world. They still have a pretty high birth rate and English has a real presence there. Kenya birth rate's fallen a lot, but they still will be significant. So the kind of Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya corner of East Africa and then that Western Atlantic Delta are just going to go crazy and everyone will court them. It's already the case.

What's the connection between China and Africa?

China decided quite some time ago to make Africa a priority. They lent a lot of money to African nations, much of which they won't get back. African nations, I would say, largely have gamed China. Chinese didn't always know what they were doing, just have not had a lot of experience in foreign affairs because under the communist years, they were very inward-looking. They still are, in fact. So US, Britain have made so many mistakes, but they learned some things from those mistakes. China is going through its mistake-making phase. And I think China's built a lot of infrastructure for those places. A lot of it's a waste, some of it's not a waste, and China will see very little from it. When I was in El Salvador, you go to the capital, San Salvador, central square, the Chinese gifted them a huge public library. Which is beautiful and in amazing shape, in better shape than any other building around, with the hope of getting influence. I mean, China has nothing from them. A big chunk of their population lives in the US. They use the US dollar. They're just not going to pry El Salvador away from the US. And China's just made a lot of mistakes.

Well, are these countries that China has made these mistakes in places that love the United States?

I think these countries politically are not loyal to either China or the US. They just go their own route. That's fully understandable. But they like the US much, much more. I don't think that really gets us anything. Maybe it does in the world of entertainment or culture. It does not politically. But they're well aware there's a large, highly successful Black community in the United States, which they relate to in a pretty deep way. And China has a reputation for being fairly racist and looking down on them. And I don't think any of that is going to go away. So US always screws up by neglecting Africa. And that's probably never going to end. Our voters don't really want to do anything to help Africa. Maybe that's a mistake, but at the end of the day, I don't know if we did more what it would buy us. I think we should help them more with public health for humanitarian reasons, like get them more anti-malaria vaccines. But we'll do better if we don't expect anything back. And I think we'll actually increase the chance we do get something back.

How will the changes in birth rates around the world impact our daily lives?

Well, you'll have fewer grandkids, right? On average. In any particular case, who knows? But right now the US fertility rate is at 1.63 and it's been falling. It was above 2 before the pandemic. So recently it was at or above replacement, no longer. No one knows if it will bounce back, but places will be emptier. Depends where you go. So there'll always be some cities like New York that so many people come from the world, it's never going to be at all empty or emptier. But a lot of the country will be emptier. Somewhere like, I don't know, Louisville, Kentucky could just be emptier, which is bad. You can't make people have kids.

It's not that easy. Is it always bad?

I think it's always bad for the US. If you are Eritrea or some parts of Bangladesh, it's not always bad. But wealthier countries, yeah, I think it's always bad.

You mentioned a lot of turmoil happening in different places in the world right now. Which are the ones that you think will have the biggest impact on our daily lives?

Well, if anything happens with China and Taiwan, that will affect us all. There would probably be a global depression. And the possibility of a war where the US could truly lose. I don't mean like Vietnam lose, like we run away with our head between our tails and can always win something later on, but really lose. And the other possibility would be something in Eastern Europe where nuclear weapons get used, and no one can really predict that. I don't think anyone's going to nuke us wherever we're living, but it would somehow fundamentally change the world levels of risk. A lot of the assets you hold would be much lower in value. There'd be different kinds of panic. Travel already has been altered. Like, I can't go to Russia, don't want to go to China. A whole bunch of places I used to go, be able to go.

Have you ever been to China?

Yeah, like 11 times, I think, in detail. Long trips to the countryside, everywhere.

What were those experiences like?

I loved them. I would love to go to China again.. But I know if I go now, they're going to strip all my devices and there's some small chance they'll detain me or just like take video of me in my hotel room. What I don't, you know, I'm not up to anything illicit, but I don't really want it. So if China is somehow freer, it's one of my favorite places to go. People are so friendly, incredible food. All the parts are different. You're just seeing a whole civilization being built in front of your eyes. It's super exciting.

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We've seen politics in the US getting, let's say, more colorful. Do you see it ever going back?

I think it's gonna stick, and it already has been sticking. So some of it is like Trump is unique, but even if you pull Trump out of the equation, just the discourse around the memes— it's like the first true election of memes. Memes about Vans, the sofa, Like it didn't even happen. It's a weird thing, but it's kind of stuck.

Can you predict any time in the future where things will feel more settled?

I don't see it coming anytime soon.

Give me an idea of what not soon is.

Let's say the next 5 years. I don't see it settling down. The things like the wars are not going to have some simple facile ending. Seeing through the results of the elections, That's going to take probably full terms. Yeah, hard to see what this simple stable outcome is going to look like. Or just the United Kingdom. There's all these riots going on. They're close to zero economic growth until the last quarter. They're not bankrupt, but fiscally they're in very bad shape. Maybe a financial crisis in their future. It's not going to be resolved quickly.

When government policies don't work, why do they continue?

Well, they have vested interest groups that favor them, but also just change is very hard. So when a policy is put into place in the US in particular, there will be connected federal, state, local, county, city, whatever, the regulatory bureaucracy, laws passed, and it's all supposed to fit together. I'm not saying it fits together nicely. But you end up with a lot of distinct discrete pieces ruled by different entities. And to unpick and unpack them all and undo it, it rarely happens. So we deregulated the airlines. I think that was 1974. And we did it just by abolishing one agency, Civil Aeronautics Board. We just disappeared it Tony Soprano style overnight. It was great. It worked. Hardly ever do you have that option. I wish we had it more.

What do you think governments are good at doing as opposed to private interests?

If it's the US government, the US government is very good at sending around piles of money to people, some of whom need it, some of whom don't, at relatively low cost. Is that a good thing? It's a good thing and a bad thing, right? Because it's low cost, they do too much of it. But in fact, they can do it And there's no private charity that could do it with equal efficacy.

Is it done with efficacy?

People demand the current Social Security system. You can debate whether it's a good idea. Is it a weird mix of like a forced savings scheme and transfers that wouldn't on its own make sense? But it's never gonna go away. And our government, I would say, does a better job running it than most governments do running theirs. You know, all this good stuff is relative. So people from other countries come to the US to learn from our system more than we go to theirs to learn from their system. And that would include reasonably well-run governments like in Western Europe. So sending around piles of money, we're pretty good at. Developing innovations through our military, like the internet, we're very good at. And I would say We're very mixed in quality at defending allies, but we have deterred a lot of wars. We're often bad at it when we actually have to do it, but the threat of, oh, I have to face the US here, it has stopped many, many wars, and we're good at that.

And then what are private institutions better at? Innovating.

Just maintaining quality control, not stultifying Cooperating, being dynamic, like most things, almost everything else I would say private is better at.

What are some areas that countries spend a lot of money and get very little in return for?

Again, it's going to depend on the country. You know, if it's Western Europe, a lot of them still spend some amount on their militaries and they do not have effective fighting forces. They need to either spend less or more. I would say more. But to spend 1.5% and get a bunch of guys who run around, quote unquote, training but couldn't fight does not make any sense. Now, if it's the United States, I mean, we're really bad in the wrong areas. We spend far too much on healthcare and we're just going to keep on doing it. And a lot of governments are not so bad at that, but we are. I think some areas of healthcare we should spend a lot, like pharmaceuticals. Which I think have a very high return. But a lot of forms of surgery I think have a pretty low return. And a lot of extending life has a pretty low return, and we spend a lot on it. But again, that will vary across governments. US has its own pathologies. We're really bad at trying to build infrastructure cheaply. But Spain, which is not the most efficient government in the world, is pretty wonderful at building infrastructure cheaply. Like, how'd that happen? It's a big puzzle. I ask people this a lot. I still don't fully get it, but it's clear in the numbers. Spanish train, subway, not perfect, but it works fine. Like a third of the cost per mile compared to the US. What's their genius secret? You know, we can't learn it from them. We're not doing it.

What is state capacity libertarianism?

It's the view that individual liberty is of supreme importance Capitalism is a good thing, but to keep this all running, you need your government to do a bunch of things very well. That could include national defense, certain public health measures. I'm not saying we do all these well, but it's a deviation from pure libertarianism, which is always anti-government, and it's just recognizing you're relying on government to protect some of your liberties, and you need some actual competence in your bureaucracy. And partly it's seeing that some parts of American government are much worse than what you can see abroad, like infrastructure costs compared to Spain, or intelligence of top bureaucrats compared to Singapore, and just wanting us to do better. I would say that sociologically, state capacity libertarianism is a recognition that some parts of working in the government have to be high status. So a lot of libertarians, they want to downgrade everything governmental because it works poorly. And I feel I understand that pretty well. But if it's all a low-status thing to do, no one will do it. You're going to get really bad government. Yeah. And you're going to have less freedom at the end of it.

So that's one other way to think about it. You wrote a book called The Great Stagnation. What was the Great Stagnation, and does that still apply today?

I date the Great Stagnation as from 1973 to about 2015 or '16. It was a period when wages didn't go up much. Economic growth was slower. There was not, other than the internet, not a lot of new tech. And I would say a lot of the internet disappointed, or in some ways might have even made some things worse. I think it definitely is over with AI and some advances in biomedical science. And you look at the data, economic growth is higher. Wage growth for actual working Americans is higher than it had been. So it was many decades, basically a 40-year period when things weren't working very well. And I feel it sapped our national mood. I think we're still in the aftereffects of that. It'll take 20 years maybe for us all to cheer up.

And what shifted it? What got us out of it?

I think the internet finally paid off. Not just social media, which I'm not a hater of, but It's not the grandest thing you necessarily can do, but the internet enabling scientific collaboration, I think, really paid off in a bunch of areas. Things like, you know, weight loss drugs, which seem to work and are going to be a big advance for many millions of people. The anti-malaria vaccine seems to work. Won't help Americans much, but will be great for the world. And just some renewed sense of dynamism. Some of that I think is just luck. It comes and goes. It may go again. But what you call the colorful nature of politics is part of that. So a lot of people, like, they say they love progress and then they hate the colorful nature of politics. You cannot entirely pick and choose. When the world is changing a lot, your politics does become more colorful. It can be more hate-filled, which is bad. But a lot of America's greatest eras, our politics have been weird. And it means, like, you can't control the discourse. So you need to just loosen up a bit and recognize a lot of progress is going to feel bad to you and just deal with it. Focus on your projects and try to make that progress better.

Tell me about the gap between a GDP that's going up and workers still not being able to pay their bills.

Well, you have periods in history where maybe GDP goes up, but it all goes to some scarce factor. Like say the price of oil is very high. Or in some American cities still to this day, parts of the Bay Area, the price of land is so high, so much of the progress goes to the landlord. Now fortunately, the US is a big country and we have all these new places growing— Texas, Nashville, wherever— where that's not the case. But it's partly the case. And we've had higher interest rates, so people who rely on debt, well, some of those returns go to people who are lending money. That's not ideal. So partially you always have it, but some places and periods it's extreme and bad. Other times it's manageable. One of our blessings as a nation is having these 50 diverse states. So we just never have it everywhere. And somewhere like the UK, part of their problem is so much of the returns go to London. Nothing against London, which I love, but it's not healthy for their country. And a lot of it also goes to London landlords.

How do you view progress, or if a country's doing well, if the big numbers look good, but the actual people are suffering? Well, then it's a mixed bag.

But you want to invest more in the forms of progress that will help everyone. And some of the recent advances, like the weight loss drugs, the people who will benefit from those over time as they become cheaper will be lower earners. You know, most billionaires are pretty thin. In fact, they don't need weight loss drugs. So that will have very egalitarian effects.

Tell me about progress studies and how you can tell when things are getting better?

I think if you're in a place, you often have a pretty good immediate sense, but you need to back that up by looking at numbers and asking if you can trust the numbers, which is a big issue. And then also looking at migrations. Are people moving in or out? Is capital moving in or out? So we talked about El Salvador. There's one estimate, maybe inexact, but it said migration out of El Salvador went down 60%. In 2 years. Maybe off a bit, but that's a real effect, right? It's telling you something. So when a number of pointers are all steering your attention in the same direction, you can feel there's real progress. Tell me about online education. I run an online education YouTube channel. It's called mru.org. And it's free economics education. And when I say free, it's also no ads. I get nothing from it. It's run on a nonprofit basis. And my co-creator Alex Tabarrok and I, we have made hundreds of videos to teach the world economics, often with subtitles in major languages, and giving away economics for free. So it's been my personal ambition to teach more people economic styles of reasoning than anyone has ever done. It's one of my projects. I don't think I'll succeed in being the most, but it's what I'm shooting for. That's great. And we get, you know, like tens of millions of views in a year, and it's a great project to have.

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Tetragrammaton.com. What are the other online learning tools available that you've seen that have been quality?

Well, ChatGPT and Claude 3.5 from Anthropic and the other AI services, what Meta has from Google, they're all amazing. They're the best learning devices we have. We're just figuring out now how to use them.

Tell me about why you think they're a good learning device when the quality of information you get from them is a question mark.

It's the case with any information we get. But one thing you can do, for instance, is just ask two different services the same question and compare the answers. If there's something screwy, you'll notice right away. But if you get an answer, say from GPT, and you just ask it, are you sure? Most of the time, if it made a mistake, it'll give you a correction. So there's things you can do to get better answers. And the more detailed and specific your question, the less likely it is to hallucinate. So I would say once you work with these things for 5 or 10 hours, you can improve their efficacy several fold at no monetary cost. You just have to pay a bit of attention.

It seems like it would be nice if it could tell you if it was hallucinating. It can tell you.

You just have to ask it again. So there was a case the other night we were talking. I said, oh, talk about Woody Harrelson movies with a Valley girl accent. And the first time it did the accent, but not strong enough. And then I said, make the accent stronger. And it was better. You heard. Yeah. You have to kind of whip it into shape. But we're going to build ones soon where you don't have to whip it into shape. They'll just be a setting. And you change the setting. These things came out so quickly. It was like a race to be first. They're very all-purpose. There's going to be like the Rick Rubin setting. I see. The Tyler Cowen setting. I see. And you'll build it in in advance. I think it's already technologically possible at a reasonable cost.

It just hasn't been done yet. I'm not against the hallucination answer, but I'd like to know that that's what it is. Yes. Because if we take it at face value, that's not always the best choice.

What we would need to do is run the query through 2 or 3 systems, but have one answer pop out. And then say your iPhone would measure how much did the 3 answers agree with each other and give you a percentage based on that. It just would cost more. It's on its way.

What if you get an answer and you say, I don't think that's right? Will it argue, yes, it is right, or will it give you a different answer?

If it's right, it will usually hold its ground and just say, no, that's correct, and stay there. It's not perfect. But again, if you compare it, say, to a mainstream newspaper, It's pretty good. And the more analytic your question, the less likely it is to give you BS back. Like that corporate income tax question I mentioned to you before. Yeah. It never gives me a BS answer. Like, somehow it knows I'm serious. It sounds weird, but it knows your mood. If you ask it some frivolous question about Hillary Clinton, like, no way should you trust that answer.

Any topics you would avoid asking about besides Hillary Clinton? That you just say, probably don't trust this from AI, but these are the kind of things you probably get a better response?

If you play with it a lot, you know there are questions it always gets wrong. And here's an example of one of those. If you ask it, name me 3 famous people who share the same birthday, it will basically never get it right.

Why is that? It's a very easy question.

I know. It does worse on easier questions. That's one thing you learn. But also it's giving you what is statistically the correct average answer. And when it comes to birth dates, it can't be the average that's right. It has to be the exact birth date. So questions where the average is good enough and questions where the average is totally misleading, you develop an intuitive sense for that when you work with these things for a while. But the birth dates—

So you'd say it's good with statistics, let's say. When the average is good enough.

If you need the exact, you've got to be more careful and ask it sequential questions to get at the exact answer. But there's another service called Perplexity, which is amazing. I think it wasn't out last time we chatted. And Perplexity double-checks the answer it gives you against the internet. And then it gives you a link. It says, you can check whether my answer is correct at this link. So Perplexity essentially is not wrong very often, but it has lower power than GPT because it's devoting, you could say, some of the computational energy to checking the answer. But again, all these things are converging.

Does it take longer as well?

Maybe a little, but it's very quick. It's not slow. GPT now is so quick. It's the quickest. Perplexity.ai, you should use. And you can always check the answer. And it's up to date. Like GPT is brought up to date maybe every few months, but Perplexity is fully up to date all the time. Real time. But it's not as smart as GPT or Claude. But again, all these things will converge and you'll get everything you want in one bundle soon enough.

How quickly do they get better?

The companies keep this a bit of a secret and everyone on Twitter loves to speculate like, ooh, it got smarter for me last week.

I'm asking your experience though, based on your experience, 'cause you use it all the time.

Yeah, I think a fifth of the time they get worse, but most of the time they're getting better every 4 to 6 weeks in subtle ways. That's my intuition.

What's an example of it getting worse?

How could it ever get worse? They're complicated, like machines of estimation. And as they get better at estimating some things, they may get worse at estimating other things. So on some kinds of simple questions, like questions so simple you maybe wouldn't ask it, They don't always get better. So in terms of practical use, they're pretty much always getting better. And at the moment, clearly Claude 3.5 is the best one of all the systems, and it's not the one most people use. So most people haven't even seen the current best. GPT-4 is the most popular, but it's not the very— it's number 2. It's not the very best. Claude is really smart and subtle. And it sounds more human. They decided on purpose to make GPT sound not human. Claude is a poet.

Any thoughts on the future of work?

I think it will change a lot. So many of your work tasks, no matter what your job, you will do with AI. Any job that has meetings, it can take notes on your meetings and give you a digest, for instance. Almost every job. Any job where you gather data on something, A doctor might spend 2 hours a day taking notes about patients and turning those notes into something in a file. It will do all that in a second for basically every job. And it can already do this. It's not a question of when, it's just when does a person adopt it? So it's happening, as they say, right now.

Tell me about playing chess. How do you get good, and can anybody get good?

Anybody can get good, but not anybody can get very good. So you need to enjoy the game, and most people don't enjoy it that much. And then in some mix of being analytical and spatial ability and willingness to concentrate, you probably need to be in the top, I don't know, 15%. And if you have that and enjoy the game, then you can get good just by playing online and reading and hiring a tutor. The tutor could even be a computer. And just keep on playing and you'll get good. Now, when I played chess as a kid, I started at 10 years old. No internet computer thing, this was not a factor. I had to take a bus into New York and play in real tournaments. And I had that, and then I had books at home where I'd like open the book and be over the board. It now feels very primitive, but that's what people did then. And it was much harder to get good. So like the age of top grandmasters, it just keeps on falling. We now have great players who are 12 years old.

I understand that the old way of learning was harder. Are we sure long-term that the old way of learning was not in fact better?

Magnus Carlsen has made a version of this point. He said he's of the age where the computer wasn't that good yet, and he had to think through all the positions himself. And he feels he's a better player for that reason. And the younger players still have not caught up to him. So I think that is correct. But I still see that on average, the players are better now than 20 years ago. And like, you can't fault the computer that much. Mostly they're better. But the very best player is still somewhat from the pre-computer era.

In the pre-computer era, did chess players keep getting better? Yes.

So maybe— Yeah. Just having— being in better physical shape. So if you go to, like, the 1960s, it's this belief in chess, probably a myth, but who knows, that if you smoke cigarettes, it's good for your brain. So a lot of top chess players smoked. Well, nicotine is good for your brain. Yes. And they smoked while they played. Now, like, no way does that happen. You're not even allowed to smoke while you're playing. But there are people who are in great physical shape, and many train almost like Olympic athletes. And that helps them somewhat. In the earlier times, chess players were older, overweight, or whatever. They were not in great physical shape. They kind of looked like wrecks.

So it was harder to stay focused for a longer period of time based on conditioning.

Yeah, they had much less stamina. Yeah, conditioning. But it's interesting, like these players with less stamina would play a 24-game match. And players today are like, ooh, that's too long. I don't want to do that. And there, you know, it'll be like a 12-game match. So who had the greater stamina? You've got to wonder sometimes.

Is there an argument that with this increased efficiency of AI, we lose something in that translation? By the human not walking through the steps, do we lose something?

My games had more drama. Bobby Fischer's games had more drama. The computer doesn't care about drama. And whether you're aware of it or not, you learn from the computer. So games today have less drama and they're less interesting, they're less fun. They're more accurate. I don't like that, but you know, it is what it is.

I think we're imperfect machines and if we live in a perfect simulation, I'm not sure we belong. I don't know that humans, the imperfect humans, fit in the perfect simulation so well.

We want a game to have a kind of overarching Narrative structure that in a way misleads us because it's not always the best move. We want to see our plans through. It's part of being human. It can be a mistake like, oh, I moved my rook's pawn, now I've got to move my rook. Well, maybe not, you know. And the younger players, they have had that trained out of them. And there are fewer distinct styles. You see this, you know, in sports with Sportimetrics. There used to be all different ways of swinging the bat, of throwing a pitch, of shooting the basketball. It's a lot more homogenized now.

In the homogeny, is there less of a chance for a new revolution? Yeah. Can the breakthroughs still come?

No, I think there's more breakthroughs. They just might not be as dramatic. So like in basketball, all this 3-point shooting, it wasn't even AI, just math and computers. Oh, it's worth taking these shots and it's worth learning how to do it from the time you're 6. And it was a huge revolution. And then there's like the teardrop two-pointer, which has become a lot more popular. And oh, you've got to start learning that at age 10, but people do it. And then, oh, you have all these beautiful teardrop shots. So I think it's a lot more innovation, but there is something maybe mechanical about it that's disturbing or less pleasing.

And you think those got more popular based on statistics? Absolutely. That's interesting.

And I have talked to some of the people who do the stats. Blade Silver, by the way, works on this topic too. You can talk to him about it. And there's just some stuff that works. And now everyone does it. And this idea like, oh, this fellow had his unique coaching style, maybe with the psychology of the players, but not with what kind of shot to take. It's way more uniform.

What makes a good chess player?

Love of the game. Hard work and being, you know, a really good chess player, being in the top 1% of the top 1% when it comes to talent.

But what's the skill set? What else does being good at chess apply to in the world?

I don't think that much. These top chess players, they're brilliant, but I'm not sure they all would do amazing things if they couldn't play chess. They might just be brilliant people who end up wasting their talent. Maybe there's two types of chess players, and Magnus once made a point like this. There's those who have incredible intuition. At judging positions, and they don't calculate that much. And there's those who are incredible calculators. And I think those are fairly different skills. And the best players are quite good at both. But you have to be very good at at least one of them. And you could be like a top 30 player being truly great at only one of them.

That's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. Is it at the point now where the computer can always beat the best chess player?

Always beat. I would say if Magnus played the computer 1,000 times, he might draw it once, but probably not. So always is a tricky word, but that's pretty extreme.

So he would likely lose 999 games to the computer.

Absolutely. And he would admit that. And the computer's even better now than it was a year ago. So it's tough.

What are the things that The human can do that the computer can't do, that you can't imagine the computer catching up?

I think the computer can catch up on everything and mostly has, but I'll give you a few examples. Understanding blockaded positions, cases when simply no progress can be made. Computers still can have problems with that.

I'm not saying in chess. Oh, oh, in general? Yeah, in general. Let's go beyond chess now. What, what can it, what will a computer never be able to do? What is a human skill set that a human can, a human can do that a computer can never do?

I don't think computers will ever be sentient the way we are, but I believe at some point they'll be able to outthink us at virtually everything. And that point is not right before us, but I'm not talking about a million years from now. I'm saying within the lifetimes of our families, this will happen. And in most areas, it's happened already. So I've been experimenting with economics. I go to Claude 3.5 and I give it economics questions. Very often it does better than I will do. And I'm a PhD economist trained at Harvard, still very active. So it doesn't beat me on everything. It often does The worst on very simple questions, but it beats me out a lot. So you've got to take that seriously. And economics is not a memorizing thing. It's not a pure calculation. It's a thinking through problems with multiple steps thing. Like if I ask it a question like, please outline all the factors that might matter to understand the incidence of the corporate income tax on labor, capital, and land, It's like a pretty classic economics question. I don't beat it. If I'm really paying attention, I think I would do as well as Claude, but I'm not doing better.

What are the areas where you would do better?

Very simple questions, like so simple they're stupid. If you just ask it, what is economics anyway? It doesn't do that well. The simpler you make the question.

That was the first question I asked you last time we sat down.

Yeah, I'm still ahead of it. The simpler the question, the vaguer the question. Are the humans still doing better? And it doesn't even have to be a top human to do better than the computer.

We hear fear of jobs being lost to AI. What jobs will increase because of AI?

Well, I think AI, for instance, will enable a lot of scientific advance. So desalinating water will become quite affordable and building out the parts of the world that are currently too dry will create an enormous number of jobs, including in the US, but maybe most of all in Northern Africa, Middle East. That's great. And that'll be a phenomenal thing. That's great. That would be one example. Just new projects. I think the demand for carpenters, gardeners, but I don't just mean mechanical rote labor. That might be done by robots, but people who build out things creatively, like probably the people you have helping you with this place, the demand for them is so going to go up, like the cost of initiating a project is what's going to go down because you have this co-planner, the AI, who does it with you. So people who work on projects in physical ways where they also use their brain, demand for that will skyrocket. And those people, a lot of them already earn more than professors, but they're really going to earn more than professors and they deserve it.

How will AI and hardware come together?

It's striking to me when I talk to very talented teenagers, which I do multiple times a week, in the last, say, 9 months, many more of them want to go into robotics. So the brilliant teenagers of the world have decided robotics is where it's at. I suspect they're correct. And robotics are now possible because AI is working. So sort of what you might call telling the robot what to do, in essence, we've mastered with large language models. And we will in turn use the experience of robots to feed data back into the LLMs. And the experience of robots will be the missing piece for LLM data. That's what most people don't see yet, but these teenagers do. That's interesting. That dual back and forth. And I think it's going to be amazing.

That's really interesting.

Like, the robot will go through the world as you or I would, taking data, send it to something we used to call an LLM, but by then will be a bigger, grander thing. And it will learn like kids learn.

Last time we spoke, you said you didn't see happiness as a worthy goal. What do you see the primary measures of a life well lived?

I think you should have projects and work on your projects and build them out and try to improve them. And in the process, try to improve yourself. I think you'll end up happier that way. I'm not against happiness, but if you target happiness, I'm pretty sure that's a disaster. And you asked, like, what are generic pieces of advice I give? This is one of them. Just tell people, like, what are your projects? What's like your signature product? The thing you're most proud of or most interested in doing. Yeah. Does it really resonate with you? Are you surrounding yourself with people who believe in that? Mm-hmm. Simple stuff, but people don't always think it through.

So productivity is number one for you, and the way you feel based on being productive is the reward.

Absolutely. And this includes family. Like, one of your projects is to build out in some manner a successful family life.

If you were a high school student today and you were graduating, would you follow the same path that you took whenever it was? Or today, would you do something different? Like, would you learn economics from your courses instead of going to wherever you went to school?

Our courses, by the way, are now in 20% of US high schools. Wow. Amazing. And they're very big in India, places you would expect. I would have a very different life if I were growing up today, and in a way that reflects poorly on our world.

So— What choices, what different choices would you make today based on what you see?

When I became an economist, grad school, I wouldn't say it was a lark, but it was very debureaucratized. You showed up, you learned what you wanted to, especially at Harvard where I went, and you sort of went off and you did what you wanted to, and the world would to some extent accept that. And now the filters are so conformist and so strong, like, they have raised the average quality, but it's a bit like if a radio station tested every song. Well, does this sound like a hit? You know, in the longer run, you end up with fewer actual important hits if you demand everything be a certain level of quality because you homogenize it. So we've homogenized the product and bureaucratized it, and it takes many more years to get through. You have to jump through many more hurdles in a way where I think I'm poorly suited for that kind of patience. That's my drawback, but it's just a fact. And I think I might be more of an internet creature from the beginning and not even be a professor, would be my guess. Getting an academic job today, very different from how it was when I did it.