Tyler Cowen - Is Commerce Still Good for Culture? A View from 2020

Linder and Michael Dauphiné, both on the faculty of the Fred Fox School of Music. So here comes piano phase. For those of you who have just joined us or came in in the middle of the process, we've been listening to the work Piano Phase of 1967 by the composer Steve Reich. And now, on behalf of the American Culture and Ideas Initiative and the Freedom Center, I would like to introduce David Schmitz who will be introducing our speaker for today. David, if you're there, please— in fact, I see you now. It is yours. I pass the microphone to you.

Okay, thank you, Dan. So I want to introduce Tyler Cowen. Tyler is the Holbert Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and he's also director of the Mercatus Center. So Tyler got his PhD in economics from Harvard in 1987, and I think that was right around the time when I met Tyler. We were— we, if I recall correctly, Tyler, we met at a summer program at George Mason and around, I think it might have been 1987, and we got to be pretty close. And I would still— Tyler and I, we hardly ever talk anymore. I hardly ever see him, but I'd still say he's one of the best friends I ever had. And that if anybody has made the world a better place in that time, My hat's off to Tyler. So Tyler went on to publish two books in praise of commercial culture and creative destruction. I think those were Tyler's first two books, um, if I remember correctly, and they studied the intertwined histories of commerce and culture. Those books were a revelation to me, and they've informed my thinking in various ways. Ever since. And I think thousands of other readers must have felt the same way because, just for example, there was a poll in The Economist that identified Tyler as one of the most influential economists of the decade. Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed him America's hottest economist, which I'm not sure about the ambiguity there, but they probably meant it both ways. Foreign Policy magazine listed Tyler as one of the top 100 global thinkers for 2011. And like I'd say, you know, on my list of people who've made the world a better place, I'd put Tyler up there pretty high. And more recently, Tyler's book, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick and Will Eventually Feel Better. That was a New York Times bestseller. So also, more recently, currently, Tyler Cowen writes a blog at www.marginalrevolution.com, so check that out. He hosts a podcast called Conversations with Tyler, which has had a range of just really extraordinary personalities to, to talk to Tyler about current events and so on. And Tyler's also a co-founder of an online economics education project, which is the Marginal Revolution University, and you can look that up at mru.org. So thank you so much. It's an honor and a privilege and just a personal pleasure to see you again, Tyler, even if it's only virtually. Thanks for joining us today, and the floor is yours.

Thank you, Dave, for the very kind introduction. I do believe we will see each other within the next year, and under very happy terms. I'm happy to report I'm healthy and have been doing fine, and I hope the same to you. I'm very sorry to you all, I cannot be there, or you all cannot be there, but so be it. So the topic of my talk concerns what I see as an unusual kind of crisis in the arts today. And I'm going to talk through that crisis, where I think it comes from, where I think it's headed. But let me first give you a little background on how I have thought about commerce and the arts, because in general I have seen commerce as very positive for the arts. Right now we're at this unusual turning point. The background gives you a kind of classical perspective on how a lot of the story has run today. So let's spend just about 5 minutes on that. If you consider, say, the history of painting, there are numerous movements in painting that essentially have been fully market-supported. In general, they rose with commerce. So if you look at, say, the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists of the 19th century, they sold their paintings almost exclusively to the private market, often sold to industrialists, often American industrialists. Early in their career, they tried to get into the French government-run academy. Mostly they were told their work was junk. A few times they were let in, not treated very well. Basically, they made their way through markets, as did, for instance, Andy Warhol's pop art of the 20th century, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein. If you ask, well, what is the greatest or most important —cultural movement of the 20th century? I know people who do philosophical aesthetics don't like that kind of big, bold question. I think if you actually ask people, most people would say it's been Hollywood movies in the 20th century. And Hollywood movies, to be sure, are mostly a purely commercial phenomenon. Probably most of them you would have to judge as actually pretty junky or mediocre, but the gems are just remarkable. They made money, they were made for profit. There are some indirect ways in which government support mattered. So the US State Department threw around the heft of the United States to keep foreign markets open to American movies. That definitely mattered. I don't think it would at all be correct to say government had no role Still, you see a basically positive synergy between commerce and the arts over a course of several centuries where commerce is very much on the rise, creative arts are very much on the rise, become more diverse at the same time, including roles for women and minorities finding markets. If you look at the history of, say, US popular music, again, for the most part, not government-supported. In fact, it was often government-opposed by censors or by race laws. Integration, racial integration came to commercial music before it came to most of the rest of American society. And to the benefit of creativity, to the benefit of music, obviously, and also to the benefit of broader American society. Now, I've been picking out deliberately some areas where the role of commerce has been especially positive. I would readily admit there are other areas where I think the relative role of government has been more significant. So you just heard the music by Steve Reich. He mostly did make his way through markets. If you look at the deeper infrastructure behind the kinds of contemporary music Steve Reich drew upon, you find a lot of that support comes from universities. Often those are state universities. Government funding, more in Europe than in the US, but government funding has definitely played a role. Government funding from the City of New York, in this country, actually a bigger role than the federal government. One of my favorite contemporary composers is here with us today. His name is Daniel Asia. Daniel, congratulations on your latest CD, your Three String Quartets. It's received rave reviews everywhere. It probably has not made you truly wealthy, but you, as I, teach at a state university, and that gives you a base of support upon which you build creative contributions. That really has worked very well. So even in the United States, it is a blended system. For some arts, government support can be pretty important. For a lot of arts, it's not important at all. Those arts have done just great. Even in the areas where government support has been significant, you still see this overall positive synergy between commerce and the arts. So if you think about the state universities that say employed Daniel or have supported a lot of contemporary music, if only through university concerts, creating audiences, training composers— UC San Diego would be another example, there are many others— those state universities would not have the resources they do without a thriving capitalist society operating underneath that layer of government support and making it feasible. Because an area such as contemporary classical music, it is a bit of a luxury in the sense, uh, it's not like food or shelter or a lot of healthcare. It's a discretionary expenditure. Often it's relatively small numbers of people buying it or interested, those are often people who are better educated. And to support so many luxuries, so many minority or niche tastes, you really do typically need a good deal of wealth in society. If you go back to a poorer America, say in the late 19th century, different kinds of music that existed, you could basically list them. You fast forward today to 2020 and you browse around on Spotify, just the number of different genres, never mind the number of significant artists, the number is so large it's dizzying. I'm not sure there's a single human being who could name them all. Furthermore, you have access to music from basically all of the different parts of the world recently, in a sense, for the first time in human history. And that's pretty amazing. Go to YouTube, Spotify, what you can pull up with only, you know, the smallest degree of intelligence in your searches is just absolutely astounding. And you can find, you know, a piano recording of 19th century music. It may be a pianist you haven't really heard of, and it could have easily well over, you know, say million listens, uh, might have come from Japan or might have come from Vietnam or, you know, have come from Canada, wherever. And again, there's this astonishing richness and diversity to it all. YouTube, of course, is very much a private company, and it's part of this larger enterprise, Google, now called Alphabet, and makes a lot of money. I'm very happy about all that. That's kind of the background Now, if you're asking me, what is the crisis of today? And to be clear, this crisis, in my opinion, it predates COVID. I think we have a number of major artistic forms. They are in transition in a way they had not been in the earlier postwar American era. And as they are in transition, there's a bit of disintegration, there's a bit of ecosystems, whether they're crumbling or changing, or some people would say improving, but I just think many things are very different, and by no means is everyone entirely happy. Let me just bring up what I see as a few of the problems, and I'm fully aware that how much you think these are problems depends on your sense of aesthetics. Uh, some of aesthetics arguably is subjective, but even if you think it is ultimately an objective enterprise, I'm not really going to defend those particular judgments. I would just say, as a matter of consensus, if you speak to well-established critics in these areas— I'm not saying they would all agree, but a critical mass of them would agree in seeing some broadly similar problems. So the first one I would like to consider is the world of music and supporting yourself making music. Largely because of the internet, most specifically Spotify, not only, but it's the most obvious manifestation, It is now very, very difficult, I would almost say impossible, to earn money by selling recorded music because what you are paid per click on Spotify, you could have millions of clicks and still not be paid enough to live from. And that is very different from even 20 years ago, all the more different from the world I grew up in. So if you think of me as growing up in the 1970s, where Led Zeppelin would put out an album, immediately hundreds of thousands of copies would sell. Over a modest period of time, millions of copies would sell. Led Zeppelin, of course, became very wealthy. They would also tour, but just by putting out music, if you were popular, you would become rich. Paul McCartney is now in fact a billionaire, and he's a billionaire from making music. But there is not a path for today's Paul McCartney to really become a billionaire, no matter how talented he or she might be. So the problem, I think, is the internet lowers the marginal cost of reproducing music being very, very low. There's competitive pressure to put your music on streaming. Different streaming companies compete with each other, or they compete with other alternatives, including, of course, illegal downloads. But the actual price of music, the price of consuming music— most of the music I want to hear Actually, I can hear for free. At the margin, it's free. I have a Spotify subscription, it costs almost nothing. YouTube costs almost nothing. I am in fact an old fogey, so I still buy compact discs, and I'm happy to support artists by doing so. But nonetheless, we're all familiar with the basic story. So we no longer have a financial ecosystem that supports people who make music Obviously, again, forgetting about COVID for now, you can do touring and live performance, and many, many, many creators support themselves that way. You are either forced to do that or forced to find some kind of sinecure, such as in a university. A very fundamental feature of the musical universe that has been in play since the 1920s It is now gone because of the internet. So if I look at the music coming out in 2020, I'm not sure it's my personal taste necessarily. I don't per se see a decline in quality at all. So in this sense, we have kept on moving. But I think, especially if you're an economist, one would have to be a little foolish to simply look at the current situation with complete equanimity. After all, if incentives matter and you can no longer, for most people, make a good career selling recorded music, someone or something over some time horizon, I think, is going to be in trouble. Now, I get that Taylor Swift is still very wealthy. There's a small number of performers, like, you feel you have to buy their CD. To affiliate with them, or they can make so much money touring, or they're such a large celebrity they can do endorsements, TV appearances, build their own empire— Kanye West. I don't think that has gone away. That is a much smaller number of people who were able to make a living selling music really not too long ago. Another area of crisis, I think, has been Hollywood movies. Of which I am the biggest fan. I've spent really a lot of time in my life going to the movies, studying movies. I just did a podcast actually with philosopher Agnes Callard and Ben Callard and talked about Iranian movies and why they were interesting. And what I see today in Hollywood movies— again, going back last year, pre-COVID— there are so many tentpole franchises. So it's the Marvel Empire, right? It's a kind of universe of movie characters. And movies that come out, movies that are successful, are so often sequels. Some of them are quite good, but it does seem a lot of the creative vitality has been drained from Hollywood moviemaking. If you go back and look at movies of the '70s, yes, there was a Godfather II, but having a sequel at all was a controversial decision. You have truly new creations coming out every year. On the whole, the best movies and the most popular movies coincide to a reasonable degree. And now marketing expenditures are so high You need to grab people's attention. Movies are derivative of comic books and earlier movies. Uh, to many observers, it seems like a much worse cinematic universe to live in, and there is not any simple way you can blame that on the government. In fact, I don't think the government is at fault at all. In some manner, when it comes to movies, it seems to me commerce has misfired. A third area I will talk about, and that is television shows. And this, I think, will be the most controversial aesthetic view I will give you. But in my view, the golden age of American TV is over. TV recently, and still now, is much, much, much better than in the age of network television. Almost infinitely better, but that said, we're back to the economics of streaming, and the marginal cost of reproduction is low, and there's a lot of competition, so the current incentive seems to be produce a lot of different shows, don't even think that carefully about them, throw them out there, and see what sticks. I don't actually think streaming American TV is that wonderful right now. I think it's okay. I think it was actually much better 10 years ago. Individual shows were made more carefully. I find it striking the 3 shows most recently I have enjoyed, they're all basically foreign creations. That is, Beforiners from Norway, counterpart, which is at least partly German, and Tehran, which is an Israeli TV show. My favorite TV show of the last 5 years is probably Srugim from Israel. Borgen from Denmark would be another contender. So I think what's happened, and also in movies, like the total smorgasbord is amazingly good, in some ways better than ever before, We've made up for domestic deficiencies, American deficiencies, by importing foreign product. It's very good for the viewer, but I do think for some ways that cultural production in the United States in the areas of popular music, television, and Hollywood movies, which are big areas, they are classic strengths of our nation, of our society, I think that in recent years because of the internet, those areas have become much worse, and that is a kind of crisis in commercial culture. It is not the end of the world. What you can listen to on YouTube for free has never ever ever been better. Spotify is very cheap. Your overall menu of foreign TV shows, foreign movies has never ever been better. It's not a huge complaint, but it is an observation. About wellsprings of creativity doing some mix of drying up or changing. Now I want to get to the question of why that is, and I think there's, there's 2 or 3 reasons, again stemming from markets, stemming from our own culture, and one of those I've already mentioned. It's that when you have the internet, the marginal cost of reproduction is very low, that can lower price. Lower price can mean lower revenue. That may not much hurt, like, lone bluegrass singer, but a lot of kinds of cultural production are pretty cost-intensive. It will make it harder for those. So, when rock groups tour today, in the old days, Led Zeppelin would bring around, like, a whole Moroccan orchestra. As a backup. People just don't do that anymore. So anyway, internet lowering marginal cost of production and thus lowering price and revenue is a big factor. I think another factor is we don't so much use cultural loyalties as symbols of who we are compared to a few decades ago. So if you take, for instance, Again, the 1970s, the 1980s, also the 1990s. If you knew what a 20-year-old liked in music, you could with a reasonable degree, not of certainty, but a reasonable degree of probability, pinpoint something about the person. There were people who liked indie music. Maybe they would go to Brown University. There were Deadheads. For metal fans, for people who looked back to classic rock, and so on. And people used music to communicate in a shorthand fashion what they were like, or what they were aspiring to be, or what kinds of friends they wanted to have, or how many drugs they were looking to take. Kind of a very clumsy system, but it more or less worked. I don't think we realized at the time how much it was an indirect subsidy to musical life. So what has happened since then, this is mostly because of social media, you have other ways of signaling who you are. It might now be what you do on TikTok, it might be your Instagram page. Facebook for younger people is a little passé, but still a significant player. And you can tell the world anything you want with TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, for some people it may be Twitter, whatever it is you use. You give that full portrait by writing about it, by texting your friends. You're not so reliant on musical fandom. And I think that has made music much less culturally central in the United States, has made it less important, less potent. Music doesn't really matter that much. In the 1960s, the radio, in some sense, which was free, it was the internet of that time. And ideas were caught in tweets by songs— Beatles, All You Need Is Love, Revolution, and so on. Those were the memes, those were the equivalent of the tweets. It was bulky, it was cumbersome, but it cross-subsidized music. So culture as symbol has weakened because markets have gotten very effective at other ways of producing symbols. Now, what else? Has changed. I think the biggest change perhaps in the last few years has been a big increase of quality in what you might call semi-cultural areas or partial culture. And let me just cite 3 areas where I think in the last, say, 10 years, the United States has done phenomenally well. It's done well for commercial reasons. It sort of swept the world Those three areas, first is video, all sorts. Another would be cuisine, and another would be gaming. Now, by no means am I saying the US is the only country doing well in these areas. For gaming, my goodness, go to South Korea, phenomenal things going on there. Cuisine, go to Spain and so on. They're not by any means exclusively American. But you have a number of areas, gaming, cuisine, and video, on the rise, phenomenally so, at incredible rates of change. And now, of course, you might be wondering, well, like gaming, food, like, is that culture, right? Isn't culture like Michelangelo and Mozart? Gaming, food, video, is that culture? I don't really have a fact of the matter answer to that question. I'm not sure there is one. I would say they have some components of culture. They may or may not be what you choose to call culture or what New York Times will decide is culture. But if you look just say at revenue, I mean, games taking way more revenue than Hollywood movies do. They've competed Hollywood movies and other uses of our time to some extent. So I think the previous cultural world, it was a bit protected and lazy. It didn't have nearly as much competition from what you might call quasi-culture. And the last 10, 15 years I see as a time of an incredible boom in quasi-culture, driven really by consumers, not by some kind of policy mix-up. But there's gaming because people want to be doing gaming. It's really a pretty simple answer to that one. So, kind of traditional culture has been hit by a few things all at the same time. Like, some areas have diminishing revenue because of the internet, some parts of culture are less important as a symbol, and then you have the rise of quasi-culture— gaming, cuisine, video, other areas— as competition. And in some ways they are winning. So what happened, of course, is a pandemic came along, which is a terrible tragedy, and that pandemic really very quickly accelerated a number of trends that already were in place. So which sectors of the economy or our culture have been hit hardest by the pandemic? Well, obviously live performance. Theater, musical concerts, large get-togethers are hurting. I mean, not just hurting, in most states they are close to nonexistent. Where I live in Virginia, there are still venues putting on concerts, I think at 25% attendance. Most leading stars are not touring. There is a limping scene, but it is not stable or sustainable. And we're just seeing cultural venues close their doors. Some are going out of existence. Even if they limp along, they are much less important. And what is it that people are doing? Well, you can do gaming in a pandemic, just great. You can watch YouTube in a pandemic, just great. You can be on social media in a pandemic, Just great. Streaming on TV. Netflix shares have gone up a lot, right, since COVID-19. Why go out to the movie theater and risk infection, if the movie theater is even open, when you can just sit at home and stream? So we've just had this very rapid, large shift in a number of areas that were growing anyway, and all of a sudden we're here in November 2020, and we see that some of the arts are really in a good bit of trouble. There were some trends operating against them, rapidly accelerated, and we're going to emerge into some new world, like in about the middle of 2021 with a vaccine. We'll start to reassemble what our lives had been like culturally, I think it will be different. I don't think everything will reopen. I don't think all the old habits will still be there. So I do think we're at this point of cultural crisis. I am not pessimistic about the longer term, but there's no point in my life really where I think the American creative arts have been at such a turning point due to the internet most of all, and then the pandemic nudging along those trends and a fair degree actually of fiscal devastation. Even the role of the university in supporting the arts, which is long and time-honored in this country, many, not all universities have seriously lower enrollments and thus less revenue. And if you ask what are the activities they are likely to cut, I believe on average they are more likely to cut, say, contemporary music competition— composition than they are to cut, you know, their engineering departments or areas such as economics or English that attract a large number of, you know, tuition-paying majors. So again, we get back to this crisis in the arts, and we as an American society have decided at some margins We prefer quasi-culture to culture. Sometimes I do myself. I don't know philosophically speaking how we should feel about that, but I think that's a choice that at least for the time being is baked in, and culture will need to do a bit of competing again. You see cultural producers They're trying to compete by getting on Zoom. Well, there's one person playing a cello. There might be a few people, you know, playing pianos with masks on, whatever it will be. I suspect that is not the final competitive answer as to what will win. So I think we're seeing really a major shake-up on the U.S. cultural stage that's also combined with just a lot more competition from foreign countries, that to me is a very good thing. Foreign countries, most of them for a long time have been very open to American or European cultural goods. America typically, you look at its movies or TV shows, we've been remarkably closed to foreign outputs. Again, not because of any laws, just because of American customs. The number of people now who will watch see something with subtitles on their television, it's suddenly much higher. You see Parasite, Korean movie, being the most talked about movie of the year. That was unimaginable until fairly recently. So, we're getting a much more globalized culture in this country, in part the internet, in part through TV, and we're just seeing, I think, what Looking back, we will see it's like a 5-year period where more in the creative arts, the performing arts, culture changed than in any other 5-year period, you know, probably since World War II or maybe since, you know, some part of the 1960s when some parts of our culture became open, freer, more radical and the like. That's my overall assessment of where we're at. I do think we're at a time where some commercial cultures are ailing. I think the desire of human beings to connect with the creative spirit in others is stronger than ever. I'm very much an optimist, but I think a lot of what we'll see for the next 5, 10 years, it will feel strange, it will feel alienating, not all of us will be comfortable with it. And we're in the process of suddenly building this new cultural world based on the internet. Based on quasi-culture, based on all this incredible competition from highly creative foreigners who now have access to our markets. I'm actually excited about it. But to sum up, my purpose in speaking today was to tell you where I think we stand and why. And why now, I would say, is a more important time than ever before to really paying attention all of the creativity surrounding you, and just asking yourself anew every day, like you as consumer, you as listener, reader, like, what is it you want to do with it? Anyway, we now have time for some questions, which will somehow be funneled to me, but thank you all for coming and listening. Pleasure to be speaking to you all.

Tyler, thank you so much. This is Dan Asia again. At the helm, at least for a moment. I'll be going through some questions. Oh, hold on, I will start my video. My apologies, everyone. Um, so some questions, Tyler, that people have been sending along as you've been talking. Do you think there a path exists in the hope or promise of blockchain contracts in protecting and expanding artists, and I will ask you to give us a definition of blockchain contracts, if you don't mind.

That's a very difficult question because I've given whole talks on what blockchain is. Blockchain is the most fundamental side of cryptocurrency. Think of it as a way of creating a distributed ledger of who owns what, who owns how much Bitcoin, right? Or you could imagine who owns which intellectual property rights to which pieces of music or poetry. Maybe I'm a bit of a skeptic on blockchain, but even if you think blockchain will outperform, say, the methods of ledgers we use with ASCAP and BMI and all the traditional ways we've recorded legal rights for artists, I'm not sure it would change the art very much, but there may be an easier way to keep track of who owns what, but I would view that actually as a marginal change, and on top of that, I'm a bit skeptical. I mean, I think we'll continue to use blockchains as a method for recording property titles in the arts. It just doesn't seem to me to be a very highly valued use for them because they're cumbersome in a lot of ways, and complicated, and there's not even a simple way to explain to people what they are. So I don't think it will change that much, is my brief answer.

Do you think that creators and investors in copyrights, such as music publishers and record labels, have the same economic incentives and should be protected by copyright law the same way?

There's a number of questions wrapped up in there. First, I think people who own the rights to songs have very different incentives. It's much easier to become wealthy owning the rights to a song than it is to become wealthy, uh, trying to sell musical product on the market. So if your song ends up used in commercials or endorsements or in any commercial context, The government will protect your IP rights there pretty well, and you can earn a lot of money. I mentioned before Paul McCartney was a billionaire. A lot of that billion he earned not by selling records, and that was in a time when you could earn a lot selling records, but he earned it by buying up rights to songs, and he chose wisely, and his song ownership empire has done very well. Which is great, but being in this world where songwrite ownership financially is more potent than being a Led Zeppelin or Paul McCartney kind of figure, I think it changes the incentives. So you have people who can write songs for those who are well-known performers, and then that music to me becomes a little disconnected or a little not unified, or maybe a little less authentic. Would I change copyright law? I think we enforce it for far too long. I would be happy with a system of copyright that were just 20 or 30 years period, and then it goes away. You know, music companies don't want that, publishers don't want that. They make a lot of money off their back catalogue. To some extent, that may be cross-subsidizing current advances, But at the end of the day, most things that are hits are hits pretty quickly, and to incentivize the actual creators, I just don't think we need to lock up copyright for that long in this world where Disney copyright essentially is de facto infinite. Seems to me both inefficient and unjust. It hasn't covered everything in your question, but it is some of your question.

That's great. Could you comment on the economics of statutory license? And the rate setting by copyright royalty judges, as well as the practice of compulsory licensing, which is the norm in music but rare in other IP situations? Very good question.

So as you indicate, the way musical rights have worked for a long time in the United States is in essence radio station can play your song, right? And the royalties they have to pay to the owners are fixed, and this has eliminated a lot of costly bargaining. There's a lot of movies you can't see because it's hard to get the rights. Just one universal system, one price, basically no negotiation. It has worked pretty well, but it seems to me that system is now obsolete. Because what counts as a radio station is no longer so well defined. So if a quote-unquote normal radio station wants to play your string quartet, Daniel, whoever owns those rights, we know the payment. If someone programs, say, their Spotify to play songs in a particular order, that is not a radio station legally. And there's a kind of economic arbitrage going on where super cheap ways of, in essence, broadcasting licensed music are outcompeting fixed price system. I'm not sure exactly how to fix that, but I think what we've done, while it worked great for a long time, it has finally become unsustainable, that we're trying to keep two prices in the same market. And what's happening is the higher earning opportunities are collapsing for music creators.

Thank you so much for plugging my CD on a regular basis.

I own, I think, all of your CDs, or all the ones that are on Amazon at least.

Well, I appreciate that. I want you to know that although the internet may make it difficult for artists to make money off their work, could it be argued that the opportunities it provides for self-marketing and promotion help balance this out.

That's absolutely correct, but it does shift the balance of power to creators with very low capital costs. I'm on the internet myself. I'm not at all a creative artist. I do create things, right? They're just not art. They're not even quasi-art. I write economics. And I write it on the internet and I give it away for free. This is in a bigger picture sense highly profitable for me through other opportunities, but it took me years of giving it away for free before those other opportunities came along. In the meantime, I was writing economics as one guy on a sofa in his proverbial pajamas, and my capital costs were essentially zero. But the big winners are creators with very low capital costs. Solo poets can do very well. People who play a single instrument and record at home in a home studio or in very small groups can do very well or maybe better. A lot of people in Indigenous cultures who have super low rents and live in a village somewhere and they make a textile or they create a kind of music their grandfather taught them, very low costs. Those people are doing in general, not all of them, much better because they can market to the whole world. But the kind of big canonical enterprise with lots of bodies staging Mahler's 8th, so to speak, which takes goodness how many, I don't know how many people, a lot of complex theatrical plays, spectacular high capital costs event, it's harder to pull off. And again, there's going to be different opinions about that trade-off, there's something to that loss I myself find very disappointing. So you may write more string quartets, I'm not sure you're ever going to write a string octet, is one way to put it. That's because of economics.

Right. No, that's a good point. What do you think about the lawsuits related to copywriting melodies? That have been developing these past few years, do you believe they've had a net positive or net negative effect on the music industry?

If negative— lawsuits go back earlier than that. So in 1970, George Harrison is sued because My Sweet Lord has chord changes similar to the Chiffons' He's So Fine, right? Rap music, this has been a huge problem. You sample something if you don't own the rights to it, maybe no one even hears per se what you've sampled, but you're immediately hauled into court. There's a whole army of people who just go around looking for copyright violations. I would change that whole system. I think there's too much rent-seeking, too many frivolous lawsuits, even the just lawsuits. I don't really see the point. So the ability to borrow, which creators have done from the beginning, steal, borrow, whatever you want to call it, that should be liberalized and deregulated greatly. And I don't think you can just, you know, copy someone's whole composition and put it out under your name and charge a lower price for it. If someone wants to quote a minute of your string quartet in his or her rap song, I don't think they should have to pay you anything. I think it should just be allowed unless it's a very close copy. So, I'd like to see a great deal of deregulation there. But if anything, we're moving in the opposite direction. Everyone's lawyered up, everyone's worried about the rights. You have to make all these payments if you want to do anything. Kanye West, of course, can do it. He's rich, he has all the lawyers. Up-and-coming creators, it's a barrier to entry. We've screwed that one up badly. And the biggest losers actually have been rap artists and especially young Black men who don't start out with a whole lot of capital. Let them copy, I say.

Do you still think that individuals don't care about in-person experiences because of the pandemic? Do you think that they have the potential— I think those live experiences—

to resurge because or when the pandemic is over? When the pandemic ends in the short, short run, I think everyone's going to go crazy going out to clubs, getting drunk, doing whatever they were afraid to do right now. But I think something else that's happened, and I'm sure you see this with your academic seminars, it's like, hey, we now all know how to use Zoom. We all have Zoom on our computers. If 3 years from now, like, you want to— have me give a talk and maybe I can't make it that time, and you say, hey, Tyler, why don't you speak to us on Zoom? I mean, we're going to do it, right? No one's going to give up on Zoom. I think business travel will fall by a third. Academic conferences will be much more sparsely attended. Job interviews and presentations over Zoom or something like it, I think, are here to stay. So because we've all had to make this big adjustment, once we get over our cabin fever, I think we'll be in a world where, you know, more is done online. That would have happened anyway. It's just been massively accelerated.

Mm-hmm. But, sorry, this is my question. The others have been from our audience, but you don't think the live performance of a string quartet, for example, or a symphony will disappear? Or do you think that the amount of that that existed before will be vastly reduced after the pandemic?

It will be significantly reduced, but not vastly reduced. So I think you have a lot of mid-tier cities who are supporting symphony orchestras, and they will stop doing that in some future just because they'll be missing the sales tax revenue and they will have lost some of their small business and have to make up pension funds and the like. So I think we'll have fewer opera companies, I think we'll have fewer symphony orchestras. I think string quartets will do just great. Like voice and piano will do great. Small number classical music events, there might be more of that. But again, the Mahler's Eighth, I'm like, uh-oh, are they going to stage Mahler's Eighth in Indianapolis or Louisville 10 years from now? Or how about Buffalo? You know, you know the history of these symphonies, of course. I'm going to say no. New York, yes, of course. LA, yes. I think there'll be less of it.

A thinning and a weeding out. Now, I should just mention, I think that's what people thought with the onset of LPs and then particularly CDs. In other words, if you can buy a fine recording of Mahler's 8th by the Berlin Philharmonic with Karajan, why would you want to hear the same piece in Indianapolis or Buffalo with Faletta or someone else? But that didn't seem to be the case. In other words, it seemed that orchestras have plugged along pretty well. So what do you think about that? And then the other question is, what about the age of the audience and simply older people not wanting to go back into auditoriums and theaters where they might in fact get COVID again.

Older people might be scared, as you say. The vaccines coming do look great, but there's some uncertainty how much they will protect the elderly. People are just spooked in general. Mm-hmm. They like to go in groups. Maybe someone in the group is still immunocompromised, whatever. That will be harder. But I don't think the main issue is wanting hear Mahler's Eighth less. As you know, it just costs an incredible amount to stage Mahler's Eighth. If you think of a typical mid-tier city orchestra, it's probably getting 10 to 20% of its support from government. And I think a lot of that money will go away and say like 16, 17% of the total budget goes away. It's not going to kill all of these things, It's actually significant when you cannot easily control like your labor costs. The orchestra might be unionized or you can't really like play Mahler's 8th with half the people and call it the same thing. I mean, people do try that with transcriptions and the like. But I just think there will be a shift to the more flexible solo vocal, string quartet, piano recital. It's cheaper, it's easier, it's not unionized ever. You can sell individual stars to donors like, hey, we want Marc-André Hamelin to come to town. We're going to ask you, you know, for $20K to help us pay his fee. Donors are very responsive to that. Donors have become less interested in, well, here's our long program of everything we're going to play in Louisville this year. Like, will you support us with general operating support? So again, I think we'll see a shift. I still think people love Mahler, but, uh, I'm hoping in 20 years you get the most incredible Mahler's 8th through virtual reality. It's just way more awesome than ever before. I would put my money on that. I just don't think the old status quo is quite going to hold.

Yeah. If a person posts a piece of art on a public platform like YouTube or Twitter, does copyright protect their work, or do they have no protection under the current system without a publishing or record company?

Well, it depends on the terms on which you post it. So you can post, say, a photograph online and claim the rights to it, and if someone else simply uses it again, the educational and other exemptions aside, you can sue them, or at least send them a nasty email, and they'll pay you $200 not to sue them. So those rights still exist. They are harder to enforce. You need to do things such as watermarking. You need monitors looking out for these copyright violations. So, again, it favors a lot of the established players. It's somewhat of a tax on the up-and-comers who just aren't able to enforce the copyright so readily. The rights are not absent just because you've put something online. Like, no one can take my blog and turn it into a book and put their name on it and sell it on Amazon. I could stop them pretty easily.

Mm-hmm. Here's one final question. It seems as if streaming in all its forms is playing into the hands of introverts. By bringing entertainment and intellectual content right into the home. What is your prediction? Now, maybe you've just given it. Does this trend continue? And if so, what does it look like in 10 years?

I think the trend continues. You mentioned aging before. All Western societies are becoming older. On average, older people spend more time at home and are less likely, say, to go to the movies. They're more likely to go to classical music concerts. But for the most part, I think we'll all be doing our own thing. Culture will be less political in a way. It will be less central to who we are. It will less define what is the American nation. Listeners, viewers, readers, whatever they are, they'll have more fun than ever before, have more choice. It will continue to get way more global. My worry is kind of the great American spark will in some ways be less than it was in maybe the 1960s or 1970s. But this new world will have many very, very positive features. And most of these you're already enjoying. Now in some form. We're just going to see much, much more of it.

Okay, well, on behalf of our entire virtual audience, I would like to thank you for a very, very fine talk and responses. This has been truly really enlightening. I, I have to admit, I've known your work, uh, not quite as long as David Schmitz has, but But as I think you may know, we in fact did a wonderful reading seminar using your book In Praise of Culture. So since you've done me the good turn of speaking about my 3-string quartet CD, I'll simply say for anybody who would like to, you might want to look at In Praise of Commercial Culture. I don't think— Tyler, you can correct me— that you would think it's out of date. Far from it. I think it's remarkably current. And those of you who have enjoyed this this talk and presentation might wish to check that out. Before I pass it back to Dave Schmitz to say goodbye, I'll just mention that we're going to play Piano Phase by Steve Reich as our walking out music, as it were. So those of you who missed it at the front end can hear it at the back end. Dave, I pass the baton over to you.

If you can. Okay, well, just thanks again, Tyler. Thanks, Dan, and thanks, Robert, for helping to pull the event together. This is Voices of Culture, and what more appropriate guest could we have than Tyler Cowen? Great to see you again, Tyler, and great to hear your thoughts how they've developed over the last decade or two, and to see the thread continuing to run through as you're processing new information and experience. And thanks for the update, and please do be well, and I look forward to seeing you down the road, amigo. It will be soon, I hope, I believe.

Thank you again for having me.

Okay, and here comes Steve Reich's piano phase momentarily.

Can you hear me, James?

I can. Let me, uh, let me clear the room.

So what was that about? Like, that was— what kind of music was that? Like, there was no chorus, there was no climax. What was the— I mean, it was interesting for what it was, but is that a particular style of music or a particular philosophy that there isn't any pulse to it?

You bet. It is called minimal music.

Okay.

Got its start in the '60s and then has been very, very influential since its inception. Its major proponents were, uh, the first generation, a guy named La Monte Young who got into meditative drones. Um, in other words, a sort of an anti-music and certainly an anti-Western music perspective. And then a fellow named Terry Riley, who was influenced, one, by drugs, and then two, by Indian music. All right.

And, um, isn't that funny, uh, because, uh, I just had an interchange with Mike Kasser And I said, if there's such a thing as fast-paced meditation, this is fast-paced meditation music.

There you go, there you go. It's music— I, I described at the very beginning, whereas most Western music is a journey, has a beginning, a middle, and an end, this has that, but you don't go very far. And it's more like being inside of a globe or an orb that's circling, and you see its parts in relationship to each other, but nothing really changes a whole lot in your journey. Were— was Reich— he was— these people were influenced by the Asian Buddhist movement, weren't they? Lamont Young was. I don't know if Riley was. I suspect he was. Philip Glass is a buju, a Buddhist Jew. And Steve Reich, after he wrote this music, began to explore Jewish texts. And he wrote a piece called Tehillim, which means Psalms. And then his opera, The Cave, is about conflict between the Abrahamic faiths as expressed in the cave where Abraham is, is buried. And he moved away from this, from the music in some sense. It became a little bit more sophisticated. Dave, to answer your question, you might want to listen to a piece called Music for 18 Musicians. It came about 5 or 6, maybe 7 years after this piece. It's considered to be his most important piece by most people. You may or may not find it more interesting. I leave it to you and also leave it if you want to take the time to listen. But that's a good—

Okay, I've got it. I see it here and it's even— it's even— it's even— there's even a recording of it on YouTube. So yeah, I'll listen to that. There you go. It wasn't— it wasn't uninteresting, maybe not my cup of tea for a regular diet, but But yeah, it was interesting.

I concur with you.

I concur with you. But he's a seminal figure right now in American music because he's in his 80s and he's not writing much anymore. And this had a huge impact on the younger generation that came up in the '70s, '80s, '90s, and into the new century.

Yeah. So it looks like Tyler isn't still around, but I, uh, but I bet he appreciated it.

I hope so, or maybe he hates it. Who the hell knows?

But no, I mean, I like— I've known Tyler for over 30 years now. I promise you he didn't hate it. I promise you that he— I mean, he likes