Tyler Cowen on Liberty, Art, Food and Everything Else in Between 3/12/2007

Welcome to EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mail@econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. My guest today is Tyler Cowen, my colleague here at George Mason University. He's the author of numerous books and articles on all kinds of interesting things. He blogs with extraordinary quantity and quality at MarginalRevolution.com. He's a well-known food and art critic and his latest book, at least I think it's his latest, is Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding from Princeton University Press. Tyler, welcome to EconTalk.

Thank you.

I say I think it's its latest because Tyler is so prolific both in the blogosphere and print, in hardcopy, etc. You never know what he's working on, but I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk about that. And given your extraordinary range of interests, Tyler, you're not an easy man to interview. We'll start with some economics, we'll move on to art and food, so I ask I ask our listeners out there, put on your seatbelts and we'll see where we go. Speaking of seatbelts, I want to start with a question from John Payne, a listener who writes, "I'd like to know what Tyler Cowen thinks are the limits of libertarianism or perhaps more broadly the limits of markets." Tyler, on MarginalRevolution.com, you and Alex Tabarrok, your co-blogger, have a delightful feature called Markets and Everything that we've copied at our blog Cafe Hayek and others have —have enjoyed where you talk about the way that markets are taking care of various problems. I think that's a good thing, a bad thing. I think markets are good at everything. Do you want to put some limits on? Have a go at it.

When I blog a markets and everything post, those range from selling organs to selling services, which I wouldn't necessarily describe on a family podcast. Thank you. To an Australian surfer selling his identity and his friends and his holiday vacations. When I blog most of those, typically I feel sad, actually, that there's a market in what there is. It's not my first instinct to want to ban it, but I do feel that, that something's wrong. And often I view the entries as a kind of moralizing from a distance. Like, look, how did this person get to the point that he's out there in a market selling this important part of his or her life? If we get to the legal question, where do we need to draw the line with markets? I think there are some very clear areas. The most obvious is politics and voting. I don't think politics should be a market. I don't think we should be able to sell our votes. When it comes to children's rights, I think many things, most things, really should not be up for sale. But for the most part, when it comes to capitalistic interactions between voluntary consenting adults, I'm willing to allow it. But this voluntarist sense of, "Look, step back, what society relies upon is some kind of moral code or just individual prudence, and you really are making a mistake by commodifying everything in your life." I believe that very strongly.

So, in an earlier podcast with Viviana Zelizer, we talked about buying hugs for your children or checking your kids. At one extreme, you pay someone to hug your kids. At the other extreme, you pay someone to check your kids' hair for lice. That latter one, you know, it has a certain appeal. The former is pretty repulsive.

There's something about life and friendship and family At its core is taking certain relationships out of markets. There's still a meta-framework of markets. It's within a context of voluntary interaction that you decide what you're willing to buy and sell at what price. But partly markets take on their meaning because not everything is a market. For instance, I find it fun to engage in what's called retail therapy. Go to Amazon, look for some CDs, click, buy one. I probably do it more often than I should, but it's genuinely fun. It's fun to do the shopping, it's fun to get the CD. I don't regret it like a compulsive gambler or alcoholic might regret it ex post. But in part, that's fun because I'm not doing it all the time. And this Aristotelian ideal of moderation, which we also find in many of the world's religions, again, is very important. And I view a lot of markets and everything as a kind of implicit slant on what happens when we reject the Aristotelian ideal of moderation, and it can be pretty scary or sometimes funny, but in a scary way or a sad way.

Well, I recommend iTunes for the retail therapy. It's only 99 cents a shot, and I— But there's digital rights management. Yeah, this is true. It's a mixed bag, and it is a little bit— there is that little bit of regret sometimes when you realize You have all these piled up purchases, you get a little bit of a rush from buying, and then you find out later you didn't listen to them for a long time, or you didn't read them. They sit on your shelf lonely and depressed.

I don't like iTunes for that reason. I find when I buy the physical CD, the fact that it takes up space is useful. It forces me to listen to it, to put it somewhere, to process it, to somehow eventually get rid of it. Either by reselling it or by deciding it's one of my favorites or by putting it down in the basement. And there's a system of inventory management with physical items that I'm well used to dealing with. But in the cyber world, I don't have any equivalent. I buy things on iTunes and they're lost. They get lost in the random shuffle function of my iPod and every now and then I hear them and I never really know what to make of it.

Well, let me give an alternative explanation. It's interesting, but it's also possible that what I know of you is you're interested in a lot more things than I am. So it could just be the fact that you like more stuff and these random purchases are more likely to please you. See, with me on iTunes, being able to narrow my choice to buy the one song on the album that I like is very valuable. For you, you probably like all— you probably like a lot of the songs. You probably like more songs than the average person does on the average album. And you probably like more books than the average person likes, more pages of the book. Although I think you confessed recently that you did not finish a book. Is that correct?

Most books I don't finish. I finish 1 in 10 at the most.

Is that a new phenomenon?

No, no, that's an old, old phenomenon. I'm very brutal with not finishing, walking out of movies, discarding things I've bought and I don't like. If I have any endowment effect, it takes a while to kick in. And I'm not very sentimental on that first round.

Maybe I misremember because it took me a long time to not be able to— it took me a long time to be able to put a book down and not finish and just say not it's in process, but it's done. I'm not going to read another page. It's a loser. Bad use of my time. Sign of maturity, perhaps. I hope. Or immaturity. I don't know. Yeah, it could be either one. We've had a number of guests on the show, particularly Richard Thaler, talking about libertarian paternalism. Where do you come down on that issue? This idea that— so-called libertarian idea that the government can narrow our choices, still give us a choice, but maybe using behavioral economics insights to help us make better choices. Do you have any thoughts on that?

The libertarian view is really no paternalism, so I don't buy it. But I think there is a deeper point behind libertarian paternalism, and it's not been expressed properly. And it has to do with what's the difference between property rights enforcement and regulation. So, we would all agree, if someone sells you something and it's not what it turned out to be, it was a kind of fraud, and you're damaged, that ex post you can seek remedy through the law. We would all agree with this. But when you look at damage in terms of risk and probability, and you buy something, and there's some chance—5%, 10%, 80%, 100%, whatever—that it will damage you, and we then ask, should society be content only with ex post remedies as enforced by the courts, which I don't trust—the courts don't work very well—or is there a case also for ex ante preventive action, at some level of risk or probability, and that ex ante action typically is called regulation, and often we criticize it, but you could say it's just a way of enforcing property rights. We don't let people play Russian roulette with each other. The chance that you'll kill the person is too high. So, what's really the line between property rights enforcement and regulation? I think that is poorly defined, and libertarians have tended to favor what they call property rights enforcement, But that, to me, puts a lot of faith in the courts, which I don't really have. It's not that I have more faith in regulators. I'm just not sure why we've opted for so many ex post solutions, where the burden is always on the courts. And once you open up that ambiguity, I think there is room for some preemptive ex ante regulation. But I don't view it as paternalism. I view it as maybe it's the best way we have to enforce property rights. And in that sense, some of the more concrete arguments, I think there can be a case, but not in paternalistic terms. When it comes to paternalism, I think people are more often either the best judge of their own self-interest, compared to government, or even in cases where they are acting or behaving destructively, it's that they really want to be destructive. And again, I may not personally approve, but I'm very reluctant to bring in the force of law even to stop a lot of behavior which is simply destructive.

You talk about the courts and not having faith in them. We have a great deal of evidence, I think— maybe it's not reliable or maybe you don't find it convincing— on the role of courts in the pre-regulatory era, say I don't know, 1920 to 1960 in the environmental era or in the safety regulation era. In the old days, pre-1960, you know, if your workplace was hazardous and your employer acted badly, you sued the employer. Today, that kind of mechanism, you can still sue your employer, but it tends— OSHA and other mechanisms are how we've tried to reduce those risks. I don't see a lot of evidence that the regulation has reduced the risks. It seems to me it hasn't done much better. My crude reading of the evidence, it hasn't done much better than the pre-regulatory system. Is that your read? Do you have a different read?

The world is much safer today. I think we would both agree. Most of that, we would also agree, is due to wealth. Yep. How much of it is due to regulation? Looking at the time trend, I think is very difficult to sort out. Some regulation may simply stop the world from becoming more dangerous also. Yeah. Uh, at some probability, I think there should be an ex ante restriction on harm. And I think more and more real-world harms are becoming probabilistic. Global warming's a good example. Even those people who are skeptics about the mainstream— I am not so much myself— but surely we have to admit there's some chance the mainstream is correct. If I think it's 80 or 90%, but a skeptic might think it's 20%, it seems to me a 20% chance of a harm that large is still something actionable. In expected value terms, there's still an issue to be taken care of. So I think the whole distinction between what's a property right and what's not just gets slipperier when you have more global issues and you have less certainty about cause and effect.

Well, my worry there is that if you're going to deal with a global issue, you need some— typically you're going to need some kind of global form of governance, which means you're going to separate even farther from the consumers and people who are dealing with the consequences of decisions from the decision makers. Let me ask you about global warming because it's an interesting issue. You say there might be a disagreement on the probability. Somebody might say it's 80 to 90%. Someone might say it's 20, but even at 20, the expected value is large. Do you think we have a good idea of what— I have two questions for you. Do you think we have a good idea of what the harm is from global warming? Say from 2 or 3 degree, 4 degree increase in average global temperature over the next 5, 10 decades? And do you think there's an obvious thing to be done about it if we agree on what that harm is?

The bounds on the forecasts are very large for the harm, but the worst-case scenarios are very bad. There's a good paper by Marty Weitzman, right, where he argues it's not so much an issue of discount rate, but an issue of buying insurance against the worst-case scenarios. And I tend to agree with him. I don't think we necessarily know how bad those are. But uncertainty doesn't necessarily militate in favor of doing nothing. I don't have a lot of faith in international institutions and treaties. I think the best case scenario is that individual countries do things on their own, just as some American states have done, not out of self-interested rationality, but out of a kind of irrational expressive voting on the part of those citizens. That is, cheap to vote to do something against global warming, even if it makes your state, say California, worse off. In self-interested terms, it's irrational. But in fact, if all voters, or if enough voters, behave that way, you get a collective outcome that's a bit like an agreement. And I think there's some chance that big chunks of the world go down that path.

I guess my— the other thing you'd have to worry about though is the— if you think the worst case— let's go back to the white swan point that the worst case scenario is something dreadful with some non-trivial probability. You should also have to worry about something dreadful from the attempt to stop it. Sure. Right. So that would be the other, you know, international government imposed as a reaction to crisis, devastating tax rates that lower our standard of living by 20%, 40% in the name of carbon neutrality. I guess those would be the issues that I worry about. Switch gears. In the Library of Economics and Liberty, which EconTalk is a part of, Dan Klein, our colleague, had an essay recently arguing that economists should be honest about their ideologies and embrace them. He articulated what he called a Smith-Hayek identity, a name he doesn't particularly like but can't think of a better one, which is part of the challenge here. And he said this would include, among other things, a skepticism about government and awareness of the complexity of the world and awareness of the challenges of gathering information. What do you think of Dan's claim as the importance of ideology and being open about it, and what do you think of his suggested identity, sort of a hat we might wear as economists?

I think economists, like other human beings, should be open about ideological issues. I view blogging as one good medium for doing this. You blog yourself, you find pretty quickly after even just a bit of blogging, you're on record on more issues than just about any economist in the history of the world ever before. And it's all there in the archives, it's there in Google. People can find you on literally hundreds or maybe even over time thousands of issues. Same with Brad DeLong. If you wanna know where Brad stands, you can find out. Greg Mankiw, same way. I think that's fundamentally healthy and I think more economists should blog. Not only for that reason, but that's a good reason. You can see biases, you discover where's a person's weak points, what effects do they tend to overestimate or underestimate. You don't just get a label, you get a whole complex multidimensional picture of their strengths, their weaknesses, what they've read, how they debate with people they disagree with, how they accept criticism, many, many things. So, that I'm all in favor of. I'm less inclined to accept a label because I'm not sure what a good one would be. I would say my label is MarginalRevolution.com. Scroll through the archives and try to build that up as its own brand name. If the label is going to be Smith and Hayek, maybe that's as good as anything, but it's easy to find problems in that. Smith wrote in the 18th century. He saw the glimmerings of the Industrial Revolution, but he was worried about the Scottish Highlands, and that's not a criticism, but it's hard to put yourself in the same world as Smith. Hayek was a kind of intellectual aristocrat from a decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. I believe he was born in the 19th, not the 20th century, and he had his own quirks. So, again, I don't mean that in a critical way. But I don't inhabit the same space that Hayek does. He worried about a lot of issues I don't and vice versa. And that label, the more it sticks, over time it will become even more out of date. So I'm not sure we have a good label. I think there's value in people trying to come up with one, but at the end of the day, I'll probably decline to use it and stick with marginalrevolution.com.

I like that insight about— how much we've revealed about ourselves through the blogosphere. A little frightening perhaps. I think it reduces your chances dramatically, Tyler, of being president of the United States.

Not just president, but any government job.

Probably even attorney general or Supreme Court justice. Just, you know, slumming downward down the prestige ladder there. Moving downward there. But it is an unusual time and I really feel— like your reaction to this. I really feel it's the golden era of economic education because of the blogosphere, the ability to hang out in cyberspace with virtually with people like you or Brad DeLong or Greg Mankiw and find out what they're thinking about those thousands of topics really is something that could only be experienced in the past by going to graduate school. I still recommend going to graduate school for people of the right inclination and perseverance, discipline, passion, especially at George Mason, of course. But you can get a lot of the intuition of graduate school without the tools by reading, I argue, a handful of blogs. And that's really a remarkable thing. That's right.

I think economics as a field does relatively well through blogging. If you have a good example, and the quick point, you can make it in a blog post, and you can link to data or to a longer argument. I've tried to read philosophy blogs. I think they usually don't work. It just takes too long to get to the crux of the matter, not through the fault of the writer, just by the nature of the discipline. A book is better. A book is better, but I think blogs in linguistics can work if you tell people clever points or ideas about the origin of a word or the way people speak or an accent. That works in the blogging form. I think reporting on political candidates— it doesn't interest me much, but I think that's proven its way in the blogosphere. So, the general question of what kinds of ideas blogs favor or disfavor, I think, will grow increasingly important. And I don't think any of us expected economics to be a winner from this, but I think we are a winner. I think more people will want to go to economics graduate school. They'll be intrigued. I'm a little worried they'll be disappointed that it's less fun than the blog. Yeah, I think that's true. But it's gone remarkably well, economics blogging, in my opinion.

That's an interesting point about the relative attractiveness of certain disciplines. Economics has done well, as you say, politics has done well. Any speculation on the next 5 years, 5 weeks, 5 days of the economics blogosphere, anything, any changes you see coming, things that are going to be different?

I think we'll see a little bit of a shakeout. I think the supply of economics bloggers is fairly inelastic, that it's pretty hard to do, and not many people can do it, say, for a few years' time or do it at all. And I think what we observe is fairly close to equilibrium, but I think a number of people will leave. And it will go on. But the question of what will the blogosphere be like in so many years, I think one feature of today's world is whatever the equilibrium is, we get there a lot quicker than we used to. And we see what it's like. We're living it now. This is it.

Do you think you'll be blogging in 5 years? Do you find it— what's your mix of pleasure and pain as a blogger? Is it all pleasure? Do you find yourself wanting to blog more often than you can or does it go the other way around? Do you feel like you're— curious. You're one of the most prolific, if not the most prolific bloggers out there in terms of just volume and quality of that volume. Do you think you'll keep it up?

I hope I'll keep it up. It's almost all pleasure. I would say what is the pain for me is when I'm traveling. Simply getting the time in front of a machine, in the logistical sense, that can be a problem, that can be inconvenient, and that I worry about. But certainly, any day I'm at home, I've always been glad to be blogging. And if I'm traveling, it's not the blogging I mind, it's just the physical logistics of being able to do it. So, if my life is looking like the way it looks now, I'll probably still be blogging. There's some chance I'll feel I've just run out of anything possible to say and lost all readers. I hope then I'd have the good grace to step aside. But I'm not planning on quitting, actually, ever. In fact, I would like to have a second blog where I could put the refuse that doesn't quite fit on Marginal Revolution and just siphon it off, just dump it somewhere. Maybe a few people would read it. It'd be a kind of secret blog.

It's probably out there now. I should alert our listeners. It's probably under some pseudonym. Taylor Cowen or some slight change in Tyler's name and it's his second-tier blog. It's where he— what's the literary analogy, Tyler? Help me out here. Give me a pseudonym for a great writer who wrote. There are a lot of people who wrote under pseudonyms.

Stephen King and Richard Bachman, for instance. There you go.

That would be an example. Does Stephen King write under Richard Bachman?

He used to and several other names. Richard James and Aphex Twin and Polygon Window and AFX. He has a bunch of names. But the problem with having a secret blog, I think, is if you blog for long enough, I wouldn't quite say you feel captive, but you feel a bit like your audience expects a certain something. And that something is what you are, so you're not being dishonest in giving it to them. And if you had an alternative outlet, you would approach it with such glee and relish that it would quickly become better than your original blog. Horrors. And rather than it being a dumping ground, it would in a way compete with or cannibalize what you're doing in the first place. And that I think is the real issue.

Yeah, of course most blogs are a dumping ground already. So, you know, you really— what's the opposite of gilding the lily? I don't know. But it is a fascinating thing. I wonder if the technology will change. Over the next few years to make it easier to do that blogging out of town. I suspect it will.

Well, Glenn Reynolds has it set up now. He buys a wireless connection, which as I understand it is always connected. It's like a cell phone. Mm-hmm. And it doesn't cost that much.

Yeah, it's not so hard.

And I may do that. I just haven't gotten around to it or I'm just not traveling enough right now for it to be worth my while.

Clearly we need a fundraiser. Here to— there's a big positive externality. Tyler doesn't blog as much as his readers would like, so when he's on the road, we need to buy him the card that lets you blog from around the world at any time. We'll work on that. Tyler, you are what I think most people would call a microeconomist, but unusually you've taught macro. I think the number of people who've taught Both is a small number. A lot of our listeners, I think, would like to understand the macroeconomy. Do you have any recommendations for them, either as grad students or as educated folk who would like to have a better idea of either what's going on in macro or what's going on in the economy at large? Not the same thing necessarily. They're related, but any advice?

I'm currently writing a macroeconomics textbook This is with Alex Tabarrok. Mm-hmm. And in that, uh, we hope to put our views on macroeconomics. And of course it's intended for students, but it will be written at such a level that anyone can pick it up. And we feel there's a need for such a book.

Definitely.

I also have longer-run plans to write a macroeconomics book, a bit like what Richard Dawkins has done for evolutionary biology, to explain macroeconomics not through a text, but just in a book that you pick up and you start, or the way people learn popular accounts of quantum mechanics. And I'm convinced it can be done. I also know we don't have all the answers, but neither does quantum mechanics or evolutionary biology. And people who read those books, they get that. In fact, they like seeing the puzzles and the frontier.

Strange and slightly alarming that book doesn't exist. Do you agree? I agree. It may be— I'm not sure the reason for it, but it is somewhat alarming. That book should exist. There should be 10 of them, right? Absolutely. And there probably are 10. And there are in biology. There probably are 10 of them right now. I guess if you went to a bookstore, you'd find a handful of books, maybe 10 on macroeconomics or the economy, but it wouldn't fill the goal that you're talking about, which would be, I think, a little more serious.

But written with the skill of a Dawkins. I'm not suggesting I can write as well as he can, but that kind of writing—

A little more compelling than a textbook.

People pick it up and they say, "Aha," and there are stories and it builds. But I think economists are not mentally geared to write books. We never learn how to do it for professional reasons. You've encountered this, I'm sure. Yep. You've written books, but most people haven't.

It's not the norm.

And it narrows down the field.

Yeah. But journalists would be a good candidate. Smart journalists would be a good candidate for that book. And as I said, there's probably been something like that written out there that we're not either aware of or didn't grab our attention with that compelling aspect that we're looking for.

But I've met many journalists who understand microeconomics. I've hardly met any journalists who understand macroeconomics. That's true.

Speaking of macroeconomics, you recently blogged on the challenges of being a Latin American despot, and you suggested that you would not do a particularly good job producing growth if you were in charge of an economy. You might avoid the big mistakes, I think you wrote, but you weren't confident that you could outperform some of the other folks out there. Why the pessimism? And what mistakes do you think you could avoid, and what do you think you might do well.

I don't think I would impose wage and price controls.

Hey, hey, good chance he's off to a roaring start.

Better than some of the competition. Yep. I don't think we'd see triple-digit inflation.

The bar is low, yeah.

But in my opinion, in a lot of these countries, perhaps all of them, there are really quite a few people, often educated in the US, who know exactly what should be done, but the real problem is managing the interest groups. And they can't do it. I know that I can't do it, even if I somehow could masquerade as a native of the country. I have no particular skill in that, to move forward with some political bargain to get a good result. You know, in Mexico, if you look at the price of corn, price of tortillas, and the like, and you have people camping out in the central square in Mexico City, you have contested elections, you have riots, you have violence, you have drug gangs, assassinations, kidnappings. And to navigate that minefield, I feel my knowledge of economics is of relatively little use and that I would not do any better than the people they've had in office. Fox or Calderón, I think I would be hard-pressed to do as good a job as they've been doing, and I don't think they've been doing such a great job.

But you make the great point that we we sometimes abstract from the challenges of a country situation and think of it as an engineering challenge. Just, you know, pick the right mix of oxygen, gasoline, and the carburetor and get the engine to run efficiently and of course, it's complicated tremendously by the cultural institutional and as you point out, the violence and special interests that are rampant in those situations.

That's right. What I'd like to do someday eventually is rewrite public choice economics putting the particularities of culture at the forefront and not treating them as a second-order effect, but really take it to be the starting point. And I think economics would be very different. It would be more practical. It would for sure be less general. But the old engineering approach, you know, free trade, get rid of price controls, a list of 20 things— you and I, I think, would agree on the list. Private property.

Private property. Capital markets working beautifully, as if that were something you could snap your fingers at.

—Yeah. —But how you get there, keeping in mind that for most of human history, over 99% of it, none of the world has had that stuff, and that you need some very special cultural conditions. It ties to religion and Larry Ianniconi's work. It ties to peer effects. It ties to the mental models that people have, the narratives they tell themselves. And to take that as really the first variable in economic theory, like what are the narratives people have, and build upon that. That, I think, is long overdue.

Do you think we've learned anything? And by we, I'll go way beyond economists and just include anybody thoughtful. Have we learned anything about the role of culture in those settings in poor countries? Do you think— we've started to talk about it. That's a good start. We've started to recognize the fact that the solutions that we think are necessary are not sufficient. Such as free prices and free exchange and private property, the rule of law, etc. But have we started to make progress on those cultural issues? Do you think we've learned anything? It's hard to systematize it. It's the challenge, right?

It's hard to systematize it. I think we've learned an incredible amount, but if we try to put it into our old boxes— you even used the phrase "the role for culture." Once you make it a "the," the answer is no, we haven't. But that's not the form the knowledge exists in either. And I think anyone who works in one of those countries learns a lot very, very quickly about what those constraints are.

And of course, just knowing those restraints and constraints doesn't— isn't sufficient for doing something about them. Can just lead to depression. That's right.

But I don't think it's necessarily a pessimistic approach because we also see there are societies that have overcome them. Examples? Well, in recent times, East Asia, more generally England, the United States, the Industrial Revolution, much of Europe. I like very much Greg Clarke's book on how that all came about. I don't think he has all the answers, but one huge thing we've learned is that it can come about. It can come about more than once. It can come about in more than one place. So there's a pretty optimistic take on it all. And if I think back to when I was a kid, this whole notion of what we now call a developing economy, or maybe it's the so-called Third World, but it's not like Bhutan, it's not sub-Saharan Africa, it's somewhere like Mexico with a per capita income that's actually fairly high and the distribution is all screwy and they have massive problems I know all that, but these middle-tier countries—Brazil, Argentina, Mexico—that are growing and getting somewhere, that too to me is an extremely encouraging sign. Yeah, I agree.

That's good news, definitely. Well, let's shift gears. Let's move on to the aesthetic side of life. Let's talk about art and food. I did ask the readers at Cafe Hayek to send in questions for you. And a number of— I got a number of thoughtful responses. I'd like to ask some of those questions now, and I'm not sure where they'll lead, but we'll give it a shot. Toby Heinrich writes, "Having just read Creative Destruction," book of Tyler's, "which talked about food as an expression of culture quite a bit, and just starting Good and Plenty, which seems to have no references to food or cuisine, why is there no funding for high-end food?" through either government money, foundations, or wealthy individuals. Orchestras are invited by cities to play there, operas are funded, star tenors guest, the Berlin Symphony visits New York, there are Russian and Chinese national circuses, yet I have not heard that Paul Bocuse, Thomas Keller, or Ferran Adrià have been invited by cities to come and cook for the public. The German word Gastspiel describes this quite well. What distinguishes the star chef from the maestro? From a political economy point of view?

That's a complicated question. If one looks to the French, the French of course do a great deal to encourage chefs and to encourage food tourism and to maintain the quality of French food. You could also look at the entirety of French agricultural policy as partly driven by the desire to keep the quality of food high. It makes food more expensive, but you have more small farms, you have more local farms, you have shorter supply chains, and consumers may be worse off, but nonetheless there are some benefits which I'm convinced are essential in selling this whole package to the French intellectuals. So it's not the case that government does nothing in other countries. If you go to Singapore, which is one of the world's great food countries, the best according to some people, the government there very consciously set out eventually to encourage what are called the hawker centers. They're covered areas and you go to the hawker centers and there'll be several dozen or maybe even over 100 food stalls selling excellent cuisine at very low prices. In part, the prices are low because government has set aside land for the food stalls So there are, in essence, no competing uses. Low land price means low price for food. Now, in the United States, our government does very little, but our government also does, in direct terms, less for the arts. The American model, so to speak, is to encourage a lot of private wealth. We have a lot of wonderful restaurants, a lot of different styles of food. There aren't many kinds of cuisine where America is the best, Maybe there aren't any. But there are a remarkable number of cuisines where we're one of the best. Where you can get, like, some really good version of an ethnic cuisine here. So, the American model there has worked pretty good. What are the public choice reasons why there's not more government in food? I don't think there's a bargain between a powerful group of intellectuals, as we might find, say, in France, and other elements of the government where both sides can be better off. In Singapore, the government's involvement in food, I think, was originally driven just by the requirements of land use policy and the desire that if people had cheap food readily available, they all would work longer hours and work harder, and this would in the long run pay for itself, and maybe it has.

Do you think there's going to be that MaestroChef concept though? I guess the Food Channel does that a little bit.

I think we have it already, but it's done by the private sector and not by state granting approval to one cook over another.

Your answer relates to another question from Matthew Bedard of Montreal, asks, "How come an interventionist haven such as France produces such great— so much great food? Isn't it a challenge to a free market advocate?" And you're suggesting comes at a price. Might be worth paying if you're a French intellectual. Maybe not. I don't know. Average French person? Any thoughts on that? Think that's a good deal for the French?

It's a good question why the French have such food, but there are a number of issues we need to untangle. The first is what the French have is wonderful French food. There's some good Italian food, but a lot of the foods I love are very hard to get in France. Even in Paris, it's fairly difficult to find good Chinese food. It's possible to find good Indian food, but it's not that many places. So, the French have specialized in refining one kind of food over and over again. But even for new creative cuisine, today I would rather eat in London, I would rather eat in many parts of Spain, I might even rather eat in Australia or New Zealand, or for that matter, New York. So, the French have a kind of perfection The French have among the best raw ingredients, and some of that is agricultural policy, some of that is simply consumers demanding it. To eat even a reasonably good lunch in a well-traversed part of Paris—not a great lunch, but even a good lunch—is $40 and up, and that to me doesn't quite seem right. So, I love France for food vacations, But as a country to live in for food, it would not be one of my top choices. And I say that as someone who thinks ultimately there is only French and Chinese food in the world.

Yeah. What would that number be in New York? If the number is $40 in Paris for a good lunch, what's the number in New York?

It depends where you are. Food in Manhattan, in my opinion, is getting worse. It's more directed toward tourists. There's more great food costing $100 and up, but less simple good food available in Midtown for, say, less than $20. But if you go to the other boroughs, you can eat incredible meals for $10, or even the fringes of Manhattan. Go to 9th Avenue, it's great.

Turn to an aesthetic question. This comes from Bruce Charlton from, uh, who writes from England. In your writings, you present a picture of someone with great enjoyment for classical art of the past and modern art. But both from introspection and observation of the social systems associated with these art forms, I would regard these as essentially distinct tastes and distinct social and economic systems, whereas you seem to stress continuity. For example, the way I listen to, evaluate, and enjoy Bach or Beethoven seems almost totally distinct from the way I might evaluate and enjoy Stockhausen or Cage or Cornelius Cardew. And the way I feel about Rembrandt or Singer Sargent is almost totally distinct from the way I evaluate Joseph Beuys or the conceptual works encountered in a contemporary art museum. Would you agree that in the 20th century there was a split, which has widened ever since, between the traditions of high art—interesting because of the complexity of the experience, but less emotionally appealing—and the tradition of popular art—emotionally appealing but much less complex and requiring continuous generation of novelty to maintain audience attention? The same person can enjoy and appreciate both high and popular art as you and I do, but these are distinct tastes with different subjective and social roles and unintegrated, like enjoying gardening and baseball. Bruce goes on to talk about this being inevitable, this split, with both gains and losses, costs and benefits. What's your reaction to that?

I agree there's a kind of breakpoint. It comes somewhere in the 20th century when— depends on the genre— But hardly anyone enjoys Cage or Stockhausen. Those composers have their fervid partisans, but most people just don't get it. And that's not the case when you take Vivaldi. There may be people who don't care for Vivaldi— actually, I'm probably one of them— but you wouldn't say they don't get it. They choose whether or not to like it. So there's a level of complexity attained at some point. It simply rules out most of the audience. I view that really as an extension of Adam Smith's argument that division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. You have a bigger market, you have more art or music that's hard to understand, and you have more that's easy to understand. There's today more serialist music than 100 years ago. What is that? Like 12-tone music, atonal music, related concepts. There's more music of those kinds circulating, but there's also a lot more popular music. What I find striking is that if you look at what is incorrectly called popular music, often how much it has in common with what is sometimes called contemporary classical music. If you look at punk rock, if you look at alternative tunings for guitars, if you look at Sonic Youth, if you look at techno, you'll find most of it is very hard to understand. Most of it does things which can be fiendishly difficult on the ears. It has its own narrow band of partisans who like various kinds of punk rock or techno or whatever the latest is, and those kinds of music often have more in common with Varese or John Cage, and someone like, you know, a pop singer is in a way closer to old classical music But most of so-called popular music today, it's not very popular. Only a small percentage of teenagers or 20-somethings like it. It's often quite sophisticated. People who've listened to that music often feel relatively comfortable making a leap to contemporary classical music. I was once sitting at home listening to a German composer called Helmut Lachenmann, whose music to most people sounds like noise. I think it's great. My stepdaughter Jana walked in the room and she heard it on and she paused for a moment and she said to me, "Is this some kind of new German noise band?" And I was taken aback, but it was a very profound question, I thought. I paused for a moment and I said, "Yes." Then she smiled at me like, "Oh, you're one of us." And conversation continued. It was on in the background. More or less accepted it. And that's, I think, the more fundamental trend. Not like high-low, popular, unpopular. Adam Smith, division of labor, more of all kinds, that even popular music is more niche than ever before, and most of it most people don't like. They don't even get it.

Do you think it's true, though, that— this isn't quite the question that was asked, but do you feel there's a difference in modern art of both And when I say modern art, I mean music, fiction, sculpture, painting. It just seems quite ubiquitous that a lot of what is considered first-rate examples of modern art do not appeal to the emotions the way that they did in the past. Or do you think that's just a misperception? I think it's a misperception.

Even purely abstract art, if you just take canvases of individual colors, someone like Ellsworth Kelly, or a bit more mixed, Agnes Martin or Robert Ryman, when I see them, to me it's deeply emotional. I feel more than if I'm looking at a lot of paintings from the Venetian Renaissance, perhaps incorrectly, maybe it's just closer to me. Mm-hmm. But it's a lot of the art from the past that I feel distant from. And it also changes throughout the course of your life depending what you're looking at. Right now I'm very keen to see medieval art. I used to take more interest in the Renaissance. But to me the Florentine Renaissance, it's almost a little overgrown or bloated or too much. In something more primitivist like medieval art, it hits me harder. It's more life or death. It's more real. And I think a lot of it is just cultural perception, the lenses you're viewing it from, and it's more relativistic than we like to think. And typically what's happening is people are seeing some art and they don't like it, and they can't fathom that they can't appreciate it because they don't even see why they're supposed to like it, and so they attack it. That's my simple public choice model of why people criticize art as much as they do.

And of course, there's a big selectivity problem. Modern art by definition is a lot of the art that's new rather than the art that survives some test of time. We look at something like, you know, The Rite of Spring where supposedly— I don't know if it's true or not, maybe you know if it's true or apocryphal— Stravinsky had to escape through a men's room window from being killed by the audience. They were so angry.

People still debate how true that is.

Yeah, I don't know, but it's a nice story. But people evidently weren't so thrilled with the original performance. Today we look at it and we go, "Yeah, it's nice." Most people like Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. But there presumably were other things that could have gotten their composers harmed that we don't listen to anymore. They didn't survive the test of time. So surely that's part of it.

That is, but I think it's also a bit like equilibrium in the blogging market. The test of time has accelerated greatly. So if you look at contemporary art— it's not contemporary anymore— from the 1960s and what's come down is important. Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol— still today. By the late '60s, Not that everyone knew, but those critical opinions were in some sense already in place, and they haven't changed that much. People like Ava Hess or, you know, Elizabeth Murray, her reputation's gone up. But the extent to which it's solidified more quickly, and then we simply move on to the next thing because the flow is so extreme, that I think the test of time has itself changed and it's radically been shortened.

I have to add while we're on the subject of art that I had the— I've had the privilege of visiting an art museum with you, Tyler, and I have to pass on an insight of yours that's been very helpful to me. We were in a modern art museum, which is not my best thing, which I struggle with. I'd like to like it more, at least understand it better, and one of the tricks that Tyler suggested to me was picking the painting in the room that I wanted to take home. It's a very interesting exercise. It's helped me a little bit, but what it's mostly helped me with is, is being a parent. When I'm with my kids now in a museum, we can play that game and their attention span quadruples or septuples. There's a certain competitive aspect because you got to pick the best, the one you like the most, and it focuses their perception and I think a very fruitful way. So I like that trick. Thank you for it.

Oh, sure. We're very good at ranking and we're very good at shopping. We're not necessarily that good at looking. Yeah, that's right. It was the Hirshhorn Museum, by the way, for those of you who are wondering where we visited. That's right.

And on that subject, I want to ask one last question about art, and we're almost out of time. We both live here in the DC area which has some extraordinary museums and many of them are public and they're public and highly subsidized so that there's no admission charge. You can walk into the National Gallery of Art and I think 363 or so days of the year at no charge and see an extraordinary array of stuff. And then there are some private museums here in DC. —where you pay an entry fee like the Phillips. I think the Corcoran would be another private one. Could you give me a few thoughts on the American museum scene, some of your favorite museums, particularly here in DC, and then imagine what it would be like without that public subsidy. We like it—we meaning the American people. It's fun to be able to show up at a museum and Of course, people don't always appreciate who's really paying for it. They might know in the back of their mind, but they'll say, "Ah, Washington's so much better than New York. In New York, the museums are expensive, and here they're free. It's great." But I'm curious what you think that's done to what gets canonized. Do you think it's had much effect in how the museum world has responded?

I don't think so. In the US, of course, most museums are still private, and the Washington museums are very, very good, but they've never been opinion leaders. The National Gallery has long been a follower.

The Mausoleum, a very nice mausoleum.

The Mausoleum, even for contemporary art, it's completely a follower, and I think that's appropriate given that it's government. Of course, we pay for these museums through our taxes, so the savings are an illusion. I would have no problem if the government started charging people for attendance. That would probably be more fair. My favorite museum in the Washington area I think by far is the Hirshhorn. It takes the most chances. It has new things out. It has things and artists I've never seen before. In most of the other museums, that's not quite the case. So that's the one I go back to the most. It's also the one where I'm most likely not to like something, but overall that's a good sign. I don't think all the DC museums or even most of them should be that way, But I'm glad that one of them is. The one I think is the most overrated is the Phillips Collection. It's very pretty, it's a great museum, a great collection, but it bores me. It looks the same every time I go. It's wonderful that it's private, the house, the annex, it's all great. But if I could never go to the Phillips again for the rest of my life, I wouldn't miss it.

Glad you've gone once though.

I've gone 40, 50 times. But the pictures in there, they basically look the same to me at this point.

That's an interesting, interesting point. But I would recommend that the National Portrait Gallery, which is—

I went there 2 weeks ago, actually.

And what'd you think? It was fantastic.

And the American Art Museum.

It's a combined— it's a weird combo building. It has different entrances. It's a little bit— I don't know what the analogy is. It's bizarre. You can walk in one entrance, you're in the entrance to one. You walk in the other, in the entrance to the other, and then they kind of overlap in peculiar ways.

And they take a lot of chances, and most of them work. There are a lot of surprises in there.

Do you have a favorite thing you remember from it?

The quilt is incredible. The naïve art blew me away. The Albert Pinkham Ryders I thought were first-rate, some of the best ones. The 19th century landscapes, but many, many items. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff there.

It's a— and the building is nice. It's a nice building. Yeah. Former patent office, I think. It's a nice lesson in technology, right? I think they had plans for storing all the patents that would ever be needed there. They turned out— I didn't know this— to be inaccurate, but it's a nice thought. Well, we're almost out of time. Tell us what you're working on. You mentioned a macro textbook. What else is in the works for you that we can look forward to?

A micro textbook along with the macro. This is again with Alex Tabarrok. Tyler Cowen, who is my co-blogger at Marginal Revolution. August 2nd, I have a popular book coming out on economics with Penguin Dutton. It's called Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Improve Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. And that will be available at the end of the summer. But that's finished.

Hear, hear. Well, we'll all look forward to that. I'm sure there are many other things to come down the road. My guest today has been Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, my colleague here at George Mason University. He blogs with exuberance and discipline at MarginalRevolution.com. Tyler, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

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