What Tyler Cowen Thinks About (Almost) Everything

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Tyler Cowen. Tyler is an economist at George Mason University, the co-founder of my personal favorite blog, Marginal Revolution, and a true polymath. Tyler is well known for giving short but extremely substantive answers to questions, and because of that, I had a lot more questions prepared than I usually do, and I won't spoil all those questions in the intro. You guys won't notice this because of post-production magic, but my internet connection was really bad during this conversation. So if I'm furrowing my brow or seeming awkward at all during the conversation, it's not because of what Tyler's saying. It's because he was cutting in and out for me and I was annoyed by that at the time. So keep that in mind as you watch the conversation. I really enjoyed this one. Tyler Cowen is someone I admire a great deal and it was great to have him on the show. So without further ado, Tyler Cowen. Okay, Tyler Cowen, thanks so much for coming on my show.

Happy to be here, Coleman.

As my favorite polymath, I'm going to ask you some very polymathic questions today. And in Tyler— in Conversations with Tyler style, this will be the interview that I want to do with Tyler, not maybe the interview everyone wants me to do. Okay, so first question, is AI a bubble?

What does that word mean? Bubble. A lot of times asset prices fall. Will some of the AI companies decline in value? Maybe. The whole thing I believe is gonna work. It will make people a lot of money with volatility and maybe a few price crashes along the way. Uh, but I don't think it's usefully conceptualized as a bubble. No.

Is AI going to lead to mass unemployment, or will it be similar to other labor-saving technological revolutions?

It won't lead to mass unemployment, but I don't think it will be just like all the other revolutions. This one may be more fundamental. It is likely to come more quickly, but AI will create a lot of jobs, not just in, say, the energy sector or biomedical trials, but AI will make it possible for so many people to start a project, to start a company, to start a nonprofit with just a small number of talented individuals. And the AI's doing a lot of the work. So those new projects will create an enormous number of jobs. So I'm very bullish on the labor market. It will revalue status in unusual and surprising ways, but there's no reason why we can't stay at full employment.

Why do you think it won't cause mass unemployment? Because the argument people make is that previous technological revolutions replaced physical labor that allowed people to then do— move on to, uh, other tasks that machines couldn't do. But if ultimately anything a human can do can be replicated either by an AI or AI plus future robots, then there just will be no more work. That's the idea.

That's very, very far away. So, so much of what you and I do involves moving and dealing in the physical world. Even if you had decent robots that could clean my house, I don't think the robots could do what you and I do in the physical world. We're also doing a podcast. We could have AIs doing this podcast right now. One would play Coleman, the other would play Tyler Cowen. None of our listeners want that, or I hope they don't want it. Uh, you don't see it surviving in the marketplace. So until scarcity is gone, there'll be plenty of jobs. Now, when you say ultimately, is there eventually, after a very long period of time, an era where there's just no scarcity? I don't know. But that's more utopian than anything else. I think it's unlikely, actually. But it's not coming even in your lifetime, certainly not in mine.

Overall, what's your position on the minimum wage in America?

The literature on the minimum wage has changed a few times. For a while, people thought it did not decrease employment. That opinion is now actually going out of favor. It seems that hiking the minimum wage does in fact raise retail prices. It does not boost employment in the long run. The medium term, it probably lowers employment somewhat. Relative prices still do matter. Uh, but it's not that big an issue for me. I don't think it's a major economic problem the way people such as Walter Williams sometimes have described it. I don't think it's a primary reason for, say, high Black teenage unemployment. So I've more or less put the issue aside. I wouldn't increase it. There's some places where if you have a, a, an NIMBY setup and a lot of high rents, high returns accrue to landowners, and you hike the minimum wage, the real burden falls on the landowner. Rather than the consumer. Uh, it also may mean that the laborers don't benefit. So it's a very complicated issue. People make it very emotional. I think it's an overrated issue, most of all, on all sides.

You and I mostly agree about the negative effects of wokeness in America, and people can watch my appearance on your podcast if they want to see some of our agreements and differences there. But in Mexico, you, you've argued to me that their version of wokeness is basically right. So two-part question: why is wokeness basically right in Mexico, and how do you model the situations where woke attitudes are right versus wrong?

A lot of my time in Mexico I spent writing a book, and the book was about an indigenous community in central Mexico, a community that's not even originally Spanish-speaking. Uh, and I think the central issue in Mexico concerning wokeness is about indigenous rights, and there has been massive land theft, and there are very high rates of discrimination, and indigenous communities typically have poor access to most of all education, and sometimes very poor access to public health services. So the extreme awareness of indigenous issues in Mexico, I think, is justified. I don't favor all the remedies put forward by the Mexican woke. I think in Mexican discourse, especially in indigenous communities, there's far too emphasis on land as mattering, whereas what I think very often it's human capital that's more important. A lot of communities that have had to flee their native countries, like Lebanese, they go somewhere else. They don't obsess over land. They obsess over making a lot of money, and that's gone pretty well for them. So I don't by any means, agree with all the claims of the woke in Mexico, but simply the core framing that there's a very incomplete civil rights revolution and one should be on the side of the civil rights, and there's still massive levels of discrimination. Those claims are basically correct and should be recognized as correct. That's hardly taking the side of the Mexican woke on everything, but I think that's where we're at.

And then the second part, how do you model in general scenarios where woke attitudes are right versus wrong?

If you go to Pakistan, or, uh, that's a good example. Rights of women are extremely weak. Rights of gay men and women are extremely weak. And you can go on down the list and you ask yourself the simple question, should Pakistan be more woke? The answer obviously is yes. Now you could say woke is not exactly the right remedy. What Pakistan really should be is more classically liberal. That too would lead to greater toleration, greater liberties. I would fully agree with that. But if what you've got on the menu is woke ideology and you're just asking, should we have more of it or should we have less of it? I think in most countries around the world we should have more of it. I don't want more of it in the United States. I think in the last 2 to 3 years we've seen quite a bit less of it. That's been a very healthy development. It's much harder for people to get canceled. Our higher education system was careening out of control. I don't think now it's been fixed, but maybe at least it has stopped getting worse. So in the US, a lot of the dose of woke we got was harmful. But if you're in the US in 1959 in Memphis and you're talking about woke, should things be more woke, less woke? You could genuinely say, well, along a number of critical dimensions, Memphis, Tennessee in the 1950s should be more woke. And a lot of the world is in a comparable position. So in this sense, I think woke is underrated.

In general, what were the most surprising and informative and worldview-changing things that you learned from spending so much time in the indigenous Mexican village?

Well, I've been to Mexico, I think, a total now of 33 times, if I'm counting correctly., and I did fieldwork in a village called San Agustín Huapan, which has about 1,500 inhabitants and is quite remote and speaks a language called Nahuatl and Spanish as a second language. And when I did my fieldwork there, I would say commonly a family of 7 would have a per, you know, would have an income per year of say $1,500 to $2,000, which is remarkably poor. You can't even imagine how people live that way. Of course they do, because it's subsistence agriculture. They grow their own food and whatever else they have to spend, if they have anything at all, is luxury. So just what life is like in true poverty. I learned how some humans can still be happy, uh, ways in which they can still exercise some control over their free time or their environments. But I also learned how difficult life is there. What it's like to live without a toilet, without any stores, without any restaurants, to live with so much noise pollution. So it's just an infernal racket so much of the time. And you think of poverty as something quiet and sedate, but it's not. It's disruptive. Uh, you wake up at 4:00 AM in the morning, whether or not you want to. You learn it's not a communitarian paradise. Commonly, neighbors might hate each other. Or in families, there's falling out. There's very high levels of envy and resentment. It's not some smooth social fabric with all these well-functioning community norms. It's really pretty essentially dysfunctional. You learn what politics is like in a very, very micro environment, how silly it is, what they argue about. And then you think, well, what is it that we argue about? And upon reflection, that seems sillier as well. And everything is about sides and who is your compadre and what faction you're in. And it just gives you a lot of perspective on the broader world. I found to go somewhere totally different, have to cope with very different problems. Of course, for me, it was easy knowing I could leave anytime I wanted to, at least if the road was not washed out by the rain. And that's not the situation they're in. But I'm very, very glad I did it. It was one of the Handful of best learning experiences in my life, and I made many close friends and, uh, learned a lot about economic development.

You've built a life rhythm for yourself that involves almost constant travel. Like how many days of the year would you say that you're traveling? Like you're outside of the DC area?

Maybe half of the time I'm on the road, which is lower than many people. I was podcasting with Arthur Brooks. And he claimed his last year he was traveling 48 out of the 52 weeks, and that would beat me. Uh, maybe I'm doing bigger and fewer trips, but still, that would beat me, I think. So half the time at home is a lot, is how it feels. But there's always somewhere I want to go. My last trip was to Cape Town, South Africa. That was pretty phenomenal, uh, cleared up so many misconceptions I had, gave me so many new questions., and now I'm reading much more about South African history and I want to go back.

Overall, what has this lifestyle of, like relative to the average person, I'll call it a lifestyle of like near constant travel. What has that given you intellectually and psychologically?

Well, I think I know more about different parts of the world than say my economist peers might. Uh, that's not comparing me to the average person, but think of comparing me to say other 64-year-old economists. I think it's kept me fresher, more vital, more curious. When I travel, I have a very high level of energy. It's frequently the case that even with younger people in the group, I'll have a level of energy at least equal to theirs, and I can just keep on going. And I'm just thinking all the time, analyzing, trying to figure out what it is I'm looking at or experiencing or hearing. And it's a, it's a real tonic for me. It's like a fountain of youth. And I think mentally it keeps me much sharper. Uh, it hasn't worn on my body yet. At some point, of course, it, it will, or it will have to, but it's been great. I have no desire to stop it or even cut it back.

But the effect on your body, what do you mean by that? Presumably you walk a lot more than you would if you didn't travel so much. That's a good thing, right?

Well, jet lag wears on people. Flying wears on people. Uh, the stress of so many new and different daily decisions wears on people. I just find they don't wear on me that much. Maybe that's genetic luck. Maybe it's a lot of practice. Probably a bit of both. But people grow to hate travel often. I think Arthur Brooks is in that position. He was telling me— this is— will be on my podcast with him. Well, he doesn't think of taking trips anymore because he's always traveling. I think that's very unfortunate. At the margin, you should always want to be taking a trip, and you shouldn't travel any more than the amount you want to keep that margin always as a positive, not a negative. So the world is a deep, rich, interesting, and complex place. Most of what matters goes on outside the United States, and it's there for the witnessing. Like, how can you not do it? I just don't get it.

So you wrote a book about fame many years ago, and I'm curious what you think about the ubiquity of influencers, especially in the mind of young people. Like, obviously when I grew up, I was a typical boy. My heroes were basically some basketball and baseball players, things like that. I had posters in my room. Those were famous people to me. Some actors I liked were famous people to me. Some musicians. Young people now have an array and variety of influencers that they can look up to from a very young age that are kind of specifically famous to them and tailored to them. Though they're probably not famous if they're walking through Times Square necessarily. How do you, how do you think about the effect that that has on the young generation?

I'm not worried about this. It's very low on my list of worries. So a lot of athletes are in fact bad people or partly bad people. The thing you admire them for, I would say it's just unclear how morally important it is. There's something about the display of physical excellence in public that I do greatly admire. Competitiveness is a mixed virtue. Athletics is pretty zero-sum. Someone wins, someone loses. So I don't mind when people look up to sports heroes. I did myself when I was younger. Certainly didn't ruin me. But if we trade some of that in for some influencers, you have become an influencer of some kind., and if people look up to you, that's great. So there's good and bad influencers. Uh, I don't overall see where the huge problem is. Clearly some of them are bad. Uh, but I think it's fine. And there was a time when celebrities were not really a thing in the sense of there were not commonly known movie stars or sports figures before the 1920s for the most part. And heroes would be religious figures or George Washington. And people thought it was some great tragedy when that went away. And then it was Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin, and that worked out fine, even though you might think, well, George Washington is more important and more meritorious. And I think this shift is working out fine.

Overall, the Trump administration and Doge, their approach to US aid, do you think it was a net harm or a net positive?

A net harm. So I would not have done a number of the things they did. I would have kept PEPFAR in place to help HIV/AIDS sufferers in Africa, for instance. But on the other hand, I think it's much more understandable than the critics are willing to admit. For one thing, a lot of the countries we were giving aid to, in some ways you could call them enemies of the United States, and to think we should be sending our aid elsewhere Again, I wouldn't have made the switch, but I don't think that's an unreasonable view. And some of the countries, South Africa in particular, have enough wealth and state capacity of their own that they could pick up the slack. Now, they may not pick up the slack. I understand that pretty well. But at some point, when you've been doing a particular kind of aid for 25 years and you say, well, we're phasing this out, we expect your government to do it now. It's just not that unreasonable a position. And if you, you know, publish an article saying this killed so many hundreds of thousands or millions of people, I, I don't think that's the right counterfactual. I think the better question is, what is it you need to do with your aid programs so that they're actually sustainable politically, they can do some good, They will always be limited. And in that framework, it's a lot less surprising and a bit more reasonable, uh, what the Trump people did. But still, I think on that, it was a mistake and a lot of innocent people will suffer. And it wasn't costing us that much money, and there were better ways we could have reformed government.

So this is in a way related to my celebrity fame question, but a little different. I'll say overall, The society today is more fractured. Like when I was young, everyone, you know, if we watched American Idol on a Tuesday, everyone would be talking about it on Wednesday. There were all these things that we had in common that you and a stranger could strike up a conversation about more easily because you watched the same thing or experienced the same cultural piece of cultural content. Today, besides like the Super Bowl, there basically isn't anything besides the Super Bowl and national politics and national elections. There isn't that much, uh, you, you have in common with a stranger. Overall, do you see this as a positive trend, a negative trend, or basically neutral?

It's probably a negative trend. I don't think we know for sure. There's a number of other negative trends going on, and what's going wrong in our world may be due to the other negative trends, and this one may be quite secondary or tertiary in importance. But I think one particular mechanism I don't like is a lot of local politicians, they're no longer accountable for what they do. They're either Republicans or Democrats, and they get a vote share or reelection prospect depending on what people think of Trump or the Republican Party. And it seems that makes state and local government, uh, quite a bit worse. So that would be a negative.. But overall, how fractured should things be? And, you know, as you presented your question, you gave more and more examples of how it's not completely fractured. It's maybe a sort of barbell thing. There's a few big topics we all talk about, like Trump or the Super Bowl, and then a whole bunch of topics that are quite niche. I'm not sure in principle that has to be worse. I, I tend to think the real problem today is just too much negative emotional contagion. And too much negativism, and that feeds on cynicism, and that increases layers of corruption, and that in turn makes the cynicism worse, and it feeds on itself and it spreads. Uh, and that may be a set of mechanisms pretty distinct from how niche our cultural discourse is.

If you could start a new religion today and it would have a wide subscribership, like millions of followers, it wouldn't just be dismissed as a cult. What would your top commandments be? What would, what would be, what were your commandments be? What would your lifestyle prohibitions or directions be?

Well, can I say Christianity as my new religion? What we have is quite a devolved version of it. And the commandments in the Book of Exodus, whether you agree with them all exactly, You know, is worshiping graven images that high on the list of sins? For me personally, it really isn't. Uh, but it's very Lindy, right? What we call the Ten Commandments. Uh, so I would stick with that and want a renewal of Christianity in some form, and earlier forms of Christianity. There's still remnant versions of those in Ethiopia and Armenia. They're not totally absent from us. Uh, it's the religion I think that's done the best. So that's my answer.

But presumably, given how much the world has changed, there are new vices that didn't even exist and couldn't have been conceived of by Jesus or his, or his disciples or interpreters. Is there presumably there's some way you could improve upon or add to the lifestyle prohibitions or commandments that would be especially useful for people living in today's world?

Well, are we going to have a 12th commandment, thou shalt not gamble on sports? You know, you have to think about sustainability. They have to be simple. They shouldn't be too specific. They should be not too hard to memorize, at least a bunch of them. To people, they should be intuitive. Again, I like the ones we have. It wouldn't exactly be my list. And as you know, there's more than one version of the commandments in the book of Exodus itself. Like, which one are we talking about here? The first version is the version I like the best. There's even, you could argue, 11 on that list depending how you divide them up. In Islam, you know, 5 pillars, but it's more about a very particular kind of behavior. Judaism has too much adherence to ritual that makes it more of a minority religion. So Buddhism, it seems to me, is fading. Not as peaceful as people think, Christianity is a clear winner. And it's had some very fruitful offshoots. So this Church of Latter-day Saints, Protestantism, a form of Christianity, but also an offshoot, they've had pretty phenomenal influence in a whole bunch of ways, you know, driving the scientific revolution, or LDS in this country, boosting prosperity, getting people off alcohol. So it seems, uh, pretty important to me, Christianity. And as you know, I'm not myself religious.

What do you think about strict church theory then? I mean, like, so you're— you don't believe in God proper, nor do I, but you see a lot of value in Christianity. Can you sustain those good things without some level of literal belief?

I think you need the literal belief or you get slow decay, but I don't think all churches should be strict. You need a mix. It's a bit like price discrimination, but quality discrimination. There should be easier options for people. So you want a certain amount of what is sometimes called cafeteria Catholicism because it keeps people attached in some way. And you want also stricter sects where people truly participate. And produce all these local public goods. I don't know what to do about the dwindling of religious belief and participation. Uh, I don't know if it will ever come back. Historically, it has ebbed and flowed. One view is that there's something special about modernity that is just not ever going to come back.

Underrated or overrated, the United Nations?

Well, it's one or the other. So you learn in grade school, it's so wonderful, And then it's overrated. And then you have people say, typically on the American right, who think it's totally worthless and they are underrating it. So I think it has some role as a forum for discussion. It's maybe helped some conflicts get settled a bit earlier than otherwise, but I don't think it yields a very high return. Conflict is rising in the world and the United Nations seems quite impotent. So I'm not a huge fan. It's massively bureaucratic. I have worked with them in the past. It was super frustrating. Uh, but they don't cost that much. So I don't know. It's either overrated or underrated by pretty much everyone. I don't think it's going to solve our problems moving forward.

Yeah, I don't see it as actually solving conflicts, but as providing a forum for people to talk, which is probably a gentle positive., but it definitely doesn't, it doesn't do what its biggest defenders promise. You know, it's, it's toothless.

That's right.

I agree with that. Um, underrated or overrated international law?

It's good that we have it, but it has its limits. It's not the final standard of right and wrong. When countries face existential risk, they will disregard international law. We need to realize that and plan accordingly and not just go around screaming they're breaking international law. Uh, but it concerns me how much of international law has fallen away in say the last 7 or 8 years. And I do think that's bad. So on that, I'm a fan, but it's a delusion or an illusion. You could say it's an illusion. We do better to maintain. You probably can't maintain it forever. Because existential risk gets spread to more countries. And when the existential risk spreads, the international law falls away. So, you know, the Allied Powers in World War II did not by any means fully adhere to what we now call international law. You can condemn that, you can say it was justified, but I think it's better to try to understand that phenomenon than to judge it morally. So The world is entering that same kind of situation once again.

Overall, monarchies seem to be working much better than democracies in the Arab-speaking world, in North Africa. Yet we commonly assume that the transition from monarchies to democracies in Europe and Europe, your offshoot societies, was a very good thing. What accounts for that difference? How do you reconcile those two observations?

Well, when you say monarchies, we need to be clear. Which countries we're talking about. I think often the monarchies work well because there are these lower tiers of fairly wealthy people, maybe in the same families or clans who are quite attached to the system. So if you look at United Arab Emirates, which is now quite prosperous, uh, is that working well because they have a monarch or is it working well because they have, you know, sub-tiers of 8,000 people who want to maintain the system. I don't feel I know, uh, I suspect if you simply installed a monarch in one of the places that's not working well, say you reinstalled a monarch in Iran, I don't think it would work any better. So I'm not sure it's monarchy. It's the evolution of these interlocking interest groups that take on enough numbers, enough wealth, enough influence to be dominant and lead to stability. And that's hard to replicate on short notice. So I think that is how I would view it. And if the UAE, you know, tomorrow moved to democracy in some form of voting, it's not clear to me the country would end up doing better.

How optimistic are you about regime change in Iran?

Well, we've already changed the regime at least twice at the time we're recording, and things still aren't going that well. So what is it we're hoping for in terms of the new regime? Uh, I don't understand Iran very well. I've never been there. That also means I've probably read fewer books about the place for a country of its size because I've never had to travel there. I don't understand why their government has been so screwed up for so long. Uh, given that, I don't know how to make it better. Simply killing the people in power doesn't seem to be working. There's also the risk that if they had a truly competent government in place, they'd be a greater threat. They could build nuclear weapons, they could do more to menace Israel, uh, some of their Sunni neighbors. So I'm not even sure what we're rooting for here. Uh, very difficult problem. I don't really see the scenario where it ends that well.

Why do you think that religious people in general are happier?

Of the papers I've looked at, religious people are only slightly happier, so I don't think it's a big effect that needs explaining. But I suspect religious people are in touch with a greater number of other people, perhaps because they go to church or temple or the mosque. That will make them a little bit happier. You know, there's a reverse causality problem. Maybe happier people are more religious. So a lot of people are made unhappy by religion. It's too strict for them. Or maybe their religion doesn't approve of the fact that they're gay or they want to be gay, and in terms of how they're going to live their life. So I don't think it needs that much explanation. In a way, it's surprising how small the effect is, if at least if you believe that Jonathan Gruber paper from a while back. And I see plenty of unhappy religious people. I don't think it's some kind of cure-all. There might be some subgroup of young men who feel lost who just really need to start, like, going to an Orthodox Christian church to be embraced and mentored and feel they belong somewhere. Uh, probably the biggest gains are there. The people who tend to go are women over 40 to churches or religious buildings of all kinds. Uh, they're maybe the ones who need it least.

So one of the, uh, challenges to your Stubborn Attachments book could be that Tyler Cowen, where, you know, though economic growth is extremely important and the key to well-being over time, the perception of income inequality or wealth inequality can lead to revolution and political unrest, which is then bad for growth. So that policies which reduce growth in the short run could be in the long run, in, in the long run, wise. I don't You know, one of my questions is how much the perception of inequality is linked to the reality of inequality.

In the political science literature, income inequality per se is not very predictive of revolution or revolt. So that's an extremely weak connection. There's the second question you just raised. Well, the perception of inequality, how does that relate to actual inequality? It seems when you have revolutions, there's something going on within the elite, and the people who, who see the thing through are already fairly wealthy. That may be one reason why it's not that correlated with income inequality. So I think people are looking at the wrong issues there. It may be about specific grudges. So if you look at the Bolsheviks, who obviously won, or you look at the French Revolution, a lot of that was about taxes. The American Revolution, partly about taxes, partly about the desire to seize some of the rents from domestic government for Americans rather than British. A lot of complex causes, but I don't think inequality, uh, is central in most of these cases. So I think it's people who, who want to argue inequality must be so, so terrible, and they'll clutch at any straws they can to make that case.

So does that mean countries should try to manage inequality within the top, say, 5 or 10%?

Uh, especially the perception of inequality, because in many countries, the top 1 to 5%, they have enough money. They might feel abused or not sufficiently respected or somehow frozen out from decision-making. And managing that is very important. Yes. And getting back to your question about, you know, these Gulf state monarchies, uh, I think from a great distance they've managed that okay. They've been very stable, right? And people didn't think they would be stable. So I think that's one of the things they're good at doing is giving everyone something and not just money, but some kind of valid form of participation.

What's your position on gun control in America and the Second Amendment?

We have the Second Amendment. I think if America is going to be the world's global policeman, that you need somewhat of a martial culture at home. You can't treat everyone at home the way, say, German male youth have been treated, you know, since the late 1940s, and then expect them to go out and fight and defend other places around the world. So the big gun culture in the US tends to be in the South and in Texas. And the people who enlist in the military disproportionately come from those same places. And, uh, one has to deal with violence and guns in some manner, in a regular way, if your country will have that same stance internationally. So I think it's a, a kind of ideological equilibrium of a sort. Now, do I think America should be some kind of global policeman? Well, not the whole globe, but some parts of it, yes. So I think you could say guns are underrated in my worldview.

Which part should we police?

Depends on what point of time you're looking at. We should be defending Europe. We should be in NATO, all the more so when the Soviet Union was a larger political entity. But now Putin's Russia is extremely dangerous. The Middle East, I'm never quite sure what we should do. But I don't believe we should do nothing. It seems sufficiently complicated that no one has a good answer there. I think we should defend Japan and South Korea, the parts of Southeast Asia we can sustainably defend. I fear that may be turning against us, but insofar as it's worked to say, have military bases in Singapore, I think that's been wonderful, and Singapore has flourished under that. There's very little in Sub-Saharan Africa where I think we should be intervening or, or putting many of our military resources, maybe none of it. Latin America, I think quite a few of our interventions have turned out fairly well. Panama under, you know, Bush, uh, huge success. Haiti under Clinton, not a success, but the overall record there is not so bad. I think what we did in Venezuela, I wish we had consulted Congress. But the place can't get any worse. So in expected value terms, I would view that as a positive. Cuba to come, probably a positive as well. So it's super era-specific and place-specific, but it's actually quite a bit where I think America should have an active role.

From my point of view, it seems like formerly colonized peoples often accept the religion of the conqueror, whether Christianity or Islam, but often polarize against the political values. Uh, so for instance, African Americans quite often accept Christianity, generally do, uh, even though that came from our former enslavers, but will often criticize Western values or capitalism in general as, as a function of white supremacy. Why do you think that is, that we accept the one and not the other?

In South Africa, this is all the more marked. So in, in a lot of communities, there was remarkably little resistance to Christianity and it was embraced pretty thoroughly. But at the same time, capitalism is not that popular and there's still an active and pretty popular Communist Party that might be someday part of a governing coalition. Uh, it's some sort of portfolio issue. So the religion comes before the actual system comes. And you embrace the religion, because I think monotheistic religions overall, people convert to them away from polytheism for reasons David Hume expressed way back when. And then they're converted first to the religion and then they want to resist the culture in a number of ways and say, you know, it's tribal cultures in South Africa. They've been extremely communitarian and risk sharing and resource sharing. For millennia, and all of a sudden they're asked to come along and live in urban centers where there's capitalism and radical change, and that they don't like it, it just shouldn't be a big surprise. You can tell them all you want, read Henry Hazlitt, it's good for your living standard. What, what about per capita GDP? It just doesn't feel that good or, or, or that natural to them. So I think it's that combination.

Should Elon Musk donate more of his wealth to charity, or is his money better served investing in new projects?

It's probably better served investing in either new projects or the projects he already has going. I don't know if he needs a new one. Uh, I would say I'm pessimistic on trying to get to Mars, but the ones that are running all seem pretty fantastic to me and they're hardly finished. So I don't think he should give much to charity, maybe nothing.

Do you think he should take the Mars money and donate it to charity?

I would like to see him take the Mars money and donate it to something closer to Earth. Maybe it's, uh, space stations in orbit. Maybe it's the moon. He's already talked about refocusing from Mars to the moon. Maybe it's seasteading on the ocean. I don't know which of those is best, but if Elon sets his mind to it, I suspect the returns to whatever that would be would be higher than Elon giving it to charity.

So if I look out at the political landscape, it seems to me the two motivating emotions behind most of politics, most of what I hate in politics, are fear and envy. Like, envy to me is at the root of socialism, communism, antisemitism, anti-Western values, wokeness, this hatred of those perceived to have more, whether it is wealth or status or whatever, or power, and the conviction that they must have gotten it unjustly. And then on the other hand, it's like politics of fear. Fear of losing your culture to immigrants, fear of a racial group that you, you know, you're afraid physically of, fear of invasion and from foreign countries. Do you agree that, that envy and fear are the two emotions that create the most problem, uh, problems in politics?

Uh, probably I agree with that, but I'm more optimistic about the overall picture than you might be. I think the dominant motive in politics, believe it or not, this may horrify you, but is that people want to make their country a better place. Now that gets mixed in with fear and envy, or they may have to deal with interest groups who are motivated by fear and envy. But I actually think the dominant motivation is not so bad, at least in the United States and most developed countries, or maybe even all developed countries. People go into politics sometimes out of sheer love of power, but in most cases, I think a, a big part of the motive is wanting to improve things.

If you were to reduce the difference between how you and how Bryan Caplan think about the world to one master variable, what would it be?

Bryan thinks he can deduce a lot of truths through a kind of a priori reasoning. I don't think he would call it that, but he starts with what he calls common sense morality. And he thinks libertarian morality is derived from that, and it's simply absolutely true and morally binding. And there's a set of fairly simple principles, and they tell you what one should do with the world. And I don't think that at all. I think most things are pretty complicated.

Same question, but you and Alex Tabarrok.

Alex and I are much closer in terms of views, I think, on foreign policy. I hesitate to use the word hawkish, but I'm more willing to countenance intervention than he is. He grew up in Canada and I grew up in America. That would be a big source of difference, but we're both fairly pragmatic. I think Alex is more technocratic than I am. So he thinks there are these various economic kind of— I call them schemes. I don't think he likes it when I call them schemes, but say he thinks prediction markets will do a lot of good. I would say I'm just more agnostic. So I think simple economics is less powerful than he thinks it is, would be my way of reducing it.

Okay. So if you think about the concept of the political left and the right across time and across places, are these real concepts that have actual substance, or are they just a way of describing the fact that societies split into arbitrary tribes with a rotating basket of beliefs.

I've never understood this. You can take one subset of the historical data and left and right seem like these very universal categories. Like you go back to the French Revolution, which is a long time ago and geographically distant, and left and right are quite recognizable. At the same time, if you go back to 14th century England, uh, the political spectrum then is not really recognizable today. And most of world history, the political spectra we see are not very recognizable or easily mapped into current categories. But current categories seem super strong across some subset that can span time and place very powerfully. And, and if it were all spannable or none of it were spannable, I would understand it better than the way it's worked out. This to me is one of the big mysteries. Like you go to South Africa where I just was, and what's a left-wing, right-wing view? Who will hold it? Can you sort of recognize someone is probably left-wing by the way they walk into a room? The answer is yes. It's crazy. How can that be? There's South Africa. It's a 14-hour flight and they have a totally different history. Nonetheless, there's some guy I met, I was like, yeah, he's on the political left. You know what? I was correct. He walked in the room. That was my thought. I knew it. Some other guy I met, I thought, eh, he's probably like right-leaning Afrikaner. I was again correct. It's crazy. You're in New York. I'm sure you see people all the time where you just think, yeah, they're, they're probably on the left, right? And most of the time you're correct.

Um, how do you think about the returns to an undergraduate degree right now? Like, say you're a 16-year-old, smart 16-year-old, 17-year-old. What algorithm should I be doing to determine, A, if I should go to college, and how I should balance between taking on debt and the kind of institution I, I want to go to.

If you can finish college, you should go. Adam Ozimic just had a good tweet today that the returns to college are still pretty high. But the 'if you can finish' is a big caveat. Schools don't like to release the rates at which people finish. My best guess is they might not even be at 40%. Maybe they're a little bit less, maybe straining to reach 40%. That's a pretty poor record if you're not going to finish. Should you go? Well, you'll learn something, but then I'm a lot more skeptical. Now, can you know in advance if you're going to finish? A lot of people do. A lot of people don't. The tough cases are when you don't know in advance if you're really going to finish. Then I'm at a loss for advice. But if you're going to finish, definitely go. Unless you're in that rare subset of people, you know, the Mark Zuckerbergs who drop out and become billionaires and so on.

Okay, just two more questions. What are your top 3 movies of all time?

Well, my favorite director is Bergman, and my favorite Bergman movies I think would be Persona and Scenes from a Marriage. I'm never sure what the third one is. I quite enjoy The Devil's Eye as a kind of, you know, unknown pick. Uh, the first Star Wars trilogy, a lot of Hitchcock movies, my favorites being Vertigo and Rear Window. A lot of classic European cinema. Most recently, Sierot was the movie I saw that impressed me the most. I know you said 3, that's not 3, but that's what comes to mind.

And final question, what do you consider your biggest weakness intellectually?

Lack of patience. I lack a lot of skills. Like, I hardly have any skills. I don't really have any skills. Uh, I'm not even good at working the microwave at home. So when you have to do things in the world that involve some kind of skill that's not reading and talking or writing about what you've read, typically I'm bad at it. So like close to zero skills, no balance of skills, impatience, that's just like the beginnings of it. Not really being that smart. I think people often underrate how much I know, but they definitely on average overrate how smart I am. Like if I just have to take a university class and compete against other people, like I do fine, but I don't do that well. It's not like, ooh, that guy's the smartest kid in the class. It's like I have to work to get an A.

That's the end of my questions. Uh, Tyler Cowen, thank you so much for coming on my show.

Coleman, a real pleasure. Hope to see you soon.