Tyler Cowen on culture, politics & society
Cowen credits America's creativity to its tolerance of weirdos and outsiders and to golden ages born from clashing cultures, and his worries about culture centre on conformism, cynicism and negative emotional contagion, which the internet amplifies. On institutions he is a pragmatist: religion needs literal belief and its decline leaves a vacuum, international law is a useful illusion, inequality is a poor predictor of revolution, and most politicians want to improve things. His deepest concern is long-run risk: new technologies get turned to war, and the default danger is a slide back into chaos rather than extinction.
16 points · 6 appearances · 2019–2026
How the view evolved
We're neurotic, and the internet gives us more to complain about → The real problem is negative emotional contagion feeding cynicism
In 2021 he traced public disillusionment to human neuroticism plus the internet showing us more things to complain about (the Gurri thesis); in 2026 he frames it as self-reinforcing negative emotional contagion, where cynicism breeds corruption that deepens cynicism.
Run the clock long enough and catastrophe will happen → The default risk is retreat to medieval-Balkans chaos
In 2021 he said catastrophe will happen if you run the clock, giving humanity at best 700 to 800 years; in 2024 he calls extinction quite unlikely and names the default risk as a retreat to a chaotic, depopulated, medieval-Balkans existence.
Up next
2019–2026
“I didn't agree with that post. If you look at labor market data, the returns to IQ as it translates into wages, they're amazingly low. They're pretty insignificant. People who are very successful, they're very smart, but they're people who have say eight or nine areas where they're like, on a scale of 1 to 10, there are nine. Like they have one area where they're just like an 11 and a half on a scale of 1 to 10. And then on everything else, they're an eight to a nine and have a lot of determination. And that's what leads to incredible success. And IQ is one of those things, but it's not actually that important. It's the bundle, and the bundles are scarce. And then the bundles interacting with the rest of the world. Like just try going to a mid-tier state university and sit down with the committee designed to develop a plan for using artificial intelligence in the curriculum. And then come back to me and tell me how that went, and then we'll talk about bottlenecks.”
2024–2026 · changed view
“Yeah, that's what I think it will be like again. Great stagnation is over. We'll go back to those earlier rates of change, transform a lot of the world, mostly a big positive. A lot of chaos disrupted institutions along the way. That's my prediction.”
2019–2026 · changed view
“I don't think economics will ever be very predictive. It's most useful for helping you ask better questions. You look at something like game theory: well, game theory never predicted USA and USSR would have a war, would not have a war, but trying to think through the logic of strategic conflict, if you know game theory, it's just a much more interesting discussion.”
2019–2026 · changed view
“My basic rule is to read as much as possible. A lot of books are sent to my house, so I order on Amazon. On a weekday I might get five to ten review copies, and I look at each and every one, and I read some of those. I love to reread classics. The earlier parts of my life, I spent a much higher percentage of my reading reading the kinds of books that would be in the back section of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon. Most of those I've read, say, two to five times. And then I read what my friends write. I spend a great amount of time on Twitter, and I love to print out, say, economics working papers and read those. And then I take books on trips. I'm about to take a trip, and I just keep on reading, basically.”