Interview: Tyler Cowen, Economist

Written for Pharos, the University of Warwick's philosophy magazine.

This interview was conducted for Pharos, the University of Warwick’s undergraduate philosophy magazine. An abridged version focussed more exclusively on the philosophical parts of the discussion is published here (archive):

In Conversation: Aashish Reddy with Tyler Cowen

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Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University, having earned his PhD from Harvard University under the supervision of Nobel Laureate game theorist Thomas Schelling. He is also a prominent public intellectual: he has posted every day for 14 years on his blog, Marginal Revolution (which he co-authors with Alex Tabarrok); he has a podcast series, Conversations with Tyler; he is a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion; and he has written over 15 books, including an economic principles textbook also co-authored with Tabarrok.

Aashish Reddy is none of these things. Nevertheless, Tyler Cowen was extremely generous with his time and we had a great, wide-ranging discussion. We talk about the philosophical implications of Large Language Models, the relevance of pragmatism and Hegelianism today, the relationship between economics and philosophy, why he’s not a fan of Rawls, why the Sophists are underrated, whether physics is failing, his credence in theism, Effective Altruism as a very Christian religion, how Chomsky is wrong about everything, why philosophers believe so many absurd things, and much more. Enjoy!

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Aashish Reddy: Why have Ludwig Wittgenstein and C.S. Peirce risen in status due to the success of Large Language Models?

Tyler Cowen: Well, Wittgenstein in his later works was extremely concerned with language games and how different pieces of a language fit together and how languages as a whole create meaning. Those themes have resurfaced in current versions of LLMs.

Peirce – that’s a complex question. He wrote and did philosophy on just about everything, and he thought in terms of systems and how meaning is a kind of web; he’s sometimes called an American pragmatist or pragmaticist. You can look in Peirce and find almost anything you want, is my sense. I’ve only read parts of it, so I’m not sure exactly which parts of Peirce people are picking up on now, but that would be a partial, highly incomplete answer to the second part of your question.

Aashish Reddy: I got those two names from your interview with Reid Hoffman, and was at the time reading Cheryl Misak’s book, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein. So I’m curious – do you see any unity, in this respect, between those two thinkers? What fact about the world is it that the pragmatist philosophers intuited, that we are now learning is true because of LLMs?

Tyler Cowen: I’ve thought about this. I would raise the initial point: we’re not really sure how LLMs work; even their designers are not fully sure. But the notion that a series of matrix algebra coefficients can capture language through some interconnected web of meaning is closer to a lot of pragmatist views of language than anything else. So, with that cautionary note, I think that’s why pragmatism is rising in status.

Aashish Reddy: I agree. Sticking to this theme, here’s you: “The whole Hegelian structure becomes more plausible once you see it as motivated by the belief that philosophy had become truly, absolutely stuck after Hume and Kant. Hegel thought that his ‘moves’ were required to get out of the mess that preceded him. I prefer the pragmatic turn myself.” You’ve also said that William James is one of your favourite writers and thinkers. What’s going on here, what does that mean?

Tyler Cowen: I would say I’ve become a bit more Hegelian as I have aged. So Hegel and the pragmatists, they have different ways of dealing with contradictions. Insofar as you read Hegel, you’re inclined to embrace them and welcome them as a way of making an intellectual, or even substantive, step forward. When you read the pragmatists, you’re inclined to think that if you reinterpret things, what seems to be a contradiction maybe is a tension, but not quite a contradiction at all. Those are both useful perspectives but I think in times of rapid change, we tend naturally to become more Hegelian; in static times, when there’s slow creeping scientific advance, language or daily life around us stays more or less the same, we’re more inclined to be pragmatists.

Now Hegel in his day saw incredible change in what we now call the Germany he lived in, and I think that’s partly how he ended up Hegelian. And he was faced with German romanticism and needed some next ‘move’ to make that would restore the primacy of the social order and the law and the state as the major objects of human attention rather than just the subjective element of your dreams, your passions, what’s in your mind. And that’s how he did it.

Aashish Reddy: Last question on this theme. Do you agree with Scott Aaronson, who thinks that LLMs show that Chomsky was totally wrong about language? Or do you agree with Stephen Wolfram, who thinks LLMs show that Chomsky was actually kind of right about language? I take it you don’t agree with Chomsky that LLMs show nothing at all about language, and they’re just not that impressive.

Tyler Cowen: There are multiple Chomskys. If you ask Chomsky – the recent Chomsky – about this question, which indeed I did, what he says is nonsense and doesn’t make sense and I think he’s just in denial. So, Chomsky as we’ve known him is refuted by LLMs.

Now, is there some deeper reading of the earlier Chomsky that Chomsky himself has forgotten – that somehow LLMs are capturing a universal structure of language? I think that’s an intriguing proposition – I’m open to it – but I haven’t seen the case made for it. I would think LLMs are more capturing something about the ability to aggregate information, than languages having this common universal structure – but I could be wrong about that. So it’s an interesting hypothesis. But the real Chomsky of the last few decades, he’s just wrong.

Aashish Reddy: Yeah, the New York Times piece also was just totally off base. I’m quoting you again: “It is Sidgwick (and maybe Kierkegaard?) who is the central moral theorist of the last two centuries.” Why is that?

Tyler Cowen:  Well, I’m mostly a consequentialist – that we judge actions and policy choices by what kind of effects they have on human or maybe animal welfare in the actual world. So then you have to ask, well who are the consequentialist thinkers you might think are most important? So there’s Bentham, there’s Mill, there’s Sidgwick, and there’s Parfit – perhaps. So Parfit himself would have put Sidgwick over Parfit, so I’m okay there choosing Sidgwick.

But I think since I wrote that, I would elevate Mill over Sidgwick. I’ve done a lot of re-reading of Mill. He’s a broader and deeper thinker than Sidgwick, even though he’s less rigorous as, what you might call, a utilitarian philosopher. So that one I would change a bit.

Bentham, I think highly of; he’s underrated. He’s easy to make fun of, but on a lot of issues – including incentives, law and economics, gay rights – he was just way ahead of his time. So, I don’t want to rate Bentham poorly by any means.

Aashish Reddy: I recently read John Gray’s book about Mill, and I was extremely sympathetic to his interpretation of Mill the utilitarian (setting aside Mill the liberal); but when I read Mill himself, I don’t really see that Gray’s interpretation is actually there. It feels like he’s adding in a lot of things – like there’s this Principle of Expediency, but Mill never mentions it, but we can kind of infer it, and then everything works. Agree or disagree?

Tyler Cowen: I think when you read Gray on many people, you get quite a bit of Gray. That’s not a complaint. I love reading John. I like him. I like talking to him a great deal. But I agree with your points.

But what I find more compelling in Mill than Sidgwick is, Mill understood the importance of his intellectual venture in the broader sweep of history in a way where there’s not clear evidence that Sidgwick ever really did. So the Hegelian in me, you could say, becomes much more sympathetic to Mill. You read something like Subjection of Women, which is a philosophical work, though it’s not foundationally philosophical. And I can’t imagine Sidgwick having produced such a work, and that’s why I’m going to elevate Mill over Sidgwick.

Aashish Reddy: I haven’t read much Sidgwick, personally –

Tyler Cowen: A lot of it’s boring! I mean, Methods of Ethics is the go-to place.

Aashish Reddy: – Yeah, I’ve mostly encountered him in the Keynes biography, by Skidelsky. Tangentially, Gray’s book on Hayek contains a funny throwaway line, where he mentions “G.E. Moore’s unfortunate influence on the history of ideas.” Do you agree that Moore has had an unfortunate influence on the history of ideas, especially as it relates to Keynes?

Tyler Cowen: Well, I would say that the much later John Gray has become considerably more Moorean –

Aashish Reddy: Agree, and I think this is bad!

Tyler Cowen: Eh! I don’t know, you have to deal with questions of the aesthetic in some manner, and it’s never going to be quite comfortable because making the aesthetic compatible with liberalism always will be tricky. There’s something quite elitist about the notion of the aesthetic, maybe inescapably so.

Moore has never influenced me. The book bored me. I think a lot of his influence was his physical presence and his roles in Cambridge, member of the Apostles Society, and the like. So I’m not a Moore fan, but so many very, very smart people thought so highly of him, I’m a little reluctant to just dismiss it.

Keynes himself took the aesthetic route. It didn’t make him illiberal, but it gave him some illiberal tendencies.

Aashish Reddy: You think the elitist kind of aestheticism influenced Keynes’ economics in a way that’s unfortunate?

Tyler Cowen: In my opinion. But again, it’s easy to dismiss Moore without specifying, well, how am I going to incorporate aesthetics into my philosophy in a way that’s any better? So that would be my indirect, roundabout defence of Moore.

Aashish Reddy: Fair enough. And did you want to address the parenthetical reference to Kierkegaard as the central moral theorist of the last two centuries?

Tyler Cowen: You know, maybe I was just teasing people when I said that. But the notions of the subjective, the individual, faith, being confronted with something you can’t make sense of – Kierkegaard is the most profound writer on those topics. They still seem relevant, but I think it was more a bit of trolling than anything else. Again, I don’t repudiate the claim, but don’t think there was some big deep reason for sticking it in there.

Aashish Reddy: I want to come back to some of these themes, but first let me ask you about Rawls. So again, I’m quoting you: “Rawls is afraid of economic growth. At times, he seems to endorse a stationary state because any savings make the first generation worse off, and they’re the least well-off people. That to me is a reductio [ad absurdum] on Rawls’ argument.” Could you explain more fully why you consider Rawls’ moral and political philosophy a dead end?

Tyler Cowen: Well, I don’t know if ‘dead end’ is the right way to put it. I mean, I don’t like it. It could be worse than a dead end, right?

Aashish Reddy: It could be Marx.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah, better than Marx. I never find contractarianism persuasive. And then Rawls, it’s so carefully geared towards mimicking the intuitions of a certain kind of US East Coast 1960s and 70s Democratic Party liberal who’s very fond of Sweden. And I think that’s the better way to understand it than philosophically, and then I’m just not impressed. So it’s all baked in to begin with, and just questions like: the worst-off group, how large are they? Why are any of these principles lexical? I don’t think he has good answers for, the principle of liberty – well, what exactly does that mean? It’s just so culturally specific, and it has to be so lexical. To me, it’s just completely unconvincing. Now, in terms of where you get – like the Sweden that had higher tax rates than today – like, it’s better than communism. And when you read the book – it’s so magisterial, it’s beautifully written, the argument somehow builds in a way that’s quite persuasive, but to me, without any actual persuasion at all.

There’s correspondence of Rawls where he actually talks about this economic growth issue, and he basically endorses the stationary state from a Rawlsian point of view.

Aashish Reddy: Yeah, you think – and I basically agree – that ending up very opposed to capitalism is a reductio on someone’s argument. But in your conversation with Amia Srinivasan, she explicitly says that we need to be thinking about a de-growth economy. So you can’t just treat that as a reductio in practice since smart people making these arguments is quite prevalent in the academy, right?

Tyler Cowen: In Britain, they’re more prevalent than in the United States.

Now Srinivasan, I don’t know what she really believes in. I’ve read most of her work. I certainly have a good sense of her ideas on gender. In terms of politics, it seems obvious she’s left-leaning, but that could mean a lot of things.

Aashish Reddy: Sure. I want to talk about your book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? What struck me most reading the book is just how philosophical all your picks are; I’ve recommended it to philosopher-types who aren’t that interested in economics (with the possible proviso of skipping the first chapter on Milton Friedman). You informally give the nod to John Stuart Mill, because he’s the master of some amorphous entity that’s a superset of economics proper, and you also bemoan the fact that “economics is no longer a carrier of ideas”.

And I think this is what distinguishes your shortlist from your longlist. Friedman, Keynes, Hayek, Mill, Malthus, Smith – very philosophical thinkers, right?

Tyler Cowen: Yes.

Aashish Reddy: In contrast, Samuelson, Arrow, Becker, Schumpeter, Marshall –

Tyler Cowen: Now, Schumpeter’s philosophical, but I think he just falls short on other grounds. But I agree with what you’re saying.

Aashish Reddy: Sure. This is interesting, and raises many questions for me. What should be the relationship between economics and philosophy, and has that gone wrong as economists have become ever more technical in lieu of focussing on big questions and ideas, like the shortlist? 

Tyler Cowen: I am writing my next book in part on all these questions. I would say this: I think it’s inevitable. Personally, I don’t at all like it, but I accept it. And some of it is just Adam Smith’s division of labour!

I don’t think there’s a meaningful question, “how should all of economics be?” But you can ask questions of individuals, what should they do? And I think of myself in a way as someone who actually became a philosopher, but who philosophises about economic topics – and that’s the relationship I’ve chosen. I don’t think it’s optimal for very many people, but a few. Maybe I wish it was a bit more than what we have. But again, I’m a realist; and to make your living, most people should be doing statistics and econometrics, and that’s indeed what we see.

Aashish Reddy: But don’t you think the division of labour is suboptimal in producing Mill-like content? So the philosophers for their part tend to be quite weak on empirical grounds, and so forth. It seems like there’s a vacuum there.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I think division of labour has hurt the philosophers much, much more than it’s hurt the economists. The economists at least have a downward-sloping demand curve, and that saves many of them from outright absurdities. The philosophers, maybe they have a=a – but that does not serve an equivalent function. So they can just be amazingly dense and believe such absurd things, and there’s nothing in the system to self-correct that at all, and I think most of them do.

If you had to be ruled by any group of academics, the philosophers would be lowest on that list. And you might think, they ought to be the highest – you know, going back to Plato, you’d way rather have the poets, and the poets are really low on the list as well. So the lack of structure and common language have really meant the great philosophers are older; and I think philosophy has deteriorated in a way economics has not.

Economics might be irrelevant with a lot of its work, but –

Aashish Reddy: At least it’s mostly saying true things. 

Tyler Cowen: – You can still trust what a lot of the papers say, yeah.

Aashish Reddy: I want to go a bit deeper into how you see yourself in relation to this vacuum I was talking about. So you’ve talked about “Internet writing” as a mode of thinking unto itself, as a sort of interdisciplinary area where computers scientists like Scott Aaronson, psychologists like Scott Alexander, economists like yourself, etc. are all engaged in a similar kind of enterprise. How would you characterise that enterprise?

Tyler Cowen: You use an informal voice. You try to get to the point quickly. You might link to things, but you’re not so obsessed with origins of ideas. You bring together reasons from different perspectives and try to synthesise them. And there’s a deliberate disregarding of what we used to call “high culture” and “low culture” arguments. And there’s a tendency to be prolific, and maybe do many short things compared to the world of books. Off the top of my head, that’s how I would characterise Internet writing – other than of course, it’s on the internet. You give it away for free, usually – not always, but it’s sort of for free.

Aashish Reddy: My first thought is that I’d expect a priori – and I’m not saying that this is actually what happens – that it selects for prominence people who are great writers but not great thinkers. You said to Agnes Callard at a University of Chicago event that professional philosophers have given up the public image of their field to amateurs. And so it’s possible that this will popularise mediocre ideas, and we should be really sceptical of this.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I do think one should be sceptical but another feature of Internet writing I should have mentioned but didn’t, is that you have something like an open comment section. Whether or not you have comments, someone can link to you and criticise you very easily, and it’s all traceable through Google or other methods. And that’s a big part of it. So the actual contribution is not the single writer, but this complex organ that we call the Internet, and you can learn how to play the organ and get closer to the truth. So if you were evaluating an Internet writer, I would ask the question: do they improve the organ? Now you can still debate that …

Now you made a remark about writers. I don’t think any of us are especially good writers, so I don’t think that’s why we’ve done well.

Aashish Reddy: Maybe not technically, but perhaps in the sense that someone who makes good clickbait images for YouTube is a ‘good artist’ – so if you look at the way Eliezer Yudkowsky can create this entire cult/community through Harry Potter fanfiction, it seems like there’s something going on there that’s not necessarily about the ideas per se. No?

Tyler Cowen: He has a very good command of metaphor, Eliezer. In that regard, he might be the best writer of the ones you mentioned. But he’s still not that good a writer.

Aashish Reddy: Sure. Maybe that’s not exactly what I mean, but there still seems to be some property that’s not directly related to how true the things are, in the way that there’s more of a rigorous check on things that come out of academia and things like that. So I agree that other people can criticise you, and you could argue this is happening in the bubble of these kinds of writers you mentioned. But if I look at the comments on Marginal Revolution – they’re not that good –

Tyler Cowen: Yeah, a lot of them are terrible. Maybe I would go back to Plato and think about the Sophists. So that’s become a negative term. But if you look at what they actually say, the Sophists are often more right than Socrates, I would say by a long mile. Some of them even periodically think like economists. So I think what you’re doing if you write on the Internet – or, this is how I think it should be – it’s not about persuading anyone of your particular arguments, though you do want people to think about them. It’s about showing people that there’s this way of life, which for me starts with collecting and organising information and then giving it back in some way. And you’re just trying to show people that there’s something interesting or exciting or maybe even noble about this way of life, and you have to do it through particular issues. But I view my contribution, if you’d call it that, as mirroring that way of life, not that I had some argument that’s so important it has to be correct. And then you relax a bit with, well, how suspicious should you be? It’s deliberately – you’re on one side of a mimetic transaction, and you think or hope it’s a good one.

Aashish Reddy: That makes sense. I want to ask you this: how much of the variation in economic views held by well-informed people is explained by how much of a rationalist they are? So maybe some people believe the human mind has all this power and we can figure out all these things, like how to plan an economy; and the Hayekians are on the other side of that.

Tyler Cowen: Probably less than many people think. I think what country you’re from (or sometimes region or city) is by far the biggest determinant of your views. So someone did a study, and if you’re a French economist, your views are predicted better by being French than by being an economist. 

Aashish Reddy: And you put this point to Piketty.

 Tyler Cowen: Yeah, you might think that’s good or bad, but I like to say that we’re all regional thinkers.

 Aashish Reddy: You have a recent Marginal Revolution post, about prices versus price paths. So the basic argument was something like, you’re more willing to accept the price of medicines being quite high in the short term because that will induce competition and innovation that will enable it to go down in the long term, right?

Tyler Cowen: Right.

Aashish Reddy: I wonder if you think that this is at odds with your paper arguing that the epistemic problem does not refute consequentialism. So there, your argument is that when some action or policy has really great short-term benefits, we shouldn’t worry too much about long-run risks because those are, in any case, unknowable. And if we just focus on the short-term, then some things are just so clearly good that we should just do that.

Tyler Cowen: Right.

Aashish Reddy: So I wonder if you think – and this is partly what I was getting at with the rationalistic question – that there’s any contradiction between those two thoughts.

Tyler Cowen: I’m not sure I would state my earlier argument exactly the way you did. But I would say this: I feel pretty confident about elasticity of supply. It’s a pretty solid proposition. So if prices are higher, there’ll be a lot more pharma drugs, vaccines, whatever else.

It’s not a priori true, but this gets back to when I said, “the economists always have the downward-sloping demand curve, what do the philosophers have?” But we also have the upward-sloping supply curve! And it’s not quite as sound as the demand curve … but I think what’s also important behind my view is, we’re in an era where in the last five years, there have been so many advances. mRNA vaccines, GLP-1 drugs, the anti-malaria vaccine. We’re on the verge of truly driving back HIV/AIDS – not just a treatment regimen of pills, but actually just beating it. CRISPR is probably going to give us a lot just in a small number of years. So if there’s any time you want to be encouraging this stuff, it’s much more now than, say, twenty years ago. So there’s this empirical fact behind it.

Now, there is some long-run epistemic, “Well, if you do all this, you’re remixing who meets and marries whom, and maybe you’re giving birth to the future Hitler 200 years from now, and how can you know it’s better?” And then I want to invoke my earlier argument. But to think there’s a medium-term significant effect from positive elasticity of supply, I am willing to die on that hill. Or rather, live on that hill, because the higher price means I have a higher chance of getting the pharmaceutical!

Aashish Reddy: Last question on this theme. In your Conversation with him, and elsewhere, Chomsky denies that there is any relationship between his views on language and his views on politics. My thought was this: isn’t the best theory of Chomsky that he’s consistently too much of a rationalist? So he’s a left-libertarian/anarchist, and thinks that that kind of society would work fine. We talked about his views on language – one of his earlier books is titled, “Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought”. So do you think there’s some kind of underlying unity there? Is that what it is?

Tyler Cowen: I agree with what you just said. But I do think his politics have this very strong, new element interjected. And that’s a kind of self-loathing of his own national or regional culture, which is just embedded in him – maybe from birth. And I don’t see any deep way that it shows up in the philosophy of language, maybe someone smarter than I am could figure that out. So there’s some connection, but then this massive injection of the self-loathing and conspiratorial thinking and negativism, which is applied so asymmetrically. It’s not really the result of rationalism, it’s some kind of anti-rationalism.

Aashish Reddy: I have made that exact critique of Chomsky, but I was recently relistening to his conversation with William Buckley on Firing Line. There – and this is just to be fair to Chomsky – he’s talking about the various sides carrying out terror in Vietnam, and concedes quite willingly that there’s Viet Cong terror, there’s Saigon government terror, and there’s American terror. But he claims that as a matter of principle, he restricts himself to write disproportionately about what the Americans are doing, because – although the terror carried out by the Saigon government is incredibly greater in extent – he feels some responsibility for it.

So I think what you say is plausible, that he comes to dislike America by doubling down on this instinct time and time again –

Tyler Cowen: But it metastasised for him. If it had stayed at that explanation, while I would not agree, I would accept it. But somehow that part of his brain got out of control and took over the rest.

I think we need to entertain the hypothesis that he’s simply a person who’s wrong about everything, pretty much; and his true achievement is one of stamina and quantity, which I do not mean in a snide, negative way. I find that extraordinarily impressive. And there’s something about the sticking at it, the responding to every email – that is this truly extreme, admirable talent, and that’s what he has.

And in all the particular fields, it’s probably mostly nonsense. Like the media work – Manufacturing Consent – it’s pretty terrible. The foreign policy. The linguistic stuff, to me in retrospect seems at best tautological. There’s no falsifiable version of it that’s really stood up. And that he went so crazy on Large Language Models reflects that there was never quite a version of it that made that much sense. I guess that’s my current view.

Aashish Reddy: Okay, shifting gears a bit. You’re a determinist – you write in a 2006 post (and reiterate in 2020 to Reid Hoffman), “I know determinism applies to me and my choices. I feel the pull of those causal chains, day in and day out”. Your arguments for that position notwithstanding, what is the effect of that position on your broader worldview? Does it affect your actions and beliefs or is it a sort of nomological dangler that you can’t help but believe, and in fact pretend you believe the opposite?

Tyler Cowen: Well, when I wrote that passage, I think there was a bit of joking going on. So when I say, “I feel the pull of those causal chains”, I’m teasing the free will people a bit by commandeering their lingo and admitting that I’m a prisoner of it.

A strict determinist – I don’t even know if those words make sense. I’m not sure determinism is entirely well-defined. I prefer to put it this way, if I’m speaking a bit more literally: that whatever are the laws of physics that govern, say, a rock, those same laws of physics govern me. I’m not sure determinism is at all well-defined, in any setting. I’m not sure causality is well-defined, but I don’t feel humans have some special ability to conjure up freedom of the will out of nothing. That would be, I think, a clearer way to state my view.

Aashish Reddy: But the Conversation with Reid Hoffman was pretty recent, and there you straight out said “I’m a determinist”.

Tyler Cowen: Well, for shorthand, it gets people the right impression.

Aashish Reddy: On this point about physics, I’ve got here a quote from David Deutsch’s first book, The Fabric of Reality. So his argument there is that although free will is an incoherent concept in classical physics, it’s consistent with the Many Worlds quantum theory that he holds: “After careful thought, I have chosen to do X; I could have chosen otherwise” is translated to “After careful thought some copies of me, including the one speaking, chose to do X; other copies of me chose otherwise”. Why don’t you buy that argument, and more generally how does your understanding of recent developments in physics affect your worldview?

Tyler Cowen: I think he’s just punting on that. For what you would call the multiverse as a whole, there’s still determinism. That little parts can be blind to the rest and feel they chose – well, let him do that, right? We all know David Hume: you cannot escape feeling you have some kind of free will. But it’s just pushing it all back a step, so I don’t buy it.

Now, recent developments in physics – I don’t feel I understand physics very well, but viewing it as an outside observer, it seems to me like a field that is failing to answer its most fundamental questions, not a field that’s succeeding.

Aashish Reddy: What are some of those fundamental questions, and why do you think they’re failing?

Tyler Cowen: Well, something like integrating quantum mechanics and general relativity, and figuring out how all the pieces fit together. There’s string theory. There’s Many Worlds. There’s different weird things. None of them seem to be converging on truth as far as I can tell. And when I ask people who do this for a living, I get such different answers, I would say it confirms my view that they’re not converging.

Aashish Reddy: What would it look like if they were converging? Surely at every point before we know what the answer is, we just don’t know what the answer is.

Tyler Cowen: Well, say we had partial experimental evidence that some version of string theory was true. Whereas what I hear from people: this is the only alternative we have that can fit everything into the framework. And you ask about the evidence, and there’s a lot of hemming and hawing.

And then you ask David Deutsch about Many Worlds, and he just insists it has to be true, and he’s sure that it's true. And then I’m like, why didn’t Karl Popper go along with Many Worlds? And there’s a lot of hemming and hawing. It’s not obvious that it’s true, to say the least.

And then the weirder views, maybe some will pan out, but they’re even further from being confirmed. So it seems to me that outsiders should be agnostic on the fundamental questions of physics, and that’s me.

Aashish Reddy: I also don’t think I understand it well enough. Although the answer that, “Popper just didn’t get the physics” seems plausible enough. But I have a question on this theme. So I often get the sense that you have an aesthetic preference that there be something fundamentally incomprehensible about the universe – what Slavoj Žižek calls an “ontological incompleteness” – that perhaps derives from your appreciation for Hayek (which I share). In your Conversation with Steven Pinker you suggest that the mind is just one teeming mess; to John Gray you suggest that modern physics is too absurd to leave a viable atheism; to David Deutsch you suggest that the universe is a big, sprawling mess that we’re not capable of understanding (analogising to the market for copper or something). Do you agree that you have this aesthetic preference? Or where does it come from?

Tyler Cowen: I don’t know if it’s best described as a preference. I would say when I was younger, I had much higher hopes for some kind of unification, and I’ve just seen those hopes dashed on the rocks repeatedly.

Now it could be that we’re just not there yet. Once we have new scientific tools, we’ll figure it all out. Once we have quantum computing, whatever; but increasingly I’m of the view that we’re just not converging.

So one thing that’s drawn my attention recently are these evolutionary theories of the universe, where maybe there are many universes, and no one of them has to have laws that make sense. They’re just laws that work well enough that the universe can reproduce itself, and there’s a bias in the system towards reproducible universes. I don’t hold that strongly, or I wouldn’t even say I hold it. But we need to start thinking of what views might rationalise the fact that maybe there just is no integrating explanation of the whole thing.

Aashish Reddy: I get that, but sometimes I feel like you hold this pessimism with more confidence than is warranted. So again, you say, “It may just be we’ve hit the frontier and there’s not a final layer of, oh, here’s how it fits together”. Like, maybe – but it feels like you have some predilection there. 

Tyler Cowen: Well, I started with the contrary instinct. Like, when I was a little kid, I figured the Steady State Matter version of the universe had to be true. It seems that one is very hard to resurrect in particular. There was stuff, it was matter, it’s always been here, there’s something about it indestructible. A certain kind of 17^th century loyalty, you might call it. And then I learned even just a little physics, and started seeing like – George Gamow says it’s more complicated! 

And again, I think insofar as I have a preference for it, I think people like David Deutsch, they close themselves off to inquiry by insisting they have it figured out. And a bit like with Chomsky, I think when you start doing that in very important areas, it tends to spread and it’s bad for you. So that would be the root of what you’re calling my preference for the open-ended views. 

Aashish Reddy: In fairness to David Deutsch, I don’t think he’s closing himself off from inquiry in the sense that he thinks he has the answers and just wants to proceed from here. It seems – in his books at least – that he’s just taking seriously the ideas that we currently have, even as he commits himself to the idea that they’re almost certainly not going to be correct. So he’s a fallibilist in that sense, and wants to take our current best description of the world (of the fabric of reality) seriously and see how they evolve. So I feel like you’re being slightly ungenerous to him, no?

Tyler Cowen: The only time I met him was doing that podcast, but I did have the sense he’s more dogmatic than you’re letting on. If you ask the question, could he pass an intellectual Turing Test of really, properly explaining why other intelligent people might not find Many Worlds persuasive, I’m not sure he’d do very well on it. I feel like it’s just so obvious to him that it has to be true: he has this excessively strong methodological attachment to what counts as a good explanation; only that satisfies what he’s looking for (which I would agree is true); and thus he believes it. You could look for quotations in my dialogue with him, but that was definitely the sense I received from the chat. 

But not from the books. I mean, I was surprised when I spoke with him. I think the books are more open. But when I pushed him on it – maybe he’s just tired of people bugging him, right? That can happen. But still, that was the Deutsch I saw in front of me on the screen.

Aashish Reddy: Fair enough. Given some of these things that we’ve been talking about like the incomprehensibility of the universe and so on, and also your claim that “the important thinkers of the future will be religious thinkers”, why are you yourself not religious?

Tyler Cowen: Well, it’s one thing to say the important thinkers will be religious. It’s another to say religion is true.

Aashish Reddy: But I’m combining that with this idea that the universe may be incomplete or not make sense, right?

Tyler Cowen: I would say the probability I attach to something like theism has gone up, but it’s gone up from a low base. It’s still not that high.

Aashish Reddy: Where is it?

Tyler Cowen: I don’t know, it used to be at 1/20; maybe now it’s 1/18. But I’m jesting with those numbers, right? I still think it’s unlikely. But the more the other approaches fail and look absurd, you need to reign in your tendency to feel that theistic explanations are absurd, because they might not be more absurd.

Now that’s not a positive reason to believe in them. My sense is still there’s so much anthropomorphising going on, and the social element, the cultural element of religion influences people so much. The fact that so many believe, it just leaves me cold. They seem to me just obviously captured by these social forces, and I don’t really get why the argument for any particular thing should be so strong.

And from the point of view of information theory – like, what’s a simulation? What’s a universe designer? What’s a god? What’s like an alien kid running you as his or her high school project (if it’s his or her for them)? Those are not so easy to distinguish from each other as we used to think. They’re only easy to distinguish from perspectives within the framework of the universe we’re in, and maybe not from outside it. So that idea gains on me. But at the end of the day, it’s just all boosting the agnosticism. It’s not bringing me closer to religion. 

Aashish Reddy: I’m curious how you understand the relationship between the philosophical claims made by some organisation – like, say, Effective Altruism – and how they function as social movements.

Tyler Cowen: They function as religions in large part! There’s a bunch of claims you’re supposed to believe. They’re enforced by small groups. There are splinter groups. It’s the same kind of story again and again. It’s just how things work. Politics also. So there’s something quite fundamental and universal about religion, which is prior to things like Effective Altruism. 

And it’s a reason why I think it’s such a fruitful starting point for future thinkers. That it’s our deepest, richest set of metaphors, ways of thinking. Religion has produced many of our very best and deepest books. Bible is the simplest example: Hebrew Bible, Christian New Testament … So those things are very powerful. We should recognise that. But again, I just don’t see the part of the argument that’s supposed to get me to belief.

Aashish Reddy: Sure. But I’m asking the question separately from, “is something like Effective Altruism like a religion?” – I’m quite willing to agree that it is. I’m asking about how the different claims made by different groups affects the way they act as social units. So you might think that there are sociological differences between Muslims and Christians that derive from the difference in beliefs those groups hold. And I’m interested in how this relates to Effective Altruism, and how the social movement is affected or determined by its philosophical claims.

Tyler Cowen: I’m not sure I’ve understood your question. But I see Effective Altruism as a very Christian religion – and I mean New Testament. And there’s this fear of the God of the Old Testament coming to kill us all, and we have to purify ourselves even more to prevent that. That’s how I think about it in religious terms, but I’m not sure that’s what you asked me.

You know, people mean different things by Effective Altruism. If you get very narrow and talk about the non-profit organisation, Open Philanthropy, they spend some amount of money each year. You could check their 990s. That amount of money spent saves a fair number of lives. That’s great. I’m all for it. It’s a big impact on the world.

I think most of what EA has done is good. It also has been an organising header for bringing young people together, getting them to ask, what should I be doing with my life? I think, on net, that will turn out to be good also.

The existential risk issues, I disagree with them but I don’t really see that they’ve had harmful impact. I think a lot of that has died on the vine. So mostly I’m a fan of EA, though there’s something about it – it seems to ignore culture too much and be epistemically naïve. You know, the whole SBF episode – it’s quite easy to say that his character is separate from EA. On the one hand, that’s true, but every movement has its villains, and the villains do also teach you something about the movement – it’s not unique to them. I’m not trying to pick on them, but I think we should also nonetheless take that point seriously. Like libertarianism, you could say, has some villains and you could say “They’re not libertarian! They advocate for coercion of people!” And yes, that’s an effective response, but in some other way, maybe you’re not taking your villain seriously enough.

Aashish Reddy: You agree with the EAs in thinking there are no moral differences over space and time. If we accept this as a premise, why (if at all) should governments treat their citizens preferentially? So obviously populations will prefer to vote for governments who confer benefits on them rather than on other countries, but why isn’t that just a flaw of democracy? I think Bryan Caplan does believe this; you’ve said that nations should devote more resources to their citizens rather than foreigners, but for reasons of practicality and cost. So is there any philosophical reason why this isn’t just a failing of democracy?

Tyler Cowen: Well, there’s some very important scale issue. So other than the US, all the large countries are terribly run, and I think that is closely connected to their size. And I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon, even with very powerful AI.

And a lot of the best run countries seem to have between ten and twenty million people, give or take. And small groups do some things better than large groups, and that’s a very strong constraint. You end up with global public goods being underprovided, but the idea that the whole world should be run by the UN is a nightmare far, far worse than that.

Aashish Reddy: Stephen Davies cited a similar argument – that small- to medium-sized countries of up to seven million people tend to have better governance and better economic policy, because public choice problems are less severe in small countries – to argue that Scotland should leave the Union. Do you agree? 

Tyler Cowen: “Should” – I mean, if they all insist on doing it, I think it’s their prerogative. But I think both political units would end up weaker. So as an American, I’m not rooting for it. The nuclear deterrent of the current UK would be much weaker. The issues of how you protect the Internet cables; security of the North Sea; responding to Russia, say, in the Baltics or the Nordics; the UK as an assistant would be in a much worse position. So it’s a worse world. The Scots have near complete devolution anyway. I don’t really see what they get for it.

So like, I’m against it, but I recognise if a high enough number of them really want to do it, let’s try to make that world better rather than just scolding them. That would be my view.

Aashish Reddy: You were also against Brexit, but now you think that was basically necessary?

Tyler Cowen: I would say ‘inevitable’ is a better word than ‘necessary’. So it’s amazing to me it lasted as long as it did. There was a Reformation across the channel some number of centuries ago that has not really been reversed. The Brits have had many chances to undo Brexit and, to say the least, not leapt at them. And I know what the polls say: 60, 70% regret it – the word ‘regret’ in polls is very funny, very strange.

There were so many times, first of all under Theresa May, where they could have tried to set it in reverse. I don’t think the EU would have had them back frankly. But it seems to be they wanted to do it, and we’ve got to live with that.

Aashish Reddy: Peter Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible”, in part because women and welfare beneficiaries are likely to vote against libertarian policies. Do you agree with that argument – or, why not?

Tyler Cowen: I'd have to reread what Peter said. He's very often pulled out of context. I would just say freedom and democracy as words are too big. Here are claims I would make: that if you have a purely democratic system with few constitutional or division of powers constraints, you will end up with a size of government that is too large and much larger than what I would want, and you will infringe on too many civil liberties.

But you’ve got to make it about, freedom at what margin? So New Zealand, prior to its reforms in 1993, was the most democratic – in the narrow sense of that term – government the West has seen. And they did have too much statism. They then had the more radical Roger Douglas reforms, but their system of government, it didn't have enough checks and balances, and they had this risk of too little freedom. So I would agree with that.

Now, you asked about women. I don't know the data for other countries. I know in the United States, single women especially, vote for levels of government intervention that I think are inefficiently too high. But I would put it as a statement about the margin, and that’s the statement I would endorse.

Now what Peter meant in the hermeneutical sense, I think he's commented on this since then. I would look at that. He might have just meant this marginalist version of the idea, rather than the absolutist version that somehow now it's like all the jack boots and the brown shirts, whatever. You see this in The Guardian; like every six weeks, they dig this one out and somehow reuse it. I would be sceptical of those interpretations.

Aashish Reddy: Sure. I do get quite confused about Thiel though, because he calls himself – and seems, in his writings and statements to be – a libertarian. Then there’s the work he does with his company Palantir, which I would expect a conviction libertarian to be more queasy about. And he backs candidates in US politics who can be quite interventionist, like J.D. Vance who even once called himself a “postliberal”. The entire picture is quite confusing to me, is it that way to you as well?

Tyler Cowen: Well, there's a lot going on there. So when you say Peter calls himself a libertarian, I think that has to be unpacked. He's very heavily influenced by libertarianism, but he's also a nationalist. So, well, how do you make libertarianism and nationalism compatible? I would say he and many other people are on this intellectual journey trying to do that.

There's a whole bunch of issues, most centrally trade and immigration and sometimes China, where I have stayed more cosmopolitan than what they have evolved into. That's how I would describe the overall picture.

There’s much more you could say, but that’s just a first cut at it. 

Aashish Reddy: You said of your book, Stubborn Attachments, that it's a Hegelian defence of liberty. What does that mean?

Tyler Cowen: Oh, I don't even remember what I meant by that. Probably this notion that there’s consequentialism, and then there’s some idea of human rights or some actions just being wrong on the face of it. And those two things seem to contradict each other, and you need to come up with some version of the argument that embraces them both and makes room for their potential contradictions. I suspect that’s what I meant, but I’m not saying that’s from memory – I’m kind of making it up on the spot.

Aashish Reddy: Okay. I said earlier that I’d recommend the book GOAT to people who are interested in philosophy. I’d say for Stubborn Attachments, those aren’t exactly the same people I’d recommend it to; rather, it would be people who I think underrate the following thesis: whatever it is you value in life, economic growth is a necessary component of creating more of it. Is that basically how you see that book?

Tyler Cowen: Yes. But I also see it as addressing Sidgwick’s program of trying to reconcile logical morality with common-sense morality. And I’m asking the question, can injecting economic growth as a central idea help you do that? And I think it can. I don’t feel it bridges the gap entirely, but that’s another way to read the book that’s more Parfitian. Like, it’s my climbing the mountain.

Aashish Reddy: I tried to steelman the objection to the book, and I think it would go something like this: “The things I value are community, stability, a quiet life, a kind of egalitarianism. I’m happy that the Industrial Revolution happened, and recognise the role that growth played in getting us to where we are right now, but at the margin we should be less dogged in our pursuit of growth at the expense of these things … especially if – whilst I’m happy that we’ve grown enough to be safe from asteroids – those policies are likely to increase the risk of climate or existential risks at the margin”. How would you respond to that criticism?

Tyler Cowen: Well, I don’t think it’s that different from my view. So it’s the sustainable rate of growth we should maximise, so we should be very concerned about risk. In the earlier editions of the book, they were 50% about risk and 50% about growth. But then Richard Posner put his book out about catastrophic risk, and I just figured the discussions of risk were not that original anymore, and I took them out. Now that said, at the empirical level, I am one who thinks there’s a lot of major risk anyway, and you need economic growth to fend it off.

I don’t think climate change is close to an existential risk, by the way; and I don’t think AI has a realistic chance of being an existential risk.

Aashish Reddy: Agree, and that’s why I separated them.

Tyler Cowen: I think the biggest risk is that we make a bunch of stupid, accidental mistakes and end up with a major war that pushes us far back in the history of civilisation, and we don’t quite ever claw back to something like the current day. That to me is by far the biggest risk. 

Aashish Reddy:  You’ve said that “an infinite time horizon might actually choke off rational thought about political decision-making”. Am I to infer from that comment that you think there’s no chance of the utopian future where we colonise space and so on; and so your difference with the longtermists is an empirical – I think you’ve called yourself a space pessimist – rather than a philosophical disagreement.

Tyler Cowen: You read some of these people, who think we’re going to have trillions of humans settle the galaxy; or Eliezer who thinks in less than 20 years, we’re all done. And then you have the EAs, and they want to sit down and attach p’s to this. I think that’s the wrong approach; I don’t think the p’s are meaningful. I think ethics is applied within a framework, and it’s applied within a framework where those things are not happening. And even if those things could somehow happen, you’re still better off with your framework that’s optimising a bit more locally than that.

And we need more and better human talent and capabilities, and healthier institutions, and the ability to fund projects – and that’s still going to push you towards growth. I think that’s how I would address the question.

Aashish Reddy: Which writer/thinker/philosopher makes the best case for liberalism (properly understood) in your view?

Tyler Cowen: Well it depends who you are and where you are; there’s something very culturally specific about this.

Aashish Reddy: For you!

Tyler Cowen: Mill has become a favourite of mine. But if you’re, say, from India, I don’t know if it is Mill – I don’t know who it is. There’s some problem of pluralism in India, and I don’t view that as Mill’s strength.

Aashish Reddy: That’s not obvious to me, why is pluralism not Mill’s strength?

Tyler Cowen: Well, if you read Mill on India, he thinks the British just need to civilise it. In fact, one thing the British did was end up pitting different groups and religions against each other to make it easier to rule. So I’m not trying to slam Mill. I’m just saying if you were an Indian focussed on making a workable pluralism in India or historic India, that Mill would not be the first place you would go.

So you know, Hegel is always in the running. I’m not a Kantian, but there’s something there. Hayek, never my favourite but again, always in the top half dozen of thinkers. And early Mises is somewhat underrated on liberalism. It wasn’t written that deep, but it’s a bit deeper than it sounds, I would say.

Aashish Reddy: I haven’t read much Mises, mostly because I got the impression he’s something of a crank. I went to Hayek instead.

Tyler Cowen: Well, both can be true, right? Later Mises was a crank; whether early Mises was both a crank and very good, I’m not sure – but he definitely was very good.

Aashish Reddy: You’ve asked this question – who makes the best case for liberalism – on your podcast sometimes, and I’m curious what you infer about people from their response. So I want to go through a few names and you to tell me, if someone gave that answer, what would you think.

So if they said Hayek, you’d think …

Tyler Cowen: Oh, that they’re a little stodgy and wanting something that sounds respectable, and is Nobel Prize-linked, but at some hardcore analytical level, didn’t quite stand up to examination. That’s what I would think.

Aashish Reddy: If they said Mill?

Tyler Cowen: Depends if they’re American or if they’re British. There’s a lot of very mainstream liberals who will say Mill because they can’t really think of anything else, and it seems good enough, and it’s not offensive. And like, fine. Just numerically, they’re the most numerous group. Now, conditional on me interacting with them, that’s probably not the person I’m talking to. But just as a brute problem in statistical reasoning, that’s what I would think.

Aashish Reddy: Fair enough.

Tyler Cowen: If they said … I want to hear someone say Tocqueville – it’s not my choice – but then I start getting a little more excited.

Aashish Reddy: And Niall Ferguson did say Tocqueville when you asked him, right?

Tyler Cowen: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s a great choice! It’s so culturally specific. It’s a little too culturally specific for me; I still have these stubborn attachments to my own book, Stubborn Attachments, which is more theoretical. Someone like Parfit, Sidgwick, Mill, also Bentham – closer to me than just a pure, raw Tocqueville, but it’s a very good answer. And it’s an answer where I would tend to think more of the person.

 Aashish Reddy: What if they said Herbert Spencer?

Tyler Cowen: I would think Spencer is very underrated. That they’re somewhat brave. Spencer really just didn’t bridge the basic problems in evolutionary theory with ought and is, and I’d wonder why they were so convinced. But then I’d think, maybe they’re just saying Spencer to piss some people off and make a statement, and it could be a positive for that reason. But I would sure hope that on the substantive level, they would see it hadn’t all worked out.

Aashish Reddy: And the last of these: just because we talked earlier about John Gray, and his answer is now Hobbes! What do you make of that?

Tyler Cowen: Well, you’ve got to be pretty pessimistic about social order. There’s a very good chance that answer can be proven correct, but it’s a bit self-validating: if everyone goes around saying Hobbes, Hobbes indeed ends up being the correct answer.

Aashish Reddy: But most people don’t go around saying Hobbes.

Tyler Cowen: Some people. People like John. But most people don’t, certainly not in America. And I’m not going to be one who says Hobbes until, you know, chaos is raining down upon my head.

Aashish Reddy: I’ll check in with you then. Now, you mentioned earlier your stubborn attachments to your book Stubborn Attachments. I’m curious what we should make of this title. You had a Conversation with Slavoj Žižek whose title references his stubborn attachments to communism, and you try to talk him out of it.

So should I infer from the title that you have these stubborn attachments to broadly classical liberal values; you tangentially have some set of arguments for why they’re morally correct; but in some sense, your attachment to these ideas of freedom and individuality are sort of orthogonal to their moral correctness. Do you see what I mean?

Tyler Cowen: I think I’m a bit more unified than that. So the attachment to classical liberalism is for reasons closely related to why I think I’m moral. So I’ll actually defend myself on that one.

But look, everyone has biases and I’m not an exception to that. But I think my core intuition from the beginning was simply that social systems should respect people who produce a lot. And I’ve seen, since I started believing that at a young age, a lot of evidence that it’s true.

Aashish Reddy: Fair enough. So I’m curious how this relates to the place of human rights in your world view. If I was going to be rude, I’d say that in the book, the discussion on rights was the weakest bit. It feels like it’s put in there ad hoc, as though you were anticipating the objection, “Oh, so should we kill a child to advance economic growth?”, and you’re giving a reason why not. But I’m curious what, in your view, is the criteria that filters what is and is not a human right?

Tyler Cowen: It’s ad hoc on purpose. I don’t think I have much useful to say about rights. I mean, clearly in the actual world there are cases where we let children die because it costs too much to save them. So it’s not repugnant outright. We only invest so much money into rare diseases, right? That means some children die. I don’t know what the amount of money should be, but for sure I don’t think it should be all of GDP.

My personal view is, those rights are really quite limited, and they’re not very useful in addressing many real-world questions. So in terms of what is before us, I’m pretty close to a pure consequentialist. But if someone asked me, is it wrong to torture a million babies for reasons above and beyond the pain they feel? I would say, of course; I would mean it; I would pass the lie detector test. But it’s a bit like fluff on top, in a way.

Aashish Reddy: I don’t know, I think I’d fail in the sense that I think it wouldn’t be above and beyond the pain they’re feeling. I think it’s because of the pain, and that’s a fine reason to be really quite against it. No? 

Tyler Cowen: There's something about agency and autonomy that you're violating that is not separable from the pain, but extends beyond the pain. So there's forms of human domination that might be worse than, say, a person dying in a storm, would be another way to put it, even if the levels of pain were the same. And that's pretty common in human intuitions. I don't dismiss that. It's just not a big driver of a lot of particular views I hold.

Aashish Reddy: Sure. I want to pursue something you said in your Conversation with William MacAskill. You're badgering him about the possibility that use of utilitarian reasoning, just breaks down beyond a certain point because of the thing you just said, or said earlier, that moral reasoning is embedded in particular social context. (I strongly agree with that and would go much further). You say universal domain as an assumption doesn't really work anywhere. So to what degree do you apply this to libertarianism? Obviously you do, but what are the facts about the world at this time which makes you believe that it's a correct view in the domain which we live in?

Tyler Cowen: Well, it depends what you mean by libertarianism. If you mean pure libertarianism, I don't think it's the correct view. If I look at the countries that I consider good or where I want to live, or where the smarter, more rational people want to live, they're broadly the capitalist democracies with reasonable constitutional protections. And that’s what I want! It’s not libertarianism, but it’s in that direction. I don’t think there’s an ultimate knockdown argument, but I think I say in Stubborn Attachments, if we can’t say that America is better than Albania, in fact there’s nothing we can say. So let’s just be willing to say that, and then unpack which intuitions went into that. 

Aashish Reddy: The refutation of growth being the important variable of course is that Britain is, in fact, better than America. I’m kidding …

Tyler Cowen: I mean, you don’t have to be kidding. It’s a serious question. But Britain for whom? If you’re saying southern England – you’re in the running. But Britain as a whole, it’s much harder for me to see that.

Aashish Reddy: Fair enough. I expected your answer to be, the political philosophy you hold, you hold it in effect because you think that’s what maximises growth, and you take growth to be a moral imperative.

But isn’t it possible that technological innovations will make it so that that isn’t the case? And in that instance – and this is going back to the title, Stubborn Attachments – would you repudiate the classical liberal views?

So for context, I recently read The Sovereign Individual and in that book, the authors point out that prior to the Agricultural Revolution, in hunter-gatherer societies, private property as a concept isn’t something that it’s important to value. The notion just doesn’t arise until it becomes necessary for you to be fixed in one location, and then some nascent idea of government as a monopoly on violence becomes much more important to protect your private property. If in fact we had a technological revolution of the kind the authors forecast, such that classical liberalism wasn’t the political philosophy that maximised growth, would you repudiate your stubborn attachment to those values?

Tyler Cowen: Maybe I can address that by looking to the past. We know more about the past than the future.

There are plenty of times in European history – and you could debate the details – but where it seems to me having a solid, wise monarch was better than, in the 13^th century, trying to bring about a classical liberal democracy where everyone’s supposed to read and vote and do whatever. So that’s a case where technologies are very different and I favour a different system than what I favour now, and I’m comfortable with that. You may have needed those earlier systems to get to the later Industrial Revolution. So I’m open-minded about the future.

Aashish Reddy: I agree we know more about the past than the future, but if it seemed probable (though I don’t think it does at the moment) that as Žižek argues the kind of policies China is pursuing, where they blend capitalism with authoritarianism, worked better to stimulate growth, you could see yourself endorsing that kind of model?

Tyler Cowen: There’s a lot of ifs in there. If the question is, do I think China in (say) the years of Deng, should have turned itself into a democracy, I’ll say no. I think it would have been unstable and would have led to civil war. So that’s a very concrete answer to an actual choice.

But looking forward, I would be very surprised if China was the direction I would turn in. Like, an actual realistic conundrum might be, if the fertility crisis continues, what would we do? I’m not sure what we should do, but it would be something very different than China. And that could be an instance where you would have to do something you might find quite unpalatable for the current times.

Aashish Reddy: But you could see yourself, in principle, supporting some kind of authoritarian policy to address that issue?

Tyler Cowen: The phrase ‘authoritarian’ is begging the question; I don’t know what it means. If the answer is to tax people a lot more so we can subsidise at 350k per baby and save the world, I could imagine being for that. Is that authoritarian? I don’t know. Those babies are going to give you a lot more output, and to some extent, it’s self-financing. It just seems to me to be a misleading word.

Aashish Reddy: Self-financing over a really quite long run, right?

Tyler Cowen: Yeah, it would be very difficult if we had to do that because the babies take time to pay off. In the meantime, how do you support them? What social institutions does that mean? Do we need to return to social conservatism? But neither authoritarianism nor China seem to be the right pointers for the dilemmas we’re likely to face.

Or, let’s say cheap drone attacks on the US or UK became pretty frequent. What do we do then? Again, I don’t know what we should do or will do. I don’t see how being authoritarian per se solves that problem.

Aashish Reddy: Agree, but it’s plausible that if you thought certain technological innovations would have led to that kind of thing becoming more prevalent, you would favour more restrictions or regulations now in the hopes of avoiding that future. But you don’t take that view?

Tyler Cowen: Well, there’s not much global governance. So you could say growth maximisation with global governance is quite different. The regime, “ban all drones” might well be better. But the reality is that that’s not a choice. Either the US tries to lead on drones, or we fall behind. And then to me, the right answer and the growth-maximising answer seem to be pretty clear. We should try to be in the lead. I’m not sure we’re trying hard enough right now, but that’s what we should be doing.

Aashish Reddy: You just said that China was right under Deng Xiaoping not to institute some kind of democracy. Again, this is a question with a lot of ifs, but I’m curious: some people might make the case that if it weren’t for the massacre in Tiananmen Square, then China might have gone the way of the Soviet Union. They wouldn’t have become this high growth economy that they in fact became. Again, in relation to your position on human rights, would you defend the Tiananmen Square Massacre if that conditional was true?

Tyler Cowen: Well again, there’s so much packed into your assumptions. I would just say if I were one of the leaders then, I wouldn't have done it. At some point, you could debate what the year is, but at some point, China should have tried to evolve into a democracy, and it did the opposite. So in that sense, I'm a strong believer in a democratic China, but the chance has passed them by. I hope they can still get back to that path. Now what would that year have been, before or after the massacre? I just don’t know enough detail to say. I’m not sure anyone can judge. But if it’s a finger button pushing thing, I wouldn’t have shot. I just would have tried to deal with it. But again, you’re not there. I don’t know Chinese. The historical record is already blurry enough. So I can't tell you what would have been better, but I would not have shot.

Aashish Reddy: Yeah. I'm curious about how you think government should think about, foreign policy and international aid more generally. Should it be exclusively about what’s best for their own country (the British are better off if some other country isn’t starving, since they’re then less likely to go to war and cause refugees to come here), or should there be a separate moral component?

Tyler Cowen: It may depend on the government. So I think you want to have governments take the actions that maintain global order best. And if, say, Britain went around interfering in every distant African conflict, however you might think about that from an EA point of view, my sense is there would be voter backlash, and Britain internationally would cease to be effective. To some extent, Britain has already ceased to be effective. And you want to keep Britain around as having nuclear weapons, the two aircraft carriers, ally of the US, in a way that buttresses the freer world for the important conflicts. Now what that will mean in any particular instance is going to be hard for me to judge, but it does give you reason to be pretty sceptical about intervening every time there's some humanitarian reason to do so.

Aashish Reddy: I feel like this avoids the question of whether they should be making a moral judgement or be pursuing domestic self-interest. The answer you just gave is compatible with thinking it should just be self-interest, and there’s a Randian temptation perhaps to think that these things converge and we just don’t have to worry about it too much. But if in fact they don’t converge, what would you have them do?

Tyler Cowen: Well, cosmopolitanism. I think they converge somewhat right now. I'm not convinced they'll converge all that much in the future. So for instance, you could imagine a future where it really is better for the US to just play Fortress North America. I don't think that's the current world at all. You can't rule it out. Like, let's just say we can't win any of these battles – because of China, because of drones, because of AI, whatever. So you're hoping for the cosmopolitan outcomes, but you realise you've got to create versions of them that are incentive-compatible with what will always be nationalistic motives and feelings. And in that sense, you're constrained for the most compatible version of the cosmopolitanism possible.

Aashish Reddy: Some people often seem to be drawn to a thinker or a philosopher in whom the rest of the world sees very little, but they for some reason find the answers to everything. So George Soros and David Deutsch find this in Karl Popper; Peter Thiel finds it in René Girard. You’ve talked before about how having the concomitant intricate worldview might help you avoid distraction of other people’s idiocy and mimetic desires, but what explains the draw to a particular philosopher?

Tyler Cowen: It’s going to depend on the thinker. So if you take Popper – Popper’s a better guide to actual stuff than most of the other people. Maybe it’s not all that deep. At the level of justification, to me, it seems quite weak. But just to go with someone, you could do a lot worse. So, Popper, fine. I don't think you need some big explanation for what's a perfectly fine decision.

I think on René Girard, Peter has largely been correct, and many more people are interested in Girard. I think the best Girard is his literary criticism, and Peter saw the virtues of Girard early. Now, Peter is more Girardian than almost anyone else. If you listen to his podcast with Joe Rogan, really the striking thing to me is that for like 3 hours and 20 minutes or however long it is, Peter just stays consistently Girardian because it’s in his bones, and I really learned something from hearing that. It came to him naturally.

Aashish Reddy: When you say, “constantly Girardian”, do you mean he’s just repeating the same message over and over again? It’s not altogether clear to me what that means.

Tyler Cowen: No, Rogan asked him many different questions – about Jeffrey Epstein and UFOs and Kennedy – and how much Peter, because it’s embedded in him, can think about these in a Girardian fashion. That’s just a great contribution. So I’m less Girardian than Peter, but I’m somewhat Girardian. And Peter being Girardian, that’s just a great contribution. So why shouldn’t Peter do that?

Aashish Reddy: I find people aping the interest in Girard in this very mimetic way to be quite ironic.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah, sure, but that’s always going to happen. Girard himself predicts it, Peter would predict it, and let it happen. It partly spreads the best version of Girard is to have the mimesis.

Aashish Reddy: Fair enough. This isn’t an exact analogy to you, but why does Marginal Revolution return almost 200 results for the search “Straussian”?

Tyler Cowen: Well, I think so much of the world is Straussian. And when I first started saying this, people ridiculed me. When cancel culture came along, all of a sudden people realised it wasn't crazy. So the idea that you're sent all these codes by the world and you have to figure out how to decode them, that's been one of the central messages of Marginal Revolution from the beginning. So I view that as vindicated.

Now people sometimes ask, how does that relate to me? I mean, I’ve written about more topics probably than any other economist, maybe ever. Even among thinkers, maybe I’m not the most number of topics, but in the top tier. And I say what I think; I’ve changed my mind, but if you read my main books, main long blog posts, it is what I think or at least what I thought. You could say it’s Straussian in the sense there’s a lot of little jokes embedded in there, or a link to a photo that means something if you know the right Beatles song or something. It’s Straussian in that sense, but it’s not me not saying what I really think.

I have tenure at a state university. I want to influence the world towards what I think, and I write accordingly. But I get how things work, and I think you have to understand Strauss to get that. 

Aashish Reddy: And you take that set of ideas to be independent of Strauss’ political philosophy, which I guess is how most people will have heard of him (if at all)?

Tyler Cowen: I don’t think Strauss had a coherent political philosophy. I once said to Peter Thiel in fact, the real Straussian secret to Strauss is there’s not that much there. I’m not sure what he thought of that. But in a lot of ways, as a thinker, he can just be really very mediocre. You can debate how good he is as a reader, but I think the contribution is just the notion that there is such a thing as being a Straussian, and that’s important. And that’s a massive contribution.

Aashish Reddy: Maybe I haven’t read enough Strauss.

Tyler Cowen: No! You don’t need to read more Strauss, read less Strauss! A lot of it isn’t that good, or hasn’t aged well. I strongly suspect you’ve picked up everything you need to know from the surrounding milieu.

But if you wanted to read Machiavelli or Maimonides, and someone said you need to study Strauss, that still might be true. I’m not dismissing him on those thinkers. Maybe I’m agnostic – like, how much did he get at what they really meant? I don’t know. But I wouldn’t write those works off. For the more general stuff, I don’t know. It’s pretty flimsy I think; it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors and hand-waving.