My conversation with the excellent Tyler Cowen:
"[Agency has] one of the most skewed distributions I can think of"
“You look like you have kids. I thought you would have kids.”
“You're going to drive Melbourne into the ground and it will be your fault.”
“It's striking to me when I receive Emergent Ventures applications, which is all in English, of course. I hardly ever get any from Australia.”
Tyler on who he is in German: “Dreamier, more romantic, maybe more relaxed, less obsessed with getting work done.”
One thing I regret not following up on live with Tyler was his objection to Caro’s LBJ biography. Of course, I do not believe it’s merely about Texan politics, as he said. Rather, Caro’s tale spans the emergence of the world’s greatest nation. It’s the story of America’s rise from an almost pre-industrialised 19th century to industrial behemoth. From the establishment of cities to electrification and the Civil Rights Act. Caro’s epic is in some ways biblical: its vignettes and colourful characters portray a broad America and speak to the heart of the human condition. And at their centre of course is LBJ, which is not just any story, but the singular story of a poor boy from Texas who through sheer force of will came to dominate an indominable Senate and through the gears of fate fell into the presidency.
You can check out my Caro posts:
Full transcript of my kvetch with Tyler below.
Summary
Shakespeare / Literature
Why hasn’t there been another Shakespeare?
Can an EDM theoretically attain the artistic heights of Beethoven?
What is Tyler the Shakespeare or Mozart of?
Is Romeo in love with Juliet?
Why did Thomas Mann fall short of what he attempted in Joseph and His Brothers?
Hebrew Bible — underrated or overrated?
Is literary fiction over?
Why doesn’t Russian translate well?
History and culture
British Empire
Multicultural experiment in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and America
Changing culture
Was Irish migration good for the previous inhabitants of America?
Did Churchill screw up by giving Poland the security guarantee in 1939?
Why did so much great American music come from black Americans?
Agency
Is agency evenly distributed?
How do you think about democracy and making laws with disparate agency? “One law for the Lion and the Ox is oppression
Aesthetics
Should the Marginal Revolution universe be more into glamour?
Feminisation
How much of 2024 and the current vibe is a push back against feminisation?
Fertility
Why do we have declining fertility?
Australia / economics
Are regional towns a problem to be solved? Do we need tax subsidies or is the marginal policy or capital investment best done on improving and expanding cities?
Should we build new cities in Australia?
How often does economic theory miss geopolitical reality? Have free markets historically just been an exercise of mercantilist power? Or globalisation a cover for outsourcing environmental and labour conditions
How well do we understand tariffs?
Mexico and Georgia
Why is there so much litter in Mexico?
How to make Georgia richer
Grandparenthood:
What has grandparenthood taught Tyler
Friendship
How to make friends in your 30s and 40s and 50s?
Generalists vs Specialists:
Tyler on being a generalist vs specialist
Is Tyler ambitious enough?
Religion
Has Tyler come across a religion or a creed or culture that so resonated with you you considered adopting it as your own?
Misha Saul
Is Misha ambitious enough?
Why did Tyler accept this interview?
Tyler production function
TRANSCRIPT
Misha Saul (00:00.207)
I have no idea if you have any sense of what I'm about, but I'm very excited to speak to you today.
Tyler Cowen (00:19.02)
I don't, you send me good stuff, that's all I know, really.
Misha Saul (00:23.629)
I appreciate it. So this is going to be the conversation that I want to have.
I got in trouble asking this question on Twitter a few weeks ago, but why hasn't there been another Shakespeare? We have orders of magnitude more English speaking folks around the world.
Harold Bloom says it's just a matter of intelligence, he's smarter than us all. Why hasn't there been another Shakespeare?
Tyler Cowen (01:00.046)
I think there was something very special about the 17th century. Some sense of dynamism, things being done for the first time. Many of the very best painters come from the 17th century. Ideas of constitutionalism, individual rights, political parties, social contract theory. There's John Milton's Paradise Lost. Some certain notion of parliamentarianism. The Scientific Revolution, the first sustained economic growth.
So it's just one of the most special points in historical time. That does not at all explain Shakespeare, but it may be to get that final degree of extraordinariness out of a writer or thinker that you need the period itself to be extraordinary. And that time was? I the answer to most questions is, well, a lot of it was luck too. you know, whoever's the greatest thinker, playwright, whatever, Shakespeare, they had to have been
living at some point, right? And then you can always ask, why weren't they living at all the other points? And some of it's just luck.
Misha Saul (02:05.642)
I expected a more cop out answer, because I thought you would say something like, well, you know, maybe the Beatles or Miles Davis is the Shakespeare of another field, you know, over the last century or something like that.
Tyler Cowen (02:16.364)
Well, they are, but they're not as great as Shakespeare. And they also were living in a very special time. So it's not inconsistent with my hypothesis.
Misha Saul (02:28.982)
You're a big fan of Beethoven and you kind of have said before that the period around Beethoven and Mozart and Haydn, that was a special time in kind of classical music. Could something like electronic dance music be the equivalent theoretically, the equivalent artistically as a Beethoven?
Tyler Cowen (02:52.14)
It has all the preconditions, like a new technology, people doing things for the first time, but I don't know who is the figure that you would nominate, even as the Miles Davis, much less the Shakespeare. So I think in that regard, it's disappointed us. Well, is it Aphex Twin, Richard D. James? Maybe he would be in the lead, but I don't feel he quite fulfilled that leading role and dominated the way some other creators have. So we're still waiting. Maybe we'll never get it.
Misha Saul (03:21.71)
Are you the Shakespeare or the Mozart of something?
This is permission to be to be arrogant
Tyler Cowen (03:36.654)
I don't think so. Shakespeare and Mozart is a very, very, very high bar. So I can't think of any dimension where I'm remotely close to those two, even a trivial dimension like best tic-tac-toe player in Burton County or something. I'm just not there.
Misha Saul (03:52.847)
Sure. You recently argued that Romeo doesn't love Juliet. He's too brash, he doesn't really know her. But what other way is there for young men to love? Don't they fall in love every day with a brown-eyed waitress and the girl on the train? I believe you proposed to your wife after three weeks.
Tyler Cowen (04:14.882)
Well, Romeo, I believe he's 14 years old. I could be wrong there, but he's quite young. And he may have some kind of crush on her, but he's flitting around to these different women. He's obsessed with other things. I think he's quite clearly not in love with her the way it's presented. I would need to have the textual evidence at hand, but I've read through it again some number of years ago with exactly this point in mind.
And I did very much convince myself. And if you ask O1 Pro of GPT, you know, to serve up the goods, it will do so. So that's a simple way to get a more detailed answer that I cannot give you on the spot.
Misha Saul (04:57.903)
I saw that link and I appreciated it, but then I thought, well, I'm not sure what other way a 14 year old could love. It's not going to be a considered, measured kind of tempered love for, you know, the substance of Juliet's character or something. Of course it's going to be wild and brazen and, you know, that seems to be the point that that is exactly how young men of 14 do love.
Tyler Cowen (05:27.8)
But it's that he has a darker relationship to reality than that. It's not like, he's some kind of high school crush. In the play, we're presenting a high school crush. Of course, it can't be that deep. There's something mysterious and Freudian going on in the play, in my opinion.
Misha Saul (05:44.419)
Why do you think Thomas Mann fell short of what he attempted in Joseph and his Brothers?
Tyler Cowen (05:51.17)
It's an impossible tale to beat the Bible was one of his problems. It's too long. I don't think he was properly religious to be able to pull that off. And it goes on and on and it's not really satisfying. It's still a popular book in some quarters. I've tried reading it. I just put it down. Maybe I missed something. I just felt it ended up boring.
Misha Saul (06:15.19)
I loved it and I couldn't put it down and it is long. I really enjoyed it. have to say, I was going over some of old podcasts and I noted you didn't like the the Caro books on LBJ either, which I also thought were some of the best books I've read. So I'm not sure I'll be taking the advice on the longer books.
Tyler Cowen (06:36.266)
Look, the Caro books, I think they're amazing. I just don't feel I need that many pages on Texas politics, which I already know is corrupt. I find foreigners love those books more than Americans do, which is appropriate. But on Joseph and his brothers, mean, give me some sense of what at the conceptual level interests you.
Misha Saul (06:57.999)
It's been quite some time since I read it and since then I've read Genesis dozens of times and I've read other texts, you know, like I love Jack Miles book on the biography of God, which I read recently. So to kind of dive back into Joseph and his brothers, it would be hard for me to be specific. I guess I remember my impression very vividly of the kind of painting a deeply majestic world and kind of, you know, the story of the universe in some way.
And in some ways I kind of acknowledge where you said that it's very hard to beat the Bible itself in terms of trying to to portray the kind of story of the universe. I'm kind of sympathetic with that, but I thought the meta point of this kind of German writer, this non-Jewish writer, albeit, you know, his wife is Jewish or whatever, you know, really diving deep into the Midrashim and whatever other text he must have consulted to kind of write this kind of beautiful story of the universe. Found the whole thing quite touching and moving in a very vivid portrait but it has been a while so it's hard for me to kind of specify again directly.
Tyler Cowen (08:09.602)
Well, I will try it again at some point. So there are certainly things I started reading and only appreciated the second time. And I'm certainly a Thomas Mann fan. So we'll see.
Misha Saul (08:21.198)
I feel that way about the Magic Mountain. I feel like I read it probably when I was in my 20s, so not too young, but I feel like I totally missed it and I need to kind of go back to it. my uncle is a big Dr. Faust fan or Faustus, Thomas Mann book, and he told me, do not read it. You don't know music enough. He's a big violin player. And I don't know if that's good advice or not, but I don't have a view.
Tyler Cowen (08:48.558)
There's also a linguistic issue. So I read Magic Mountain once in English when I was younger and periodically I read parts of it in German now that I can read German. It's much much funnier in German. But the story also drags more, partly because my German reading is slower. Budenbroek's is much better in German than in English. And when I first read Joseph and his brothers, I tried it in English, not German. So that's another issue on the table.
Misha Saul (09:17.176)
Thomas Mann's irony, I've only read it in English, obviously, although I do note in Magic Mountain, there's like half a chapter in French, which I had to kind of slog through, which I appreciate how he did that. But you can kind of sense the funny German irony kind of bleeding through, which I'm not sure, might be lost on a modern readership and probably on English readership as well. How are you different in German?
I find when I speak Russian, I'm a different person. My Spanish is much worse than yours. My wife's Mexican and I kind of get about in Spanish as well. I'm probably a different person in each language. How are you different in German?
Tyler Cowen (09:59.15)
Dreamier, more romantic, maybe more relaxed, less obsessed with getting work done. Since I've never really worked in German.
Misha Saul (10:06.262)
Sure, you're a young man reading Thomas Mann in Berlin or something. It's easy to be romantic. Sure. Wonderful. And in Spanish?
Tyler Cowen (10:15.756)
Freiburg, yeah, so it makes you different.
Well, I learned most of my Spanish in Mexico. So there's a way in which one can be like very chattering. I wouldn't say gossipy, but like very concrete. My Spanish is not as good as my German. That limits my conceptual abilities. So I'd just say I'm more concrete in Spanish.
Misha Saul (10:42.818)
Back to the Hebrew Bible, underrated or overrated?
Tyler Cowen (10:47.916)
Grossly underrated. you the question is the people who study it the most. Do they underrate it the most or overrate it the most? I'm not sure. I would have to speak to more of them. But certainly by anyone else. Grossly, grossly underrated. One of the best books. Most people don't read it or they don't read it carefully or they read a very bad translation or they read it only through a Christian lens. So, everyone, really everyone should study it.
Misha Saul (11:16.14)
Am I missing anything only reading through a Jewish lens? I don't know the New Testament at all and so I only read it in a kind of either literary or from a of religious Jewish perspective. What am I missing?
Tyler Cowen (11:33.304)
Well, I think you should study the Gospels, which are in a way the ultimate commentary on the Hebrew Bible, whether or not you agree with that story. Now, as for myself, being a non-believer, in a sense it's like reading the Hebrew Bible as a Jew, that there's no other text that supersedes it. But to put on your imaginary hat and think of yourself as Mormon, other kind of Christian, reading the Hebrew Bible, yes, that is very interesting. Muslim also.
You should read the Quran and it retells many of the stories in the Hebrew Bible but with significant changes. And that's also a good investment of time.
Misha Saul (12:13.454)
I read your post on Jack Miles book on the Quran, which summarises those differences. I really loved his book on God, so I may well consider that. And is it?
Tyler Cowen (12:23.224)
That's a good book.
Misha Saul (12:27.694)
I guess you've said recently reading literature, the learnings are more incremental or expanding context rather than sudden. Are there any particular lessons or learnings or anything else from the Hebrew Bible you reflect on in any practical sense?
Tyler Cowen (12:49.912)
Well, the section on law and economics in Exodus, I still find extraordinary. On negligence and liability, how much of it was thought of, how early, if you want to get very practical, but just how complex the best parts of the Torah can be is astonishing. And how many times you can reread them and still see new things. Very, very impressive. And I'm not sure the world, you know, maybe Shakespeare, but...
I'm not sure the world really has surpassed it in some ways.
Misha Saul (13:22.766)
I'd agree and certainly Harold Bloom would agree. I'm an investor by trade and it always strikes me that Joseph is the first distressed real estate investor when he's his viceroy of Egypt and he kind of he buys all the Egyptian property on behalf of the Pharaoh at its nadir and then kind of you know for the benefit of the crown. I find that when I say to my rabbi he doesn't know what I'm talking about but
but I always find it really, really interesting.
Tyler Cowen (13:56.494)
But are you willing to defend Leviticus? Because to me it's still a bore. Apologies if I'm offending anyone by saying that. But I just don't enjoy it. You know, I love numbers and Deuteronomy and of course Genesis and Exodus. But Leviticus for me is just a slog. Am I missing the boat?
Misha Saul (14:11.918)
You know, it's funny you say that. I told my rabbi, Genesis is my favorite book. And he goes, yeah, yeah, it's everyone's favorite book. Come back to me when it's Leviticus. So I think implicitly, you know, that's more or less exactly right. Look, think it's, I mean, so basically I agree with you. The kind of nuance there is, you know, when you're kind of reading it, with the commentaries or reading it with Rashi or whatever. The kind of meta extractions or the kind of what they read into it, there's always something interesting there, but overall I kind of agree with you. Is literary fiction over with the kind of rise of the internet, writers of YouTube, TikTok? Will we kind of look back in the last 100- 200 years as a kind of renaissance in literary fiction that we won't really come back to.
Tyler Cowen (15:10.446)
I don't see any evidence that it's over. So some of my favorite fictional works like Ferrante, Knaussgaard, know, Cotescu, Solenoid, they're very, very recent. So I don't have a specific prediction about the future, but I have no reason to expect all that to stop. It does surprise me, actually, but you could make the argument the last 20 years, you know, maybe we're better than the 20 years that came before. Some of that is just more of the world being mobilized.
You know, the people I named, they're often outside the United States and indeed the Anglosphere. So maybe that's not an accident. Latin America still seems quite creative. Germany seems much less so than what it used to be. But Central Europe, maybe its moment has passed.
Misha Saul (16:00.586)
I'd to talk about the anglosphere a little bit. You once said that the more you learn about the British Empire, the more you dislike it. What did you mean by that?
Tyler Cowen (16:09.506)
I don't think that's what I said. I would say this, the more I learn about it, the more I think, you know, in population-weighted terms, it was bad for the people who lived under it. Now, it's been great for Singapore, incredible for Hong Kong. You can add to that list. But even putting aside earlier slavery and the Brits got rid of it before others and so on, I look at India, which in population-weighted terms is a huge chunk of it, historic India, right?
Overall, I think it was bad for India. So it's hard to come out of it all thinking positively about the British Empire when the single largest place by far had a higher growth rate under, you know, post-war socialism than under British rule. And it's just hard for me to get around that. And furthermore, as I learned more about the details of the early British conquest and settlement of Ireland. It did seem that was a pattern and a plan put in place to varying degrees. Of course, they didn't do that to Hong Kong and so on, but a lot of what they did looks worse in the light of that particular history. Those would be the two points I would stress.
Misha Saul (17:26.658)
Makes sense. When I was in India, was struck by when I was speaking to some folks and they basically ran through the Hindu kings and the Mughal kings and the Raj and it just felt like...one kind of followed the other and the British were no different to the kind of other foreign invaders or the other kind of local kings. But then I kind of reflected, I kind of read Dalrymple's book and other things and it does seem that the Raj, one of the differences may have been the Raj was more extractive, that basically the other conquerors at least had the wealth stay locally or that might be one kind of nuance as to how the British may plausibly have been than some of the other leaders.
Tyler Cowen (18:09.71)
I think they just, I'm not saying the other leaders did this well, but the British, as far as I can tell, invested nothing in local human capital. Now if you count the places where the British just took over, like US, Canada, Australia, as British Empire, then of course the record looks much better. But I was thinking in terms of places that continued on as British colonies for, you know, longer periods of time. But if you want to put the US into the basket at checkout, so to speak, it would be in that plus.
Misha Saul (18:41.423)
Sure, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America, we're all founded on the kind of back of Anglo cultures and populations. How's the multicultural experiment going? And for, you know, my family came to this country and to Australia in 1991 with Soviet emigres. Australia's something like 30 % foreign born population. But, you know, obviously now there's probably increasingly topical that is probably across a range of these populations.
I don't know if you'd call it tipping point, but it's becoming more of a salient issue and a question of kind of cultural integration. I think overall Australia does kind of integration pretty well, but what's the kind of scope of the experiment and how worried are you?
Tyler Cowen (19:31.458)
Worried that people across all these countries, in fact, feel they've had enough. It's probably going the best in the United States, though it's noteworthy in percentage terms we've taken considerably less than Australia or Canada. But I think there's some fundamental shift, you you could say in the vibes or the zeitgeist, and the whole Anglosphere wants to put the brakes on. I think the US will do that the least.
It's partly because our system has so many checks and balances, it's just harder to turn on a dime. But securing the border has been a key, key reason why Trump won again after some what you might call bad publicity in the meantime. So Canada, Australia really need it in a way the US does not. And I'm worried they will significantly slow down their futures by checking immigration.
But again, they're dependent enough on it. I don't have a clear political sense of how much it could flip back in the other direction. And Australia, what do you think?
Misha Saul (20:39.149)
I think the differences are quite significant between them.
Mexico and the southern border in the US has been the most salient issue. In Australia, we've had probably disproportionate Chinese immigration, a lot of it through student pathways. And that's a very different profile, often a better profile, increasingly Indian or other subcontinental immigration, which again has a different profile. The UK probably has a very different subcontinent weighting which again kind of changes the the local profile and the dynamic and I think those nuances are kind of lost in the conversation and it's very hard to have that discourse in a nuanced kind of public way. I do think it's kind of wrapped up in Australia with property prices and the like which is a kind of perennial sensitive issue. I guess that's the same across the the anglosphere. So I think each jurisdiction has its own version of the problem which may have different solutions or different issues.
Tyler Cowen (21:47.48)
Sometimes I think what you might call the Australian or Canadian profiles, they're ultimately harder to deal with because those immigrants disrupt status relationships. A lot of the Latinos who come to the United States, I mean, quite a few of them succeed, but there's not a general feeling that somehow they're becoming all the high status people. A lot of them, you know, become comfortably middle class, upper middle class, some become wealthy.
But the averages are still lower than say for white Americans whose families have been here for a few years. And maybe that is more stable and durable. There's less of a threat.
Misha Saul (22:29.459)
Maybe it's hard for me to see because I'm a kind of a fish in the water. I've worked my entire career and studied with very, very high performing folks from all over, from China and India and Europe and South Africa and wherever, which is a typical kind of experience here. I haven't seen that. Wonder if it's coming. I was at a private equity event a couple of years ago and I noticed that a third of the room were Chinese descendants, right? And that has zero visibility. And I'm not sure it's going to be a problem, to be honest. I'm not sure Australians notice or care, and private equity is pretty niche. Or maybe it will be an issue down the line where suddenly they realize there are all these folks in finance from China, India and the like. I'm not sure. I think overall immigrants in Australia, especially within that class, are pretty well integrated. They want to kind of jostle to the same schools and the like but you know one example in your favor is probably school selection you know folks.
There is increasingly probably ethnic delineation and you want to live in them. Do you want to go to a selective school which is dominated, send your kids to a selective school which is increasingly dominated by say Chinese kids or other immigrant kids. That might be one place where that issue is visible. I have to say I haven't really noticed that at all. think overall that side of it is pretty well integrated.
But that may be a function of Australia having been a growing pie over 20 years. so recently that's kind of slowed down and whether that kind of brings tensions to a boil over time, may be the case.
Tyler Cowen (24:26.774)
If it stays in private equity, I'm not at all worried. For instance, I could not name a famous Indian or Chinese person from Australia. So in terms of visibility, it hasn't happened yet.
Misha Saul (24:38.447)
I probably couldn't either. Hmm. Yeah. No, I think, I think that that's, that's, that's probably true. So we'll, uh, we'll see. Think, you know, I kind of view culture as pretty sticky and path dependent, you know, the whole Albion seed thing and Australia was born out of a kind of an administrative police state and I think that culture has persisted in some ways and America is more of a frontier minded and ungovernable history. How changeable is that kind of overall picture? Can Australia really push the edges and kind of move towards more either freedom loving or innovation heavy model.
Tyler Cowen (25:27.768)
I don't know Australia very well. I've only been there twice. It's striking to me when I receive Emergent Ventures applications, which is all in English, of course. I hardly ever get any from Australia. Like in what, six, seven years, I've received fewer than five. I'm not sure what that says, maybe something about me, but I don't see any reason other than culture why there shouldn't be more and there are not.
Misha Saul (25:56.335)
Hmm. Why doesn't Russian translate well? And the humour also?
Tyler Cowen (26:04.652)
Russian is a very complex language. The way the sounds jam or jar together is very important. There's a strong dark humor in Russian, as I understand it, and a lot of context in the background from history, culture, whatever is being discussed. And the English doesn't carry that. One reason English is so great for science, it can be a pretty stripped down language. But that's why it's hard to translate Russian poetry or jokes into English. Because English is so stripped down. Now if somehow we were translating it into the English of John Stuart Mill, maybe it would go a little better, but it's still gonna be very different.
Misha Saul (26:47.023)
I recently read Common Ground by Anthony Lucas about the kind of Boston busing issues in the 60s and 70s. Irish migration brought a lot of change to Boston, crime with the townies and totally changed the political landscape with Tammany Hall and further north with corruption and cronyism. Was Irish migration good for the previous inhabitants of the US? the Protestants who were there?
Tyler Cowen (27:17.08)
Depends what you take to be the counterfactual. But I think on the whole, it was very good. It made the US a stronger, bigger nation with a much larger market. Irish often knew English before they came, by no means always, but slotted quite well into what you would call a broadly British culture back then. So even though there were transition problems, I think it's been great. I say this as an Irish American.
But I'm well aware, like Thomas Sowell says, well, Black West Indians have higher per capita income than Irish Americans. I don't know if that's still true. Wouldn't surprise me if it were. So the Irish Americans are relative failure in that sense? I guess so.
Misha Saul (28:06.018)
Did Churchill screw up by giving Poland the security guarantee in 1939? This is the Pat Buchanan argument where he basically said that that kind of triggered a regional conflict into a global war.
Tyler Cowen (28:21.208)
Well, there's two questions. One is, should Britain have taken a very hard, tough line against the Nazis? And I would say absolutely yes. A major conflagration was inevitable and it was important to stake out the moral high ground and do whatever you could. And ex post, we know in fact, the good guys won. But if someone has a, you know, not Buchanan's point, but something more tactical, there would be like some modest change in how the policy was done that might have been better.
I don't feel I can really judge that from this distance. But do I think we should have just let Hitler have his way in the East? No, I think we'd have, you know, still today probably a devastated Europe and it would be quite unfree.
Misha Saul (29:05.582)
I found Pat Buchanan’s argument reasonably compelling, given the outcome was total devastation for Europe and then Soviet rule for another 50 years. But then I thought the kind of convincing counter argument to him was the flip side where Hitler and Mussolini were idiots for invading Poland. They probably could have had whatever they wanted and had in a large Germany and the like without committing suicide effectively, even though it did obviously harm Britain as well, but the agency kind of cuts both ways.
Tyler Cowen (29:40.864)
I think Hitler would have taken over much of the European continent in any case. Say Britain had not said anything to Poland. You don't stop Hitler. So I don't see the upside really.
Misha Saul (29:57.135)
Sure. Why did so much great American music come from black Americans?
Tyler Cowen (30:03.534)
Some of it is the African roots. So a lot in blues scale and blues music has been traced to West Africa. That's a very fruitful musical direction. But I think also because of the great migration, you have blacks moving up the Mississippi to Memphis and Chicago, and then along the Eastern seaboard to New York City at times when American culture is very vibrant and that urbanization and mixing of influences and later electrification.
Just meant a lot of blacks were in a very good place to take the musical innovations they had and go in a lot of different directions with it. So some of it is luck and some of it is having had a culture that had a lot of musical skill and good ideas in it to begin with. And then so many other areas were closed to blacks that the relative returns to being in music and also sports, once that was possible, were higher.
Misha Saul (31:00.579)
I'd like to ask you about agency. Is agency evenly distributed? know, Louise Perry recently had a really interesting piece where she suggested that it may be skewed or differently distributed among women, for example, and hence requiring cultural norms for protection. How do you think about the distribution of agency among people?
Tyler Cowen (31:23.778)
Well, it's massively skewed. I strongly suspect a lot of it is in you from birth. It's one of the most skewed distributions I can think of. There's plenty of people who do fine, but just aren't ambitious. In most cases, probably shouldn't be ambitious. And they're agentic in the sense they manage their own lives, probably well enough, but they have zero desire to be president or build the next, you know, Facebook or whatever. and they're just very, very far from that.
Misha Saul (31:56.013)
And so how do you think about democracy and making laws with very, very skewed agency populations? So you've spoken about the kind of the top end of agency, but also where criminality and bad decisions are concentrated, probably skewed the other way. William Blake kind of famously said, one law for the lion and the ox is oppression. Kind of how do you think about that?
Tyler Cowen (32:23.886)
Well, I think if you have a reasonably mature, somewhat industrialized society, democracy works much better than the alternatives. And if you look at all the wealthy democracies in the world today, including Australia, there's really not a single one where I wish they were less democratic. Now, does that mean every nation can pull off a successful democracy? Almost certainly not. So then you're choosing amongst lesser evils and it's just going to depend.
But I don't see, as Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan have done, why we can't have more other countries going that route and successfully graduating into the ranks of the Democratic. I don't know how many will, but I don't see why more can't. Chile seems to have done it.
Misha Saul (33:11.544)
Sure.
You write a lot about aesthetic virtue and lookism, but I see the kind of George Mason school and the marginal revolution adjacent universe as being short glamour. Why aren't marginal revolution universe kind of looksmaxxing?
Tyler Cowen (33:36.334)
Well, we're all a bunch of nerds. We're not beautiful. We didn't grow up with high fashion, and we just don't know our way around those worlds. So we stick with what we can do. I don't think you can get a convincing version of glamour simply by buying it also. I'm not saying we could afford to buy it, but even if somehow we had this huge pot of money to make ourselves more glamorous, I think it would come across as phony.
Misha Saul (34:06.306)
But I don't buying Gucci or whatever, but you could be running triathlons, doing triathlons and at the margins kind of figuring out how to, or being more long, being beautiful. And not you specifically, but the kind of whole ecosystem. Cause I agree, it's what you'd expect of a economic school basically. But...
Tyler Cowen (34:29.55)
But even within economics, we're far on the other end of the distribution. So like, who's supposed to do it? Economics is also predominantly male. That's another factor. I'm not saying men can't be glamorous, but it makes it harder for most people in economics to be glamorous. Someone like Nouriel Roubini is often considered either glamorous or adjacent to glamour. And he has like some kind of loft in South Manhattan.
Misha Saul (34:33.877)
Hahaha
Tyler Cowen (34:59.372)
Supposedly he has all these parties, beautiful women come. At least one reads this in the magazines. I don't doubt it's true. So he has some glamour. That's one way to do it. It's much harder to pull that off in Fairfax, Virginia. I can tell you that.
Misha Saul (35:17.358)
Sure. How much of 2024 and the current vibe is a pushback against feminization?
Tyler Cowen (35:27.116)
I don't think we know yet, as Peter Thiel likes to say, it's over determined. It's a pushback against so many things. Feminization, I'm pretty sure, is a big one of them. But there's a lot of just white male upper class progressive thought that people have grown to hate. I'm not saying none of that comes from feminization, but it would be weird to think all of it did. So men have their own, you know, pathologies, so to speak.
And yeah, over determined.
Misha Saul (35:59.279)
Why do we have declining fertility? You've written a lot about the bad issues, but it seems that it's very hard to pin it down given the very different kind of circumstances around the world and the universal effectively decline in fertility.
Tyler Cowen (36:16.942)
Do you have kids?
Misha Saul (36:18.51)
I've got four.
Tyler Cowen (36:20.342)
And you don't need to ask me. I'm sure they're awesome and you treasure them above all else. But I don't have to tell you it's really hard. And the mystery to me is why it took so long for fertility to decline. We've had good birth control for a while.
Misha Saul (36:32.046)
You were trying to catch me out on that. You thought you'd catch me out on that one but I came back with a zinger.
Tyler Cowen (36:41.846)
No, you look like you have kids. I thought you would have kids. But again, there's nothing I can tell you. And presumably you have a decent income. And to manage four kids when you don't have a decent income, it's just very, very hard. Even like two is very hard. One is somewhat doable. And then part of the issue in the data, as you know, is just people marry later. They might in theory want three kids. But if you marry at age 32,
I think in some subset of countries, like the average age is now 31 point something, so it's like 32. You're not going to get three or four kids in very easily. Now, why are people marrying later? It could be, you know, women want to wait and make sure they're getting the right guy since so many men are louts or just are not going to earn as much as the woman might hope. So that's like efficient privately, but you end up with too few kids.
And in earlier times, it probably was an inefficiency that like high school sweethearts would marry and then really end up not that well matched. And so we're back to why did it take so long?
Misha Saul (37:54.041)
But that's a story in the West, but even say across the Muslim world, people get together younger, they have fewer options and so on. You see declining fertility rates. In the past, the money point is understandable. It is hard, it is expensive ultimately, but I reflect on all my predecessors who were dirt poor peasants somewhere and they had more kids and the average Australian lives far better. Maybe it's a rise in expectations, it seems to be...
Tyler Cowen (38:25.006)
But it's a marginal thing. They had no opportunity cost. You can have a great life with one kid and travel the world and go skiing or whatever it is you want to do. And if you're, you know, a peasant in, say, 1928 Ireland, which is not the poorest part of the world, but it's pretty poor, I mean, that's just what you've got. So birth control aside, kids are your joy.
Misha Saul (38:28.343)
Hmm.
Misha Saul (38:52.345)
Sure. I think it's a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk. I'm long kidmaxxing. It's like an it's an obvious thing that you want to be kind of having having more kids and you know, they're a great joy and kind of lifelong kind of presence and kind of the act of creation there is a blessing to me. And I mean that not necessarily even just a religious sense. I think just in an actual experiential way. Think it's probably my contrarian take that I'm into kid maxing.
Tyler Cowen (39:33.262)
If I think of the village in rural Mexico where I used to visit and did field work, my rough estimate is that 50 % of the men were alcoholics. And I mean severe alcoholics, not, they drink too much. So you're a woman in that village, 50 % are alcoholics. Some of the others over time leave for the U.S. Maybe even after they've married you, you're in a very tough position. And a lot of the non-Western world, like the details will differ.
But they're not necessarily set up to have a lot of kids in an easy way where everyone will be glad they did either.
Misha Saul (40:08.768)
It's pretty grim. agree. I mean, I think even a Western version of that, if you kind of go through a friend's dating app, you know, a female friend's dating app, you kind of see the selection of men they have, you you early described them as louts. I think that's, that's fair. It's pretty grim selection. I think there is a skewed distribution where the dating prospects for a woman don't seem that appealing oftentimes. And that's in the Western world. agree. In like a regional kind of third world country those problems may be exacerbated.
Tyler Cowen (40:42.092)
And then say you're a guy in finance, maybe you're in New York City, you're earning very well, you do want to settle down and have kids, but you can wait until you're 35. And whether it's sleeping around that you want to do or a number of other things, you do it until you're 35, then you marry a 27-year-old, you start having kids when you're 30, you might end up with a reasonable number of kids, but again, you're not on this easy glide path to having four.
You might, but it's harder.
Misha Saul (41:13.166)
That describes 100 % of the people I know and oftentimes, basically, the way you describe it, to be honest, is easier. Oftentimes now there's fertility issues, there's rounds of IVF, there's other things kind of coming into it. People underestimate how difficult it is.
A lot of the story of the last 50 to 100 years has been increased urbanisation, agglomeration in cities, brain drain from regions. Are regional towns a problem to be solved? Do we need tax subsidies or is the marginal policy of capital investment best done on improving and expanding cities?
Tyler Cowen (42:02.826)
It depends on the place, of course, but a lot of places I look at, I tend to think the best outcome is to drain the population more rapidly, that there's not a way to make them work. It's not going to be true for everywhere. So I'm skeptical about place-based policies. I doubt if it's politically feasible to tax people to get out more quickly, but if anything, we should direct some of our thoughts in that direction. There's an external benefit to getting people out of the middle of nowhere, whether it's the cost of running your postal service or people trading ideas back and forth or access to a hospital or lower levels of market concentration, the list goes on and on. So it's not that everyone should live in Mexico City or Shanghai, but a fair amount of density is basically a good thing with some external benefits.
Misha Saul (42:55.535)
Kind of suspect that's the case whenever I travel around regional Australia or regional Mexico or regional US you know it's easier to romanticize than on the ground it's probably you know just generally grimmer than you expect I guess following on from that you know should we build new cities in Australia. I guess it's an issue I've been chewing on and writing about for a while. The last city we built was Canberra in something like 1913, 1914. But I guess, is that a good idea or should we just expand existing cities based on what you just said?
Tyler Cowen (43:33.166)
Depends on what happens with your birthrate and immigration policies. But assuming your population doesn't plummet, it struck me that both Australia and Canada would do well to have a new city or two. And the US has always had this. They may not, like, literally be new. In some cases, they're quite old, like Chattanooga is pretty old. But it's like a new city in terms of population inflow being revitalized. And it just gives you a safety valve.
And it way lowers the cost of NIMBY. It's a place some of your immigrants can go. And Canada, Australia, if I think of myself there, I know I'm not typical, but there's really pretty few places I want to live. But the ones I'd want to live, I'd want to live a lot. Like they're really great. Sydney, Melbourne, like fantastic places. Like, okay, Canberra, I could do a small list of others, very small. And even those are not coming close to your big two.
So yeah, I think that's a national drawback. It's not easy to fix, but it would be great if you could.
Misha Saul (44:39.855)
How often does economic theory miss geopolitical reality? Even now, the Trump administration talks about evening the playing field, but so long as it helps America. So have free markets historically just been an exercise of mercantilist kind of power or like globalization? Is it just a cover for outsourcing environmental and labor conditions?
Tyler Cowen (45:02.392)
Just a lot of different issues in what you're asking. So if you look at, say, the 20th century history of Hong Kong, it's very free market. You wouldn't say Hong Kong is practicing mercantilism. You could say they're on the receiving end of a particular kind of British mercantilism. But in fact, it just evolves into pretty free markets and it works well. If you look at the United States, it's a more intertwined history where mercantile motives and freeing up of markets come together. And our government intervenes abroad quite aggressively to have markets be open for American goods under the premise that American companies will have a lot to export. think on net that's been good for the world, but there is a lot of mercantilism embedded in there. It tends over time to be more pro-export than anti-import. I hope that is not going to shift under Trump.
But power and free markets very often are closely intertwined in history and we see that with Britain as well.
Misha Saul (46:05.388)
Yeah, how well do we understand tariffs? I think you or Tyrone once noted that economies accommodate higher wages, or higher minimum wages rather, in strange ways. So countries like Australia and Sweden don't obviously suffer all that deadweight loss, the kind of economy moves around them in strange ways. Could the same apply to tariffs?
Tyler Cowen (46:28.898)
Depends on the size of your economy, but a large economy like the United States has more dimensions of adjusting to tariffs than may at first appear to be the case. Now that also means the benefits of tariffs can end up being lower. But I think in the past quite a few of economists have exaggerated the harm from tariffs, at least for very large countries. But if you're Singapore, you know, you should basically not have tariffs.
Misha Saul (46:56.398)
That makes sense. Why is there so much litter in Mexico?
Tyler Cowen (47:04.632)
Well, compared to what? I don't find Mexico to be extremely dirty relative to its per capita income. Where in Mexico do you go?
Misha Saul (47:14.318)
I spent a lot of time in the Quintana Roo region, so like... off Cancun to Tulum going inland to Valladolid to Merida to the you know so I guess when you kind of go into the regions and the small towns there this time I asked I just came back from a few weeks ago I love Mexico I go there quite a lot I think that the natural beauty is incredible the people are great etc but this time to be honest I did notice the the litter more
Tyler Cowen (47:47.448)
When I used to go to my village, what would strike me was just how utterly terrible pollution of plastics would be. But I never felt general litter was that bad. Some of the parts you mentioned, because they're recent developments, they may not have these long-standing social norms, like which granny sweeps which part of the street. I'm not sure that's true, it's possible. But I think of Mexican litter as pretty specialized litter.
Misha Saul (47:55.682)
Yes.
Tyler Cowen (48:15.596)
And in my village, they just didn't know what else to do with the plastic. And there was not a functioning government to take it away. And then it was a free rider problem. And the property rights were ill-defined to begin with.
Misha Saul (48:27.502)
Sure. So I was born in Georgia, in Tbilisi. And I guess when I look at Georgia, post-Soviet Union, they kind of did everything economically probably right in terms of liberalization, their trade, their labor laws, reduction in corruption, they have smart, educated population, but they don't have oil, Russia's breathing down their neck. It all looks... hard and stagnant over there. Like what is the kind of policy prescription towards wealth for a country like Georgia?
Tyler Cowen (49:01.56)
My guess is the key factor is what you mentioned. Russia is breathing down their neck and they will lose and I'm not sure there's any way for them to succeed. And it's gotten much worse in the last year as I'm sure you know.
Misha Saul (49:11.278)
Fair enough.
Misha Saul (49:14.978)
Yes, it looks from afar, it doesn't look very good. So I guess moving on to some more personal questions. You have two grandkids, as I understand. What has kind of grandparenthood taught you?
Tyler Cowen (49:32.856)
There's a fertility crisis. You know, I love babysitting for them, but it's not easy. And if that were the main thing I did in life, I don't think I could do it. So I wouldn't say that idea had never come to me. But I'm very glad that I'm not the primary caretaker of a baby. Put it that way.
Misha Saul (49:53.678)
Hmm.
You know, I was going to posit to you later on, you know, with the Tyler production function, but my theory of your production function is that it would break with young kids. know, all the work and the travel that you love to do, I love to read about. And that with a bunch of kids, you just, you know, be a totally different person, basically. And I noticed in Jude the obscure, Jude's ambitions for academia and for church are both disrupted by his loves and his kids.
Is my take kind of right that the kind of Tyler universe is not super compatible with a bunch of young kids?
Tyler Cowen (50:34.84)
Think that's right. And you know, when I married Janna's mother, Janna, now my daughter, Janna was 12 and a very mature 12 and very ready and indeed eager to just go on trips with me right away. And that worked great. So I also learned a lot from her on the trips and in general. But I never had her below the age of 12.
Misha Saul (50:58.998)
And how old are your grandkids now?
Tyler Cowen (51:02.478)
She doesn't like when I talk about all that on social media. They're young. I'll just say they're young.
Misha Saul (51:05.486)
you don't have to say it, that's fine. Yeah, yeah, great. So you seem to be good at making friends in adulthood. You know, I can't really tell how intimate or professional or what they kind of look like from afar. But how do you think about making friends and sustaining new friends in your 30s and 40s and 50s?
Tyler Cowen (51:28.44)
Well, if you have kids, the parents of your kids' friends become your friends, whether you like that or not. It's another factor involved with having kids related to your question about my production function. The older you get, the more you have to work at it. And the more likely your friends will be quite a bit younger. So you have to deserve younger friends is one thing I would say. And maybe that's not easy.
just hanging out with your same-aged buddies. That can kind of suck, right? Some are bitter, some are complacent, some are stalled. It's mostly younger people you're going to learn from. But again, you've got to be friend-worthy to them.
Misha Saul (52:11.758)
Yeah, I think it's hard. you know, I sometimes also wonder how much in the age of social media that your kind of virtual friends on Twitter or whatever kind of come to substitute for that part of your life where you would have gone out and sought to make new relationships as well.
Tyler Cowen (52:33.262)
Twitter is a good way to figure out who it is you want to meet. And that's, I think, always going to be very useful. It's one of its main functions, I would say. I don't know of anything quite like it in that regard.
Misha Saul (52:47.224)
So you're an uber generalist, you interviewed Suzuki who has spent a lifetime meditating on Bach, you've interviewed Kotkin who lived inside Stalin's head for decades, was, you haven't interviewed Caro but you know spent 30 years just on LBJ basically. How do you model the kind of generalist versus specialist approach?
Tyler Cowen (53:11.48)
Well, I think generalists usually are not generalists. They're specialists in a particular way of being general. So in that sense, we're all specialists. I'm not actually a generalist in the sense that I could, you know, shoot a rifle, go skiing, cross the English Channel swimming, and then do seven other things. Like, maybe I'm just an interviewer. And that's like my quote-unquote generalist side. but entirely specialized, so I'm at peace with that.
Misha Saul (53:45.177)
Fair enough. I guess where I was kind of going with that partly was, have you been ambitious enough? Could you have directed your energies or could you be directing your energies towards a massive project over 10 years? And perhaps you are and I'm miscategorizing it.
Tyler Cowen (54:05.806)
Well, I think everything I'm doing is part of this massive project over much more than 10 years, which is like building and to some extent displaying this way of life, of collecting information and hoping some other people find that rewarding also. So that's the project. And there's a lot of mini projects along the way, like this book, that article, whatever. But that's the big project.
Misha Saul (54:11.722)
How would you characterize that project?
Misha Saul (54:40.206)
On your travels, have you come across a religion or creed or culture that so resonated with you that you considered adopting it as your own?
Tyler Cowen (54:48.972)
No, never. I just think temperamentally I'm not attuned to belief in God. Whether that should make me more skeptical of non-belief, I'm not sure. But I think it should also make believers more skeptical of their belief. And that greater agnosticism ultimately pushes you a bit more in the direction of non-belief. When I went to Amritsar and saw the Sikh temple, that made a very big positive impression on me.
Maybe I would say I find Buddhism the most remote. I don't mean that I have these negative views of it, but I find I'm the least tempted, perhaps.
Misha Saul (55:25.09)
Hmm. And so I have four kids, you know, I run an investment fund, but I'm not terraforming the Australian outback or conquering New Zealand. You am I ambitious enough?
Tyler Cowen (55:39.074)
Well, aren't you hoping to fund people who will terraform the outback? You may or may not be succeeding, but capital allocation is super important. I don't know what side of it you're on, but I wouldn't dismiss your importance just on the basis of what you told me. Or maybe you're not good at it, right? You're going to drive Melbourne into the ground and it will be your fault.
Misha Saul (55:55.15)
Well, you know what?
You
And well, I guess, you know, I guess at the margins, how could I be more ambitious is another way of of pressing you on that. Yeah, well, hopefully, God willing. And what
Tyler Cowen (56:10.338)
Have another kid.
Tyler Cowen (56:15.446)
And where you live really matters. And I think in Australia, in many ways, it's easier to have an impact on your country, but very hard, much harder to have an impact on the world. assuming you stay there, I would take that into account. To say you live in Israel, your chance of having an impact on Israel, or New Zealand for that matter, it's like really pretty high. I've lived in New Zealand. Like even I had an impact on New Zealand.
Misha Saul (56:53.42)
Why did you accept this interview?
Tyler Cowen (56:58.476)
When break rolls around, a number of people who have emailed me, I've told them write me back right before break. And if I have time, you know, we'll do a podcast. I learned things from these. It just feels like something I ought to do. So when I was a kid, like the thing you might do is write someone a letter. Now, if you write a letter to Paul McCartney, of course he can't write you back. But if you write a letter to someone who's not in that position,
It sort of seemed to me like if they could, they should write you back or tell you something or send you something. And technology has changed, but this is like a version of actually being responsive to the world you're doing all this for. So if you would like never do it, like you have to limit it at some point, but it seems deeply weird to me, the people who never do it. I'm like, why are you doing all this other stuff? Like, was it just to earn income?
Was that your path of maximum income? Like really? So to me it's a bigger puzzle why it's not a lot more common, but it's not.
Misha Saul (58:08.754)
And you say you do these things because you sometimes learn from them. Have you learned anything from this conversation?
Tyler Cowen (58:16.618)
I definitely believe I have, but I need to ponder it and think about it. And, you know, as you get older, learning becomes a funnier thing. You have many fewer aha moments, but cumulative learning from a whole bunch of different interactions is deeper. And it can even be harder to say in a legible manner what you've learned, but you don't stop learning from doing it. And this might just fall under that category. Like I'm really not expecting you'll tell me some new theory about tariffs that I haven't heard before. That's just quite unlikely, right?
Misha Saul (58:50.39)
No, I'm expecting you to tell me that, so that's kind of what happened.
In the Albion Seed sense, what is the folk way you come from?
Tyler Cowen (59:02.166)
Irish American New Jersey, very clearly living near New York, growing up in the Northeast, when humanities had a greater influence than they do today, when people in younger ages were more likely to say read certain classics or go to the Museum of Modern Art or take an interest in classical music. There was this more of a dominant elite establishment culture in a like fairly Jewish New York City.
And I was captivated by that and it's had enormous influence on me ever since. But being an Irish American, I have this more barbarian background where I approach it not as an insider, but as someone looking at it from a bit of a distance and always being inferior to it. But that in a way also spurring me on to learn more about it and not just be totally like on the receiving end and just quite totally inferior.
but instead trying to, you know, not master it, but get a good handle on it. Because I don't feel in any way that it's my like, birthright or legacy to have a claim to it.
Misha Saul (01:00:09.838)
Hmm. I think, you know, I've got a kind of Tyler Cowen on my shoulder that I kind of, you know, that I kind of bounce ideas off or reflect, you know, conduct with and like. And I think, you know, certainly I probably intuitively think of you as a kind of Jewish uncle in that sense. I kind of get that. And so I guess in that vein, you know, you're kind of a celebrity.
You know, what's the kind of strangest parasocial event that's kind of happened to you? You know, it can't just be random guys in Sydney emailing you for a podcast interview. I'm sure some bigger things have happened.
Tyler Cowen (01:00:54.478)
Well, if you're at all known, you also have problems, which I would not go into detail on, but it's an issue and you have to cope with it. Those would be the strangest.
Misha Saul (01:01:08.622)
Is there any non-problematic, fun, curious event that's kind of happened? I don't know, I'm kind of getting out of my...
Tyler Cowen (01:01:20.866)
Well, you meet like the best people. I feel I have like some of the best audiences in the world that anyone ever has had, which is quite remarkable, like better than the audience Socrates had or better than the audience, you know, the great novelists of the past have had, like pretty decent numbers, not massive millions, but that might be worse. And they actually come to it because they're interested and not because they have to, not because it's a sign.
It's not a way to like marry a better person or you know, it sort of has to fight its way to whatever audience it gets on its own. And I think that's worked out pretty well.
Misha Saul (01:02:03.8)
Well look, as I said, Conversations with Tyler is my number one favourite podcast. I'm a huge fan of your writing, I've been following you for well over a decade. One proxy for success that I have is turning up on Conversations with Tyler one day, so I need to kind of accomplish something interesting like write a TV show or something of the next decade or however long it is that you'll be...
Tyler Cowen (01:02:26.604)
Ruin in Melbourne, then I'll have you on. Be like, how'd you do it? It was a great city.
Misha Saul (01:02:31.372)
That's absolutely an aspiration of mine. We have to reconquista Melbourne and take it back. So look, I recommend everyone read Marginal Revolution and it was a great pleasure to finally speak.
Tyler Cowen (01:02:45.582)
Enjoyed doing this. Please keep in touch and thank you for the podcast.
Misha Saul (01:02:50.444)
And please let me know when you're in Sydney. I'd love to show you around or take you out to lunch or something.
Tyler Cowen (01:02:56.79)
At some point I will end up back.
Misha Saul (01:02:59.363)
Wonderful. Thanks Tyler.
Tyler Cowen (01:03:00.714)
Okay, Happy New Year.
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