Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, I had great fun. I learned more than anything else, honestly, how to do politics because the Yale Political Union was like a mini parliament, but there were political parties, and you had to make alliances. You had to, especially if you were trying to rise up there. I became president my sophomore year, which was pretty fast. You had to be very good at politics. I discovered — if I can be totally honest — I was very good at politics, but it scared me. I did not like the person I became in doing it. You have to be pretty ruthless, pretty expedient. You have to make alliances. I wouldn’t say you have to be deceptive, but you have to do a little bit of overpromising and switching horses when it seems necessary. I don’t know if I decided this consciously, but I think one of the reasons I’m a journalist and not an active participant is that I saw what it does to you as a person, and I didn’t love that. I was very good at it, I will boastfully say. There was, I think, a 2003 piece in New York Magazine. I know you know it. This suggested you might someday be secretary of state. Now, this was never you saying that, but when that came out, no one laughed. Today, that would be unthinkable because our politics is somehow crazier. What did you think in 2003 when you heard people thought you could someday be secretary of state? I was enormously flattered, obviously. I didn’t myself think that that was a likely scenario because I had already begun to see a shift that had taken place. If you look back to when Nixon appointed Kissinger national security adviser, Kissinger had barely — he had been a consultant to the Kennedy administration. He had really been an academic, and Nixon had been attracted to him for two reasons. One, he had read his Foreign Affairs articles, mostly in Foreign Affairs. Two, he knew that Kissinger advised Nelson Rockefeller, and Nixon had a little bit of that envy of the Eastern establishment. When Carter appointed Brzezinski, Brzezinski was a famous academic, again, had never held a government job. There was something about the Cold War which made people think the stakes were so high, you had to find the most brilliant person you could, or something like that. In the last 30 or 40 years, the trend has moved much further away from that, and much more toward loyalty, toward people who have been supporting you, who have been on your team, who have worked on your campaign. I’ve never wanted to do that. I’ve never done that. I always thought that that was people who are using an old standard, which is, “Here’s this guy who writes really interesting stuff on foreign policy. Maybe he’s going to hold high government office.” I don’t think people like me are asked to do that kind of thing anymore. It’s a separate question as to whether I’d do it. I have been asked to serve in government several times but never at that level. I’ve never really wanted to do it because I’ve realized it’s a version of what I was saying to you about the Yale Political Union. I’m not a very good courtier, and you have to be a courtier if you’re going to serve. You lose your own voice. You have to take on the voice of the principal, the president, and you have to be a good team player. I’ve always liked my own independence, my own voice, and so, even though I was flattered at times when I’d be offered these things, it never quite made sense to me. I always found some excuse. Economists have a wonderful phrase, revealed preferences. After about the third time I was offered something, when I turned it down, I realized to myself, “You know what? My revealed preference is, I do not want to go into government.”…

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