Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don’t know. That’s an interesting question. I sometimes think, well, one reason that the governance standouts are small is that there’s more variance in the small countries because there’s a lot of them. You go around, and there’s a couple really nice ones, and there it is, which is different from a causal question. Does scaling up make it worse? I think it’s probably true, though, that a billion Americans will be more of a mess in the sense that people will scan the headlines of the latest in politics. It’s like, “Oh my God! What a catastrophe!” Because it’s people who don’t know each other, people who don’t have anything in common. Politicians opportunistically are trying to create weird new identity cleavages to mobilize people, and it’s all very ugly, and everybody hates politics, and now all the politicians are unpopular. We would only go more in that direction. Whereas, if you have a homogenous small town, people who don’t like it just leave, right? So you’re left behind with a nice community of people who have a lot in common, who share a lot, who can directly self-monitor each other, that could be really well-informed about whether the guy in charge of the fire department knows what he’s doing. Probably the right solution is something to do with federalism, but it’s definitely a different book as to why American federalism does not deliver on its promise in the way that we might think it should. If I think of myself — when I analyze, say, Denmark or Singapore, I’m less libertarian than when I analyze America because I think their governments have a higher chance of succeeding at what they might set out to do. So this Matt Yglesias one-billion-Americans world of the future — will that future, Matt Yglesias, be more libertarian, just like I’m less libertarian when I analyze Denmark? I think in terms of direct public provision of things is one way in which some of the small countries really suggest nonlibertarian solutions to problems that I don’t think is appropriate for America or would be for the future. I was in Stockholm sometime, and I was super-confused by how their city bike-share thing worked. And I just went into the Teavana, and I asked someone who worked there — obviously in English, not in domestic language — I was like, “How does this public service that you are not responsible for in any way or work for, how does it function?” She explained it really well to me in a foreign language for no good reason. Like, no, I’m sure they have strong unions there. There’s no reason for her to provide high quality customer service, and no American transit agency employee would do that. That’s just nice, right? That’s not America, and it’s not going to be America, and it’s really not going to be one-billion-Americans America. I think that level of libertarianism in which we do not expect direct public provision of things to be all that high quality is very much baked into the cake and could become even more so.…

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