Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…No, no. It’s very human, right? It’s just the mundane and the small things that happen. It’s a very good way of actually putting it. I had not thought of this until you said it, Tyler. It’s a great point, that there’s a lot of lot of political economy in John le Carré’s description of how these bureaucracies operate and the personal relationships and so forth. I have to think about it. I’ve never had this starry-eyed view of how government agencies operate. It’s not one that is jarring with respect to my own worldview. If I think of your work as a whole, I always like to ask this question about thinkers. What’s the underlying current which ties a lot of the different parts together? One thing that struck me going through your work. By the way, this pile is a small fraction of your work, and I feel sorry for my assistant who had to print it all out. But even a lot of your papers that don’t mention Turkey at all, I guess personally, I read them as asking the question, “why hasn’t Turkey become a fully free and modern society? ” Even if I think of your work on premature deindustrialization, if I think of Turkey in the 19th century, a big theme from my understanding is that Turkey is then prematurely industrializing, and that’s why the Ottoman Empire becomes the sick man of Europe. I read a lot of your papers as looking at this elephant from different sides, even if not about Turkey at all. Would you respond to that? Do you think that’s a fair characterization? I think that’s very perceptive. I think from my first foray into social science, I think that has been the question that I’ve been motivated by. Just to back up a little bit, when I was growing up in Turkey, in high school, of course social science was probably the last thing on my mind, just because of the way that social science is taught in Turkish schools — rote memorization and so forth. That wasn’t fun. Like all Turkish kids of my generation with some academic pretensions or at least relatively good in school, my goal was to do engineering. So I came to Harvard as an undergraduate to study engineering, only to find out that there’s actually no engineering major at Harvard.…

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