Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Wow. That is the person I’d like to be, actually, so I find that very honoring. Thank you. Somebody said, actually, in that book, that he didn’t know anybody with more conceptual models in your head that you can apply to any situation. I would just say the one feature I admire more than any others is to be a lifelong learner. There’s a book I read by a woman named Susan Engle. There’s a woman named Susan Engle who works here in the Y. She did some research into how many questions does a three-year-old ask. The median three-year-old is 140 questions an hour. If any of you have kids, you’ve been there. But then they go to elementary school, and the teachers know that if the kid asks the questions, it’ll take them off course, and they won’t be able to cover content. This woman — she’s observing classrooms, and literally, she writes down, “A teacher says this.” Some kids had found an old-fashioned scale in the classroom, and they were playing around with it, figuring out how it worked. The teacher said to them, “We don’t have time to experiment now. We’re doing science.” That’s the way they repress curiosity, but your curiosity has not been repressed. Here’s one. I hope it offends no one in the audience. This is from Ted. “To David, would you agree with Tyler that New York City is no longer a cultural center of America?” The cultural center, I would say. It’s a cultural center, really. My family has been here for five generations, so that’s a tough one. I would say I think New York City — to the extent that America has a cultural center, which I’m not sure it does anymore — I would still say New York City is (a) the cultural center, (b) the most dynamic city in America. But, and it pains me to say this, I do think, if you ask me the most dynamic city in the world, given my experience, I would have to say London is more dynamic than New York.…

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