Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I was wondering, who is that person for you, a sort of economist’s economist, if you will? I think the important thing about the contemporary world is how you manipulate your networks in your clusters. I don’t think any one person is very good on Twitter, no matter how smart or clever they may be. And I don’t think any one blogger is very good at all. So there’s a kind of embedded algorithm in blogs, Twitter, other social media. If you’re really good at reading the system, that’s when you learn things. That’s extremely powerful. And every day, I try to train, retrain myself in reading the system. And I feel that’s a skill I’ve become pretty good at. But I’m always working on it every single day. That’s the one thing, I’m always, “How can I improve this?” obsessively. I guess that would be my advice, to downgrade the individuals and try to understand properties of these systems better. Hi. I grew up in the Rust Belt, and I’ve watched a lot of large companies, tech companies, come in and try to build hubs — technology hubs — in those areas. And invariably, they move in and then five years later, they close down. If they can’t be tech clusters, what can they be? Or maybe they can be tech clusters and they’re just doing it wrong. What should they do?…

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