Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, that’s a good question. I had an epiphany recently about that and that was — Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which he never really made into a pyramid but we all imagine as a pyramid, and at the base is satisfying our need for shelter and clothing and basic water and food. At that lower level, the entire world is converging on uniform, basic needs. Everybody in the world wants to live in an airtight, air-conditioned concrete box that has Wi-Fi, and it’s looking very similar. But I believe that at the higher levels of actualization and what it all means, I’m seeing a diversity in the world. I think there’s a commonality that we all share fundamentally, more than ever, at the base level of our genetic bodies and basic human needs. There’s weirdly a diversity of differences in what it means to us and how we make value and the kinds of things that we find important or not. So yes, there’s two things going on. There’s this huge commonality and then there is this difference that we find important. I think travel has helped me to see just how much virtually all squabbles are petty squabbles. You go to other places and you hear them talk about what they’re squabbling about: like, “Oh, what kind of music should you play in the church ceremony?” You think of it, “Well, that’s a petty squabble” — and you’re right, but your own squabbles are not less petty. That’s the unity I come away thinking more about after a lot of trips. I think for me, the overwhelming lesson about those kinds of travel for me has been how — what’s the word I want? Basically, most people in the world are fairly racist, sexist, suspicious of strangers, and stuff. Relative to the rest of the world, the US is doing pretty good. That’s one of the things I come back — the general thing that we’re trying to move from was the norm for most of the world, for most of history. The kind of elevated society that we want is, compared to the rest of the world, a pretty good deal.…

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