Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…So we should be more willing to defer and just give a free berth to other countries and less interest in conflict to contain them. Well, I don’t think that follows. I guess I agree with what you’re saying, but the mere fact that the ordinary citizens in some country might be better than it seems doesn’t itself mean we shouldn’t intervene. If you look at what NATO did in former Yugoslavia, it seems to me that was actually a good intervention that worked out well. And you can think that was a good idea without thinking they were all evil people, which I don’t think at all. I’ve been to all of those countries but Montenegro, and I’ve had a lot of fond connections with people who live there and were alive at the time. So I’d say it’s a pretty separate question. Looking back from today, people often say that one of the most important things in the 21st century was that the United States developed nuclear weapons before the Nazis did, and it could be of very great long-term significance that the US developed nuclear weapons first and then the Soviet Union next, rather than some other group of countries. Looking forward 500 years from now, how likely is it that we might look back and say the details of how some really important technology developed — who got it first and how they applied it early on — was the decisive issue of how the 21st century went in the scheme of things?…

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