Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Patrick Carlison put it in an interesting way where he said, in the past, maybe thinkers were more interested in delving into the biggest questions, but if they couldn’t do it rigorously in a tractable way, they would make the trade-off in favor of the big question. And today we make the opposite trade-off. Does that seem like a fair comparison? I think that’s correct. And I would add that, say, in the time of Smith, there was nothing you could do rigorously. So there was no other option. Well, oh, I’m going to specialize in memorizing all the grain prices and run some great econometrics on that. And that’ll be rigorous. It’s really William Stanley Jevons who to the Anglo world introduced this notion. There’s something else you can do that’s rigorous. It was not yet rigorous, but he opened the door and showed people the. Alternative of the Jevons paradox?…

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