Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…Well, I think six years ago, maybe whenever it was, when the early MOOCs were coming out, online classes, I was all excited that there’d be a revolution. That hasn’t happened. Now this is going to give it another chance. Maybe it’ll spur it along. I think it’s equally likely they’ll say, “That was incredibly ineffective. We’ve got to go back to face to face.” I don’t know. I’m very agnostic on this. I think the idea that you don’t need a coronavirus to discourage people from going to sporting events, right? The number of people who watch sporting events live is a very, very small number. It’s a unique experience. A concert is the same way, a concert, live theater, those are all there. They’re extraordinary. There are substitutes for them that aren’t nearly as good, but they’re a lot cheaper and easier to access. We access them. But I can’t see those dying out at all. In fact, they may bounce back stronger than ever. I think we’ll see a kind of polarization. Things will be either very face to face and very exciting and very extreme or things will be very online. The kind of average degree of online-ness may not change, but you’ll demand more from your face to face encounters and I won’t use my previous point again. Then you’ll be doing more on Zoom and Skype and other services. I think we’ll compensate for that by having our face to face be all the more huggy or whatever you think it might be. Well, I liked the idea that that norms are evolving now that will encourage face to face to be higher quality. I do think the idea that in the middle of a conversation you can look at your phone or glance at your … increasingly going to be seen as unattractive. The etiquette of that’s going to evolve, but I don’t know how it’ll be. But I think increasingly people will put away their phones because they don’t want to be connected 24/7. But we’ll see. It’s a bit of romance maybe on my part that when we are face to face, we’re going to do it with more focus, intention, presence. So nice idea. I like this.…

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