Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…My wife has descended from Canadians on one side, from Newfoundland and Ontario. And when things get particularly hot on Twitter, she will sometimes suggest that she needs to reclaim her Canadian citizenship. But I actually think that is how certain Americans think of Canada — not as a land of opportunity, but as sort of a stable and lower-risk version of the US to which they can abscond. And to the extent that’s true, then that suggests that there is this kind of resilient dynamism in the US that comes with risks but doesn’t seem to be on offer in Canada. But do you think that’s out of date? How dynamic do you think Canada is right now? I think market size matters greatly. So talented Canadians come to the US in great numbers, but not so much vice versa. So it could just be that people care about market size much more than they care about the kinds of issues you and I talk about, and that always gives me pause. Just size of the country seems to be a more important variable relative to the amount of print space it gets from public intellectuals. And that’s why we don’t want to go to Canada. Plus, it’s cold. It is cold. And all Canadians live in a very narrow strip of Canada. The population distribution is, as you would expect, extraordinarily compressed. In effect, geographically, it functions like a very nice northern province of the US with an immense and entertaining hinterland.…

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