Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, I think being not tied down to the actual events, allowing the imagination to roam, really, writers are able to do amazing things. And I think that’s what we get out of it. That nonfiction, the description of what has actually happened — first of all, it’s also very difficult to capture just precisely what has happened. And often fiction allows you to go beyond that, to imagine the reasons behind it, which you might not be able to if you were doing just purely following the facts, so to speak. But say we think of it in marginal terms. You know, I’m an economist, so if I say, “Well, reading Hamlet, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen” — of course that was essential for one’s own education, to speak to other people. The core — I don’t know if you’d quite call them ideas — but inspirations in those works move people’s lives. But at the margin, given how much you read — and you know, I read a fair amount of fiction, too — how much value is there really for that marginal work of fiction, given the regularity of patterns of stories that we see? What is it you get out of the marginal work of fiction? Well, it varies. I mean, I have to admit that a great deal that I read I don’t get that much out of. And you really — I think one of the reasons I do read as much as I do is because it really takes that whole mass to really find all the different things you’re looking for in it. But I definitely think it really expands my horizons in a way that other things can’t. Travel, talking to people, meeting people, reading the newspaper, following current events — those things obviously also help you understand the world better, but I think fiction adds a totally different dimension to it. And truly great fiction really can take you much farther than other things can, I think.…

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