Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. You start with priors. You can say, “The prior is that candidates like Donald Trump tend not to win the nomination. So what signs could I find that would violate that assumption?” It’s not necessarily performing well in early polls. Lots of candidates who are flashes in the pan — I guess it’s a little tautological. Lots of unusual candidates have done well in early polls. Lots of unusual candidates have won Iowa or New Hampshire, not usually both, but one or the other. It’s the ability to consolidate the field after that, by becoming the consensus choice of the party that’s been more unusual. That assumption still might prove to be true. I did think though that I, and a lot of people, overrated the ability of the Republican Party to stop what I think is, in some ways, a radical insurgency within the GOP. The party’s weaker than you thought. What other judgments about the world do you feel you or I should revise that we once held? Paul Krugman I think would say, “Republicans are more racist than many people believe. ” It wouldn’t be my take in particular, but it’s a candidate. To be honest, that’s a little bit of what I wanted to resist. Actually, I think one lazy heuristic that, in my thinking about Trump I use is (there are exceptions — Paul Krugman, Norman Ornstein — who have been very consistent for a long time), but I thought the people who were pro-Trump were generally not people whose opinions I would weight as highly. And I think that’s lazy and possibly quite dangerous.…

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