Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. You have to go there if you can. That was the same case with Somaliland in the last African trip. But the special thing about Transnistria — it was bizarre, the place in itself. It’s the only place in the world, I guess, where you can order sushi and sit down in a restaurant, eat sushi only 100 meters away from a Lenin statue, which is still standing. It embodies a lot of contradictions in itself. Here’s a question I also asked Chris Blattman, I asked Charles C. Mann. If we think about the New World, it seems to me that, systematically, a lot of countries in the New World are much more dangerous than countries in the other hemisphere. If you think about Colombia earlier on — not so much now — you think about murder rates in Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, many parts of Brazil, there does seem to be a difference in the level of violence. Gun deaths in the United States compared to, say, Western Europe. Why is this? It’s not just one country. There’s something about the New World that makes some significant parts of it more violent. What is that? Probably because in our evolution as territories, we have had violence as a part of it much more recently in the timeline. We were conquered by means of powder. I think that’s probably in the genetic of our culture. I hope not. But it’s interesting what you said about the shootings here in the US. It’s something that, of course, as an outsider and as someone who it’s his first visit to the country, it would be not proper to give a very deep reflection on that. Going back to the hitchhiking issue, there is some sort of relation I can establish. When you hitchhike, you’re trying to establish social links with random people. I feel that in a very developed society like the US, where the value of independence has been stressed over interdependence too much, and much more than in Latin America, for example, or even Europe. I feel that when you are absolutely independent and you don’t need help from your neighbors, then also, no one is needing your help. Then how do you feel that you are needful for your community? I think that we are losing…probably something happening here that some people — just some people — don’t have the chance to demonstrate their value to the community. This leads to social anomie.…

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