Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…This is true. This is true. But I think privacy has social ramifications that people don’t always consider. So they give away a lot of information for free on Facebook, let’s say, because they may imagine that on Facebook, they are giving their information to their friends. But it turns out they are not. They’re giving their information to lots of advertisers. They’re giving their information to political operatives. Their information cannot be put back into the bottle. And we now know that Facebook — I’m just picking on Facebook because it’s the lowest-hanging fruit, but there’s many instances of this — we now know that Facebook’s mission to “connect everybody” — it sounded like it was going to produce a much more pluralistic, diverse world where people would have communication with people they couldn’t connect with physically because they lived in a different place. But in fact, as you’ve noticed in Complacent Class, Facebook more often does the opposite. It unites people who are similar and convinces them that the voices in their own echo chamber are, in fact, the right ones to listen to, and they tune in less and less to other people. It’s interesting. I would like to ask you about what you consider the roots of complacency and the kind of sorting that we have both been noticing. Because in some ways, you would think that people moving around and going other places and moving house every few years, as Americans did more several decades ago, would result in exposure to more kinds of people and have a bigger sense of the world. But in fact, it often results in people grouping amongst people who are very similar to them. Whereas if you have an old-fashioned small town, it can result in the opposite, which is to say, people going to church with, or socializing with, people who are very different in terms of age, in terms of — well, not conviction in going to church — but running into people who are a different social class, who do different things for work, that kind of stuff. I think a lot of people are moving just once. They figure out where they really like it, maybe through cheaper travel and also the internet. They go there, they stay there, and then there’s less mixing and more sorting, and geographic mobility is down. I see this problem as predating social media for the most part. One hopes that most people don’t live in social media bubbles. I think the data actually suggest they don’t so much. Social media don’t seem to be enough of a cure. Their net effect seems to be to keep us at home. You have Netflix, you have Amazon packages — wonderful things, but you enjoy them at home for the most part, and they just keep you there. Exactly. And that’s the least mixing of all, is if you stay at home. The fracturing of our political dialog is only the most obvious of the malign effects of technology.…

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