Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…That’s right. People like to know in advance before they get the charge. When you’re picking up people after the football game or after tailgating, it’s amazing how frank they’ll be if all of a sudden they find they have their senator as their driver for nine minutes, and they’ll tell you what they’re worried about. I tend to view voters very similarly to the way I thought about who my audience should be when I was writing a dissertation, which is, “Assume that the people you’re writing for are a lot smarter than you are, but that they know nothing about your topic.” It’s a useful way to think about complicated policy discussions: Assume that the voters are a lot smarter than we are, that they’re wise but that they’re not immersed in the detail, day to day. So you need to figure out how to telescope in and out at the level of detail you want to talk about. And I’m very fascinated by work. It’s a fundamental anchor of human identity. Instead of just doing town halls with my constituents, I like to work with people. So I do lots of ag labor, partly. Again, I have little kids, and I want them to suffer, and so I take them with me to work on the farm or on a ranch. It’s pretty easy in Nebraska to figure out ways to do ag labor. It’s tough to find ways to work with people who have modern knowledge-economy jobs, and learn from them. And so that’s why I want to play on the sharing economy, to learn a lot more about it. And people understand that we’re going through a massive disruption in the nature of work. This is unprecedented in human history to have people who are going to be 40 and 45 and 50 and 55, and get disintermediated not only out of their job and out of their firm, but out of their whole industry. That’s never happened before. Bill Gates’s way of talking about it is, “This is the first massive intragenerational economic disruption.” Other economic disruptions when you had technological substitution creating push from the farm and pull to the city, that wasn’t one 45-year-old farmer laying down his tools or her tools and moving to the city. It was 55- and 60-year-olds recognizing that their 15- and 20-year-old kids were not going to have the same life they had and they were going to leave and go to the city. We’re going to have intragenerational work disruptions and a shortening duration of jobs forevermore. That’s new. And in the sharing economy is a place where you’ll find people that are actually thinking about that. At age 37, you were president of Midland University in Nebraska — I think at the time the youngest university president in this country. And there’s a common claim that it’s an economic problem for colleges and universities that administrative costs have become too high. Do you agree with this claim or not? I do agree with this claim.…

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