Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Mm-hmm. If I think of the very populous countries, I wouldn’t quite call them a wreck, but they’re much, much less well governed. It’s amazing, in a sense, the US is not more corrupt and screwed up than it is. So if we move to a billion people, are we lowering the quality of governance in this country? And by how much? I don’t know. That’s an interesting question. I sometimes think, well, one reason that the governance standouts are small is that there’s more variance in the small countries because there’s a lot of them. You go around, and there’s a couple really nice ones, and there it is, which is different from a causal question. Does scaling up make it worse? I think it’s probably true, though, that a billion Americans will be more of a mess in the sense that people will scan the headlines of the latest in politics. It’s like, “Oh my God! What a catastrophe!” Because it’s people who don’t know each other, people who don’t have anything in common. Politicians opportunistically are trying to create weird new identity cleavages to mobilize people, and it’s all very ugly, and everybody hates politics, and now all the politicians are unpopular. We would only go more in that direction. Whereas, if you have a homogenous small town, people who don’t like it just leave, right? So you’re left behind with a nice community of people who have a lot in common, who share a lot, who can directly self-monitor each other, that could be really well-informed about whether the guy in charge of the fire department knows what he’s doing. Probably the right solution is something to do with federalism, but it’s definitely a different book as to why American federalism does not deliver on its promise in the way that we might think it should.…

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