Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think I can agree with the broad claim. One of the things we always face in complex societies, meritocratic-based societies, is there’s a tendency for people to want to surround themselves by people that are loyal to them, by family and friends and people who owe them things, right? We call this corruption. In most human societies, this was called business as usual. There is this tendency to want to surround yourself with those loyal to you, those of your same tribe, ethnic group, all those kinds of things. Maintaining well-functioning institutions requires constantly resisting the tendency to surround yourself with reciprocal partners and family members that would otherwise corrupt the system. Let me try a somewhat related question. I’m not at all intending this as asking you about your personal views on politics. But let me pose the question, and then circle back to what I’m really trying to ask. I look at your research. You have papers. We learn better from teachers who are like us in some way, maybe slightly senior, but they’re similar in terms of their groups. Religion is something that’s very prosocial. There’s a kind of wisdom in intuitions about repugnance. Not always, but often. There’s a wisdom to these carried intuitions. There’s a high value to cultural evolution. War in some cases can foster cooperation, especially over the longer haul. Biology really matters, and the West is quite distinctive in terms of what we do and how we think and the culture we’ve developed. I’m not trying to ask personally are your views conservative. But in some temperamental sense, if I can just whisper this, do you ever feel even here, does it make you conservative believing all these things? I just follow the trail where it goes. I don’t think of these things as conservative ideas although —…

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