Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think there’s any plausible alternative to doing that? I think the most plausible alternative to my view is simply to say the actual time horizon is not very long, that maybe in an extreme case, either the world will end soon or history will start collapsing and run in reverse. So there is no grand, glorious future that has a heavy weight in the calculation. And thus, we’re always dealing with the here and now, a quite pessimistic view. I think that’s the main rival view to what I put out in the book. I don’t feel I refute that argument. It’s going to be true with some probability, right? If you do an expected value calculation, well, retrogression is true with, say, probability 37 percent, progress with 63 percent. In the expected value calculation, progress is still going to win. It will have the dominant weight. But we need to be very careful. Don’t assume progress is possible. And the other pessimistic theory of history as, say, a lot of the ancient Greeks would have accepted, may well be true. And if that’s true, then this vision is a kind of large mistake. But you cannot live with pessimism, right? There’s also a notion that more optimism is a partially self-fulfilling prophecy. Believing pessimistic views might make them more likely to come about. Yeah. In the seminar room, it seems like economists and sometimes philosophers are not willing to aggregate welfare across people. If one person’s worse off then someone else, you just won’t be able to say whether, overall, the situation is better. But then it seems like in everyday life, when they’re making calls about what should a group of people do, they’re always willing to aggregate.…

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