Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Expand on that. If you take, say, cyber weapons, we don’t know how much damage they can do. But it could be that some weaker, but “more evil” countries having more powerful cyber weapons could bring about a sense of balance. I think one of the big trends in the world today is that these super powerful countries are much weaker compared to mid-level emerging economies than they were 30 years ago. So a place like Turkey or Saudi Arabia — in total military and geopolitical terms, those countries have much more clout than they did not long ago. And that makes the United States, China, also Russia quite a bit weaker. People don’t talk about this much, but you have many more regional powers with a lot of sway. Maybe that’s stabilizing. I don’t know. It seems more likely that it would be destabilizing to have a more multipower world, with lots of different actors because any one conflict can be extremely dangerous, and you’ve got more connections between the different actors that matter.…

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