Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I don’t know. You got to give me three. I’ll choose a, b, or c. Well, some of it could be the demographic composition of who becomes an economist has changed, I believe. There’re many more foreigners. I’m not sure of the net effect there. It could also mean you just have more political spectra floating around, but I think non-Americans, on average, are more interventionist than Americans. At least in terms of the flow of younger people, I believe there are more women. Women, on average, are further to the left than are men, especially educated women who are probably not yet married. I’m not sure those are the reasons. That’s what pops into my mind. Okay, good. Now we can have a debate. I don’t think that’s true. Many of the foreigners I know come from socialist-y or much more interventionist countries, saying, “Oh my God, I love this free place.” Talk to an Argentinian about government. I know a lot of libertarian foreigners. Economics is a classic case of the wonders of free immigration because — listeners may not know — many economics departments — there’s few native-born Americans left. We have scooped up the talent from around the world, and they bring with them some political inclinations. So you’re right. Some of them tend to be more lefty. Some of them tend to look at where they come from. The people pushing back against Princeton’s latest woke outbursts are Eastern Europeans who say, “Hey, guys, socialism — we were there. You don’t want it.” Foreigners, I do think, are driving the other unfortunate feature of contemporary economics — its increasing careerism. People don’t go to a university . . . When I first got my job and the dean started telling me about the retirement program, I was just glazing over. “What are you talking about? I’m not going to be here then.” Now, people seem to regard their progression in a company the way the labor markets work in Italy. That’s an unfortunate feature of ours. There’s not that many in economics. What’s driving the woke-y leftyism in economics is the millennials, the American-born millennials who’ve been through our school systems and our colleges, which teach this kind of stuff. If there’s anything different about the demographic composition, it’s that people like me can’t be in economics anymore. People like Gene Fama can’t be in economics anymore. Gene Fama — he did his internship when he was an undergrad; he worked in the steel mills. I applied to be an economics graduate student on a lark one month before classes start. You can’t do that anymore. You have to be deeply ingrained in the system, starting as an undergraduate. Maybe there’s a self-perpetuation in that sense that wasn’t there in the much more freewheeling earlier era.…

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