Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Absolutely, so am I. But it also seems like there’s a long-term trend, as Robin Hanson has pointed out, towards more greater and greater concentration, that the units of governance are getting larger progressively over time, from villages now to enormous countries. Do you think it’s possible that gradually, over hundreds of years, we could converge on having more of a world government, if not a full world government? I think you’re always going to have rival blocs of some kind because the notion of having unity and no enemy doesn’t seem like a stable equilibrium to me. But I’m not even sure the trend toward larger units is continuing right now. You have Brexit, Scottish secession. It lost the referendum, but the movement actually hasn’t gone away. A Catalonian secession, which to me in logical terms — it makes no sense. That hasn’t gone away. It may even happen. So there’s at least a chance there’s some fragmenting of power at the margin. Although both Scotland and Catalonia wanted to do that in part because then they would still be part of this broader EU in their view — that would give them many of the benefits of being part of a large state.…

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