Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…My sons and my wife forced me to get the cell phone. Therefore, I’m not competent to express any opinion about artificial intelligence. Now, in some of your particular explanations in the book, I’d like to push on a few of those. I read you as arguing that Rachel Carson mattered a good deal. I’m not sure that’s true because it seems there’s a lot of countries that when people get to something like $28,000 per capita income that they just turn much greener, and they clean up their air. We sometimes call that the environmental Kuznets curve. The fact that there’s a broad class of those countries, doesn’t that mean Rachel Carson probably didn’t matter that much? At minimum, Rachel Carson jumped out of the environmental movement about a decade before it would have been jumpstarted. Yes, an environmental movement was starting in the United States then, but it had not gotten a great deal of attention. Her book, Silent Spring, that book and Darwin’s Origin of Species are probably the two books by scientists that have had the biggest impact in the last century. When her book was published, the very next day, it was Senator, I think, Ribicoff of Connecticut, who announced the next day that he was launching a US government investigation into toxic chemicals. She certainly caused the environmental movement to develop earlier than it would have developed afterwards. You’re correct: The environmental movement would have developed perhaps later and more slowly.…

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