Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Shouldn’t that be something I should be asking you about? Because to me, cryptocurrency — I didn’t know anything about it, so I was like, “Well, I should look into this, just to understand it.” It’s very difficult to understand, as far as I can tell. I came across something, an idea that I’m wondering what you will say, as an economist. My assumption always was that cryptocurrency, in some ways, was like we’re breaking away from the way money used to be, and there’s a real opportunity to make a lot of money in this kind of Wild West scenario. I came across some information that seemed to suggest that for someone like me, it might be smart to look at cryptocurrency as a safety net in fear that the US economy collapses or the world economy collapses. Is there any value in looking at cryptocurrency, not as this radical change, but as a backup? Early crypto prices are very countercyclical. They’re like gold once had been. In more recent times, crypto prices have become highly cyclical, that is, they move with everything else. Now, what would happen if a big part of the world collapsed? I would say, we don’t know. I suspect some small percentage of your portfolio should, in fact, be in crypto, just because it helps you diversify. I see the world as follows. Every decade, to me, is super weird, but the 1980s and ’90s pretended they weren’t weird. The ’80s pretended to be good versus evil. The ’90s pretended that good won. But when crypto comes and persists, you have to drop all pretense that the age you’re living in isn’t totally weird. You have internet crypto, and everyone admits, right now, everything’s weird. And that, to me, is the fundamental break with the 1990s because everyone pretended most things were normal and that Seinfeld was your dose of weird, right? Jason Alexander — that’s a very manageable weird. Oh, absolutely.…

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