Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you think that you can’t actually get somebody to have something that lives up to the billing, that really is the life project, there’s no point in subsidizing it. Subsidizing something that you can’t get people to do . . . But people are built differently. Again, if you think of there’s something like a spectrum, with more tightly wired people on one end and more disintegrated people on the other end and different configurations in the middle, it’s not as though there’s any one thing we should be encouraging people to do. Different ways of approaching their lives are going to suit different people. I worry in your book that you are underselling Jeremy Bentham a bit and underselling Mill’s view of Bentham. If I read Mill’s famous essay, just called “Bentham,” which I’m sure you know very well, Mill is still pretty positive on Bentham. He says Bentham has a lot of flaws, but fortunately his main influence has been on the law. If we think of Bentham’s writings, the Panopticon and Auto-Icon proposal to always be reputationally evaluating the achievements of dead people, I don’t favor those as policy proposals, but they seem quite profound and have been highly influential and prophetic. Bentham on usury is smarter than Adam Smith — on gay rights, on animal welfare. His pamphlet on interest-bearing currency. Fragment on Government is quite good. Mill sees this, so why be so down on Bentham? Why isn’t he just a brilliant, wonderful philosopher with serious limitations — along with most of the other brilliant, wonderful philosophers? First of all, although Bentham was a very strange guy, he had a lot of bad ideas, but also a lot of really good ideas. And the good ideas, they speak for themselves . . .…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.