Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…He looks back at him, and he doesn’t give him a number. He says, “More.” Those are the people we don’t have to worry about, right? If there’s something like a public option, a series of safe assets, T-bills, FDIC-insured checking accounts, or some equivalent thereof, I think that’s the most we can do for people. People can take risky decisions with their careers, with how they drink, with the drugs they use. They do all the time. In a way, the financial risks are often the least important of the ones they take. These people don’t become rational just by electing them to office and putting a hat on them that says “government,” right? If you think people are bad at risk, our government is terrible at risk. Oh, I completely agree with that assessment. But you go back and look at what happened, frankly, in 1929, and actually, you could look at it in the context of what happened in 2008, too. Interestingly, to me, in 1929, when people lost money, for the most part, at least initially, they blamed themselves. There actually was personal accountability. If you look at Groucho Marx, who famously lost his home during this, he actually had to mortgage his home because of mortgage loans. While he blamed the broker, if you will, to some degree for suggesting he buy some of these stocks, he ultimately blamed himself, which I think is a very different approach to life than we have today, where there’s always finger-pointing. It’s never our own fault. It’s everybody else’s fault. Now, is that a human condition? What is that?…

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