Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Then we don’t have to even disagree, because we’re going to act the same way. Let me mention this book. Reading this book, it really cleared up for me, I think, a lot of the things you believe. It’s called To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace. It came out last year. It’s received attention, but less so from economists, for obvious reasons. It’s a book about leaders sitting down and just doing something and basically getting it right. Is that fair to say? Solving — more or less solving the Cuban Missile Crisis, defusing tensions, avoiding nuclear war, right? It’s a book, yes, of this remarkable last year of Kennedy’s life, which included the Cuban Missile Crisis and then negotiating the partial nuclear test ban treaty. Basically, I find it a story of tremendous insight and very moving also. If I could put it in pure conceptual jargon, it’s a story of finding a way to the cooperative outcome of a prisoner’s dilemma. That’s, to my mind, a crucial structural feature of our lives, which is that we face constantly this challenge of finding agreement. We face constantly the logic of defection, as it’s called in the prisoner’s dilemma, or the noncooperative outcome that’s worse for everybody. The question is what to do about that. The cynics say, “Well, the world’s bound to disagree.” The idealists say, “The world will always agree, or we should always act that way.” I find fascinating and compelling the idea that we should try to find ways to move to cooperation, knowing how fragile that is.…

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