Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Relatedly, I think, a couple of years ago, Paul Schlemming had an interesting paper that if you look from 1311 to now, interest rates have been declining. There’s been hundreds of years of interest rate declines. What is the big picture explanation of this trend? I’m not sure we have one. You may know Cowen’s third law: All propositions about real interest rates are wrong. But simply, lower risk, better information, higher buffers of wealth would be what you’d call the intuitive economistic explanations. There’s probably something to them, but how much of that trend do they actually explain as a percent of the variance? I don’t know. Let’s talk about anarchy. You have first written about this; I hadn’t read the last time we talked, and it’s really interesting. So maybe you can restate your arguments as you answer this question, but how much of your arguments about how network industries lead to these cartel-like dynamics? How much of that can help explain what happened to social media, Web 2.0?…

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