Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think there’s something interesting going on with Indian immigrants. In particular, if you look at the executive leadership bench in tech, there’s massive overrepresentation of Indian immigrants or children of Indian immigrants. I don’t know if you have a view, but there’s something interesting going on there. I think that’s an interesting effect someone ought to study. Certainly, with start-up founders, which is maybe the area I most studied in, you tend to see first-generation immigrants. But these are people that come to the United States usually not out of sheer desperation to have some basic form of economic success, because they were somewhat suppressed in their origin country, but more people in search of some spiritual belonging that they believe they found in whatever technology they’re working on. They look much more like religious migrants, I think, than your typical immigrant: “I’m trying to make it.” Founders, at least, that I meet that come out to San Francisco — some of them actually are American, just immigrating from Iowa to SF. Obviously, many of them international, too. The best ones are not necessarily that worried about making a buck tomorrow. They’re technical, they found an interesting scene, and they want to belong. I think it’s actually quite different from the immigrant persona of, “We took our whole family to the US. We have two screaming, crying babies, and we’re just trying to survive.” I think those people, for very obvious reasons, are very risk-averse. I’m strongly of the view that right now is a golden age for the Indian diaspora and also India. If you look at Florence during the Renaissance, or you look at Central Europe in the early decades of the 20th century, you see remarkable, truly remarkable levels of achievement that don’t happen before, don’t happen after. It’s not some genetic thing, but somehow everything is coming together just right. I think part of talent is to realize when you hit these mother lodes, and then to figure out, “Well, we’re just going to try to do a lot here, as much as we possibly can.” Investing in potential mathematicians in Hungarian high schools in 1916 was a really good thing to do. You don’t even have to be that good at picking talent. Today, for whatever reason, I do think it’s India, possibly South Asia more broadly. I see the potential for parts of Nigeria joining that club. It’s further away, maybe still contingent. But for whatever reason, right now, something remarkable is happening. Combination of level of aspiration, internet is good enough, enough people with enough English fluency, some underlying flexibility of worldview that I think has made Indians relatively well suited, say, to be CEOs in American companies in a way we might not have expected, say, 30 years ago. I think something extraordinary is going on, and it won’t last forever, and it was not the same, say, 40 years ago. Maybe it started 20, 30 years ago, but now we’re seeing it all blossom. To me, it’s very exciting. I would agree. EV India is a lot of fun. For those of you who are investing or thinking of investing in India, there are a lot of low-hanging fruit. A lot of the people that we pick for EV India — if they were in the United States or Canada, they would have been in incubator programs and accelerator programs and magnet schools and Thiel Fellowship or something like that, but none of that exists in India. The scouting or the incubation infrastructure doesn’t exist. Actually, Tyler and I are in competition usually, and I get far better quality of applications, a higher average and lower variance than the ones that Tyler gets from the rest of the world. That’s my simple explanation for what’s happening in India. One of the things that both start-ups and economics departments have in common is failure. This is both at the level of . . . Start-ups, it’s fairly obvious. But in economics, most people who start their PhDs don’t finish, or even the people — the sorts that Tyler is hiring as professors in the econ department — they may stop publishing, or they may give up at some point. What is a good way to screen for who will handle failure well, or at least better than the others in the running?…

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