Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Cancer? [laughter] I mean, clearly, yes. I don’t mean that so flippantly. There is — There’s an article in the Jerusalem Post today: someone credible claiming that cancer has been cured. I don’t know if you saw that. I didn’t see that, but I do — having talked to many biologists working in the field, I will say there is a surprising amount of optimism that we are within a decade or two of that being true. It’s not an area where I feel anywhere near expert enough to comment on the validity of that statement, and I think it’s always dangerous to just trust what other smart people say, especially when they have an incentive to hawk their own book, but it does seem like a lot of people believe that. Growth is bad in plenty of times, but it does mask a lot of problems. A statement that I wouldn’t make is that growth is always an inherent good, although I do think — I think you’ve said something like this, too — that sustainable economic growth is almost always a moral good. Something that I think a lot of the current problems in the country can be traced to is the decline in that. And part of what motivates me to work on Y Combinator and OpenAI is getting back to that, getting back to sustainable economic growth, getting back to a world where most people’s lives get better every year and that we feel the shared spirit of success is really important. And growth feels good. It does mask a lot of problems, but there definitely are individual instances where you’d be better off with slower growth for whatever reason.…

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