Tyler Cowen: disagreement

Transcript context

…What I would say is, first of all, how do you see recent events in the United States as fitting into this broad scenario? Do you think that the kind of account I’ve given to populism in Europe is a good way of understanding or explaining what happened in the election last November, or other trends in American politics in the last few years? I think it’s much cultural and less economic than people think. If you look even at a state such as West Virginia ‑‑ I just wrote a column about West Virginia ‑‑ we all talk about how poor it is, but per capita income in West Virginia, it’s about three‑quarters of the US national average. If you take into account the fact that it’s cheaper to live there, it’s actually not that far from the national average. There are obvious problems with opioids, low labor force participation, but that actually means the other people in West Virginia have to be awfully productive. That per capita income in West Virginia in real terms is about equal to that of France of Japan. Those are poorer countries than the United States. If you’re theory is all about the extreme poverty of West Virginia and the state is falling apart, when in fact it’s been growing a bit. It’s gained 50,000 residents over the last 15 years, not a lot, but it’s not being massively depopulated ‑‑ and your theory is they’re all opting for Trump, or populism, or alt‑right because they’re so poor, it doesn’t make sense. There’s increased sorting of this country by education and what is sometimes called the coastal elites phenomenon, though you find it in Ann Arbor, and Austin, Texas, and some places that aren’t the coasts. Part of it is because of the Internet. There is a split of sympathy. Say parents, they might have once said, “I don’t want my daughter to marry an X,” some ethnic or racial group. Now it’s, “I don’t want to my daughter to marry a Republican,” is a much strong sentiment. [laughter] Parts of the country are realizing they should rebel against that. I don’t feel they’re doing so in an especially effective way, but that’s what I think is happening here. There is slow wage growth, and that creates grievances where expectations are not met, and that feeds into the cultural problems, but also in Europe it’s very often a more cultural thing. Spain has relatively recent fascism, so they’re somewhat inoculated because there’s been a lot of immigration to Spain. Ireland didn’t have fascism, but it had the issue…obviously a lot of violence. The idea that some kind of alt‑right view comes along that flirts with the idea of being violent on Twitter, it’s not going to be a big seller in Ireland. It’s really history being recreated in different places in different ways. I tend to agree very much with that, actually. What I then ask you further is you say ‑‑ and I agree with you, as I said ‑‑ that the economics is not what’s really driving this. It’s more a cultural phenomenon. On the other hand, how do you think politics is reacting to something you’ve been writing about for a while now, which is what you see as the stagnation of innovation, the problems of lack of income growth for large parts of society? What effects do you think this is having on the broader political media that we’re living in?…

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