Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…In Prague, we ate really, really well because that was the beginning of the trip. And all of these shucksters, who were trying to take your money, would think that I was a German tourist in Prague for the weekend. Because the Germans would use Prague as their playground at this point, and so people would come up to me constantly, very surreptitiously showing you currency in their hand. It was illegal to be a private money changer, but all these people would just come up to me all the time and, in German, ask me if I wanted to change money. I hadn’t expected to feel in a place like Prague that there were folks that had this constant, immediate East-West line. Having created eastern Europe as a playground for western Europeans. But I was mistaken as a German all the time. You’re an opponent of what you call age segregation in education, and I think, more generally in life. Tell us why. If you brought people from 300 years ago or 3,000 years ago to live among us now, if you dropped them out of a time machine, I think the first thing that would stun them is just simply our material abundance and our tools, and especially our digital tools. We have more built stuff than anybody in human history by huge magnitudes. I don’t think you could possibly arrive here and not first be surprised by our material abundance. But if those folks stayed with us for a while, 30 days later, that would wear off, and the thing that would be most striking to people from other times and places living among us is how age-segregated we live. It is a really, really weird thing to allow our 17-year-olds to believe that the world is mostly made up of 17-year-olds. It’s strange, it’s not healthy, and it’s not true, and that’s the way we raise our kids. They are hyper, hyper age-segregated. As the father of 15- and 13-year-old girls, I get that the pure slight of a 13- or 15-year-old girl really hurts. But it’s not really enduring if you have any wisdom. Right? If your 13-year-old knows 60-year-olds and 75-year-olds, and they’ve been through a lot of life experience, another 13- or 15-year-old girl saying something trite and mean to you, it’s water off a duck’s back if you have any perspective. I don’t think we’re serving our kids very well by allowing them to live these hyper age-segregated lives. And that’s closely connected to the core driver of our perpetual adolescence category, which is that our kids don’t know the distinction in their belly, they don’t feel the distinction between production and consumption. They know aging through grades in school as their productive work time, and then the rest of life is just different forms of consumption. That’s really unsatisfying and it’s really unfair to them. Again, this book is not a blame-laying book, but if I were laying blame in this book —…

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