Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I was too right-wing. I had to start not as a graduate student. I had to be deprogrammed by beginning as a first-year undergraduate. There had been a fierce fight in the faculty at Cambridge about whether I should be accepted as a Fulbright graduate student. Those arguing that I should prevailed, but the quid pro quo was that she would be my tutor. Well, you could imagine, I learned a lot from her. I came to understand better her way of thinking, but after eight weeks, we parted, and I got another tutor, Frank Hahn. One thing that’s striking to me about the arc of your career, if I think geographically where you’ve been — you start in Gary, Indiana. There’s Amherst, there’s MIT, there’s Kenya, there’s Yale, there’s Cambridge, there’s Oxford, there’s Princeton, there’s Boston University, there’s Columbia, there’s seven years in Washington. I’m sure I’ve left some out. Being in so many different places — how has that influenced what you’ve produced and what you’ve thought? And why didn’t you just stay at MIT your whole life? Surely you had that option. Yes, but you could have asked why didn’t I just stay in Gary? As a young person, I read about this big world outside of Gary, and I just wanted to see it. As I went to Amherst, my eyes opened up more, and I wanted to see more. I just had this thirst for seeing more and more of the world, and the more I saw it, the more I wanted. That had an enormous influence. I think coming from Gary, Indiana, gave me empathy for those who didn’t start at the top in life. It certainly made me much more interested in development. Gary was beginning to go through the process of de-development that we see over the next 30 years after I left. It was the epitome of de-industrialization in the United States. I think it affected me, made my career very different. It affected my economics in a lot of ways. I was more concerned about inequality than most of my colleagues. I wrote my thesis on inequality. It’s been a thread throughout my career. I wrote in 2012 the book The Price of Inequality, and a couple of years later, The Great Divide. The good news is, with that long arc, the economics profession, our society is finally catching up on, coming to terms, recognizing the importance of studying inequality and the important role that inequality plays in creating the great divides in our society.…

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