Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…You wrote, one of your best books for this year was this Sub-Saharan Africa: Architecture. Why include that? What was it about it that spoke to you? Obviously, Africa’s a very important continent. It’s a very hard continent to learn a lot about. Hard to get there. Not always an easy experience — so many countries — even apart from COVID issues. Here are these seven books — which I’m not done reading yet, by the way, but I will finish the whole series — that just teach you the whole history of Africans building things. That to me, in many ways, is a more fundamental history than just reading another political history of Africa, where they all go through, more or less, the same events: apartheid fell, and the Biafran War in Nigeria, and this and that. That’s all very important, but at the end of the day, if you’re interested in Africa at all, that is not what is scarce. There’s something more nitty-gritty, more contextual on the ground, and these books make a very serious attempt to give you that. They have excellent photographs, and they cover the entire African continent, and also give you a sense of diversity and lived experience. But also, institutionally — how did these things actually happen? Where did the influences come from? What was the role of colonialism? Why are Finnish architects prominent in some parts of Africa and not others? And so on. I thought it’s a pretty remarkable series and one of my topics for the book of the year. Architecture and visual art as an entry point into learning about new fields or areas.…

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