Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Having written on the history of the Indian industrialization, in 1999, I dragged my spouse and three children on a five-month tour of India, seeking to try — just by being on the ground there — to see if you could understand anything more about why this economy, which was still at that stage, lagging enormously behind. We traveled on train all the time, and we ended up talking to Indians. It was interesting to ask people, “Why is India so poor?” It turns out that people have all kinds of answers, but they’re easily testable as false. They would say, “Oh, it’s the population. We have too many people.” We know now, of course, that that actually is not going to make any difference. “It’s the corrupt politicians.” Or “it’s the education system.” Stuff like that. The problem with, as I say, this pluralistic, open humanities-type explanation is, it doesn’t work. It’s time to get on board with the Scientific Revolution. We can only explain things if we have these mechanistic, closed-form, empirically testable explanations. Otherwise, it’s just conversation. If we take England — when I read your book, A Farewell to Alms, I took you to be ambiguous, but when I reread that book through the lens of your later papers, it seems to me you’re saying there was an actual genetic change in English society because of who was marrying whom and having kids with whom, and thus, people saved more, became more conscientious, more forward-looking. Yes.…

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