Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It seems more likely that it would be destabilizing to have a more multipower world, with lots of different actors because any one conflict can be extremely dangerous, and you’ve got more connections between the different actors that matter. But you might be more robust. So the old story is two polarities of power versus many, and then the two looks pretty stable, right? Deterrents. USA, USSR. But if it’s three compared to a world with many centers of power, I don’t know that three is very stable. Didn’t Sartre say, “Three people is hell”? Or seven — is seven a stable number? We don’t know very much. So it could just be once you get out of two-party stability, you want a certain flattening. And maybe some parts of the world will have conflicts that are undesirable. But nonetheless, by having the major powers keep their distance, that’s better, maybe. The world seems more resilient today in that it’s richer. We can lose a lot of GDP without starving. On the other hand, it seems less stable, less resilient because we’re all interconnected such that a disaster anywhere, like a disease, can spread everywhere very quickly, and there’s nowhere that’s protected from it. If we could potentially bifurcate the world into two totally separate halves that barely had any contact with one another, or you had to go through a quarantine in order to get to the other half, would that hypothetically be a good idea in order to increase sustainability?…

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