Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Cool. You’re in favor of markets and kind of liberal governance but I see two arguments here that might justify an alternative approach. One is, you’re in favor of faster economic growth. Essentially, planned economies in the past have been able to reinvest a much larger fraction of GDP and future growth just building more factories rather than producing consumer goods than market economies have been able to. So perhaps, you might be interested in having some greater central planning of the economy that would allow us to do much more investment through science and technology or perhaps physical capital that will allow us to increase the economic growth rate? What do you think of that? We need to become more concrete, but the wealthiest societies in today’s world are, for the most part, the freest ones. There’s no guarantee that will always hold, but I think that’s an argument for some kind of liberal freedom. But if you look at, say, China since 1979 — yes they grew because they became significantly freer, but I suspect they also did better keeping some elements of Communist Party rule in place than if they had, say, followed the advice of western reformers. And I think for the most part — not on every decision — but did the right thing. I think we need to recognize that. But that’s not a centrally planned economy either — it’s because they gave up central planning. But nonetheless they spent very heavily on infrastructure and still do, and that, in large part, comes from the government. We don’t want to give up the benefits of market, absolutely, but, I guess you’d be fairly happy if the United States spent quite a lot more in science and technology research and perhaps the government built lots more infrastructure?…

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