Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Why is that, given all the putative cyber warfare and pathogenic weapons and all these other catastrophic macro events that we think could occur? There’s a chance pathogenic weapons could become more important at some future point, but for now, it’s still nuclear weapons. A lot of people have them. They’ve been used, twice, by us. They might become much easier to acquire. They can be launched by mistake. The institutions surrounding them are not always well designed. North Korea is a particularly hard-to-understand case that might be highly dangerous. So the notion that nuclear weapons are always the most important issue — this also gets back to your Trump question — you want, especially from this country, a lot of predictability. And I worry right now that the risk premium — especially in Asia, which does not have Western Europe’s built-up antiwar tradition — that we’re underestimating that risk premium. I don’t see it in asset prices. I think it’s simply poorly understood. I don’t have a prediction, but it’s my single biggest worry, that the South China Sea and northeast Asia are less stable than we think. Is there any way in which your outlook differs to Schelling’s?…

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