Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Fair enough. We’ll see, I guess. I spent most of my life as an optimist. Most of that optimism ended or I think around… It’s slowly starting to decline through the 2000s as events… maybe more, and I got older. I think when you get older, you get crankier. I think the 2000s were not nearly as bad as people think, by the way. It’s a separate matter, but they did not dent my optimism maybe as much as yours. Yeah. In the face of your gloominess, I found my natural optimism re-arising. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad. I guess we’ll see what actually happens. It’s kind of foolish to talk about it or to forecast it. I do think there’s an interesting dynamic going on now between… It reminds them a little bit of other social issues, climate change, you name it, where people argue that we should be more worried than we might otherwise be because that otherwise will encourage people to be less worried. I don’t know. I find that hard to be sensitive to. There was a big dustup yesterday on Twitter because John Ioannidis suggested that were in the dark here. We might be overreacting. We don’t have much data. Us and Taleb and others responded back, “That’s why you have to be extra careful.”…

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