Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is it that you believe that we can’t do anything about this, and so we should appreciate the consequences as best we can and make the best of it? Or you think that we should not do anything about this? As an individual, there are definitely things you can do. You can be quirkier. You can be eccentric. You can partake in some networks rather than others, and subsidize things that otherwise might have their stocks depleted too quickly. At the macro level, it’s hard to steer. The Nassim Taleb case — that free trade gives you too much monoculture — I take it seriously at an intellectual level. But the amount by which you would need to cut off trade to really create separately existing independent parts of the world that would give us greater protection against existential risk, it seems you would literally need to go back to 1500 to do that. And that’s not feasible; it wouldn’t be desirable. But I think he’s getting at a tradeoff that a lot of the rest of us aren’t sufficiently willing to admit. That in some ways, we’re investing in literally a monoculture of diversity. And that’s a little dangerous. Like every city has restaurants. I saw a Guam restaurant on Mission [Street] when I was walking today. I ate at a Cambodian restaurant. Two days before, I was at Mandalay, a Burmese restaurant. And many cities have these. And we call it “diversity,” but we have to be careful also not to just be fooling ourselves. So is connectivity the worst thing that ever happened to global culture?…

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