Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…One frustration that tech people have is that they have very little influence, it seems, in Washington compared to how big that industry is. Industries that are much smaller will have much greater sway in Washington. Why is tech so bad at having influence in Washington? I think you're getting a lot more influence than maybe you realize, quickly, through national security reasons. The feds have not stopped the development of AI, whatever you think they should or should not do. It's basically proceeded. National security as a lobby, they don't care about tech per se. But it has meant that on a whole bunch of things in the future, you will get your way a bit more than you might be expecting. A key problem you have is so much of it is in one area, and it's also an area where there's a dominant political party. Even within that political party, there are many parts of California with a dominant faction. Compare yourself to the community bankers who are in so many American counties, who have connections to every single person in the House of Representatives. Your issues in a way are not very partisan. The distortions you cause through your privileges are invisible to America. It's not like Facebook, where some John Haidt has written some best-selling book complaining about what it is you do. There's not a best-selling book complaining about the community banks, and they are ruthless and powerful and get their way. I'm not going to tangle with them. You all here are so far from that, in part because you're dynamic and you're clustered. Final question. Based on yesterday's session, it seems like Patrick's main misgiving with progress is that if you look at the young girl cohort, there's something that's not going great with them. You would hope that over time, progress means that people are getting better and better over time. If you buy his view of what's happening with young people, what's your main misgiving about progress? Where if you look at the time series data, you're not sure you like where this trend is going?…

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