Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I wrote this novel, Blindspot, with a friend of mine who is a colleague here, Jane Kamensky, and we had a whole lot of fun doing it. The reason that we wrote it and tossed in a lot of Adam Smith and everybody else was, we’d become really frustrated that we were really interested in telling stories that weren’t biographies of the founding fathers, 18th-century stories that weren’t another biography of Benjamin Franklin or another biography of John Adams. It’s very frustrating, as a historian who studies other sorts of people, that you just don’t have characters to drive a story like that. We know a great deal quantitatively and aggregate about, say, poor widows in Boston in the 18th century, because we have the records of the overseers of the poor. We know how old people were when they entered the poor house, how old they were when they died there. How many days they spent there, how much their food cost. But we just didn’t have a story to tell about those people. So, Jane and I decided to write this novel in order to animate the 18th century, the lives of ordinary people in the 18th century. But then, we also wanted to show how important 18th-century thought was to ordinary people, that for Smith, ideas about sensibility and the moral imagination, and the degree to which we form ourselves in relation to one another through the act of empathy and sympathy, were ideas that suffused the whole culture. That, for Smith, came out of his experience of the culture as much as they were him injecting something into the culture. So that’s why [laughs] that stuff is all over Blindspot. We were ultimately, I think, two didactic professors just, “Here would be an occasion where we could allude to the Wealth of Nations now.” And “Here would be an occasion where we could bring in Locke.” We wanted to show that ordinary people were bound up in the world of ideas. Even though you’re famous and teaching at Harvard, I think of you in some ways as an outsider historian, much as we have outsider artists in American culture. So you have a background in ROTC, in field hockey, and you also, for a while, were a secretary at Harvard Business School. How do you think those experiences have made you different as a historian and also a writer, compared to, say, your colleagues in American history? I don’t know. I think I might be romanticizing myself to believe myself to be an outsider in the way that you’ve described.…

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