Jeff Holmes: belief

Transcript context

…History of Economic Thought. It’s a graduate class I’m teaching, already fully subscribed. Of course, the book to the students — as for everyone else — it will be completely free, and they can just ask away. A professor at Purdue, I believe, reached out to us and was planning on doing the same. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of that as a use case, but it makes complete sense. I think in this case, the professor was mentioning that it’s hard to pinpoint, sometimes, a specific book to do a bunch of readings. Well, maybe you can do a reading or two, but also just use a tailored AI assistant to help give you that context that you would get from multiple readings. That’s right. It’s kind of a meta book. You can ask it, “What did Joseph Schumpeter say about Walras?” And it will give you a reasonable answer. There aren’t that many History of Economic Thought classes, period, anymore, but I think the topic is making a comeback online with nonprofessional economists who just want to read great books, smart books. I hope this is speeding along that comeback, because Adam Smith, Keynes, John Stuart Mill — they’re some of the greatest thinkers of all time. As I reread them, it just amazed me how much even smarter they were than I had thought. That’s the main thing I learned from doing that book.…

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