Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…So here’s what I would say about that, and I think actually my answer to both would be the same, which is, it is impossible to say . . . I know a lot of liberal Jews who will say that Judaism and Democratic politics are virtually identical, and if they don’t say it, they feel it. To which I always say, look, if the most learned and most observant Jews, that is the Orthodox community, tends to be Republican, then it’s a little shortsighted to say, obviously Jewish values and Democratic values are identical. You can’t say that. On the other hand, you also can’t say that the values of the prophets, of Amos and Jeremiah, for the poor and the widowed and . . . Hermann Cohen said very beautifully, “In the idea of the stranger, Judaism was born.” Think about that today, right? That’s what Hermann Cohen said. So I think you can make a very powerful Jewish case on both sides. I don’t want to address individuals at the moment. I think that that’s not the purpose of the forum, although if Tyler asks me, I will. But I think that you can, in good conscience, be a Jew on the Right or on the Left. And the only thing that I would say you ought to be uneasy in your conscience about, is if you believe that the other side has no good Jewish values on its side, because you’re wrong. If I could just try a follow-up question. Given how many literally billions of people have been elevated from poverty by, what is mostly in my account, capitalism, not only capitalism, Milton Friedman saw this, but still the weight of Jewish intellectual opinion in the United States has mostly been on the Left. I think that’s a well-established regularity. What’s the intellectual or sociological reason for that underlying . . . ? Well, I’ll say why that is and then one thing about capitalism that I think is profoundly Jewish that most people don’t realize, seriously. I think the reason is because they came from Eastern Europe, and that tradition, like the FDR tradition in America, is very . . . the only way that you could see out of the morass of the civilizations they were in, the only thing that gave them hope other than Zionism, was a kind of Bundist, Marxist, socialist . . . there wasn’t really a living capitalist alternative. To the very first glance, it looked like the humanistic face of economics as opposed to . . . what is capitalism — competition. Well, that doesn’t look like a humanistic face. But the one thing that I will tell you, and I think I first heard this many years ago mentioned by George Gilder — I want to give him credit for this insight. He said, “A real capitalist has to have empathy.” Because if you’re building a business or a product and you don’t know what other people want, you’ll fail. The only way you can succeed is if you actually understand what it is that other people want and/or need. And both that combined with what you said, which is that it is the great engine of wealth that lifts people out of poverty, I think that a Jewish thinker today, and certainly many in Israel would argue this too, that you would have to be a capitalist of some stripe. I think it’s very hard to make the case that certainly communism or even socialism is the Jewish . . . although I could find you a few Jewish socialists who would argue with me.…

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