Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…For one thing, we’re all much dumber, at least in the amount of societal knowledge we have in our heads compared to our ancestors. If we go far enough back, every single person had to know everything about how to find food, cook food, every feature of the productive system, how to make all the tools. Now, left to our own devices, we wouldn’t be able to do the first thing in order to recreate the productive system that we have. We’ve been breaking knowledge down into smaller and smaller parts. In terms of our ability to produce for ourselves, it’s gotten smaller and smaller. In the book, I have these cases of lost European explorers, where a particular group of explorers gets stuck in an environment where hunter-gatherers have survived for centuries, and they’re faced with the challenge of surviving. Of course they can’t, because they’re missing this large cumulative body that the hunter-gatherers got for free but helps you find food and avoid disease and travel and all those kinds of things. As you know, it’s a common 18th-century theme that the division of labor possibly will make us stupid or uninteresting. It seems that was wrong in the 18th century. Nicholas Carr has argued, “Well, Google makes us all shallow, and we lose the ability to remember things.” Will that also be wrong? The thing is, we probably have been losing memory ability. As soon as we can write, we can offload lots of information that we normally have to keep in our heads. I’ve always been impressed, living in small-scale societies, the number of stories that people tell over campfires and just the amount of, say, folk biological information — information about plants and animals and what’s poisonous and what you can eat and what you can’t eat, and how you have to process it. There’s just this encyclopedic knowledge, which I would just use the handbook for, for a lot of that information. That’s not available to you. We’ve been gradually figuring out ways to download stuff. I think that’s the Google problem, is that we have less stuff in our heads, but our ability to do things can still expand.…

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