Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think Goodreads is the third platform I’ve been on. More people are on that platform than others, so that’s why I’m there. I actually don’t even particularly love the platform, but it’s where other people are. I started the reviews for myself just to remember what I thought about a book and why I thought it. And now there’s a few people that are reading my Goodreads reviews, but I still rarely spend more than half an hour on any one of them. For me, I’m always trying to discover — I think a little bit like you Tyler, although presumably a much lesser version of you — really omnivorous and read in a lot of different genres within fiction and nonfiction, always trying to find new things. Goodreads — I’ve gotten to know if it’s young adult fantasy, it needs to have at least a 4.5 or above or you shouldn’t read it. But it’s not like I’d not read Madame Bovary because it got 3.7, because a bunch of college students were mad they were assigned it. Let me try a very embarrassing question on you. I sometimes tell people that, along a particular dimension, which I can’t quite myself define, that I think you are the greatest economist in the world. A particular kind of policy economist, I guess. But if you had to describe what you think is the dimension of economist where you are the best, how would you put it? Economists who have been chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and read everything that Charles Dickens has ever written. But yeah, I think you’re kinder about me than I would be, frankly.…

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