Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, this is the other thing. Economics pre — what was it — the 1950s, 1960s, it wasn’t all these formulas. It wasn’t all these formulas. It wasn’t a branch of physics, like it seems like it is today. It was descriptive. It was verbal. If you read Keynes, it’s like this, and even the people that preceded him. I was fascinated by the Second Industrial Revolution a while ago, and I found this book on Google Books about David Wells, who was an economist in the 1880s. He basically just describes how the Second Industrial Revolution rolled out at that time. He just tells the story. He goes through, like, “Here’s what’s happening.” That was an economics book with no formulas. The form of humanities that resonates me is like that. It’s history, economics, philosophy, politics merged. And then, at least in my case, you’re trying to find the people who are analytical and descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive, but it was a different kind of thing. You could argue that they were not rigorous. You could argue that they were storytelling and not being scientific, but I think they were being scientific in their way at that time. They had their issues, but they didn’t have our issues. Everything today is filtered through our politics. It’s really hard to understand, in my view, how people thought, especially before the 1960s, and again, I think, even before the 1930s, through our political lens. You have to go back and reconstruct what they actually talked about at that time. It turns out to be more interesting than I would have thought. We learned from Twitter that today’s supposedly rigorous thinkers are often not very rigorous at all. They often use rigor against themselves, in a sense, right? The great miracle of Twitter. Everybody looks at Twitter. It’s like this mass. Basically, it has an engine — there’s no question. Are these different machines engines or cameras? Like, is the stock market an engine or a camera? It’s something that economists will debate. The thing about Twitter — is Twitter an engine or a camera? This prevailing view is that . . . I say social media broadly, but Twitter specifically because it’s where the elites are — the intellectual elites, the social elites. The prevailing wisdom on Twitter is that it’s primarily an engine. It’s changing behavior for better or worse. I actually tend to think it’s at least as much a camera. It’s like a giant X-ray machine. You’ve got this phenomenon, which is just fascinating, where you have all of these public figures, all of these people in positions of authority — in a lot of cases, great authority — the leading legal theorists of our time, leading politicians, all these businesspeople. And they tweet, and all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, that’s who you actually are. [laughs] These are the things you actually think.” To your point, “This is your actual level of thought. Oh, these are the delusions you’re operating under.” Our friend Martin Gurri has this thesis of collapsing authority in the modern world. I think a lot of it is the authority figures just basically showing up and exposing the emperor, quite literally, in a lot of cases has no clothes. The fact that that phenomenon is so widespread and not more recognized, and then that it continues — I just think it’s absolutely fascinating.…

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