Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think both are possible. That’s a very difficult question. You’re a rapidly growing Asian country, and you decide to build an airport somewhere where there aren’t very many people. You do that because it’s going to be cheap to build it now, when there aren’t a lot of people around, and it’s important to establish the land. Then 15 years later, if you’ve grown fast, you’re a brilliant hero of masterful long-term planning, and if you’ve grown slow, you’re an idiot who’s building an airport where nobody wanted to go. It’s hard to know which is the case. The Japanese probably look stupider than they really were because they built in anticipation of more growth than they, in fact, were able to generate. I don’t know quite what’s going to happen with respect to China. It’s not unlike Dulles Airport. Today we think of Dulles Airport as an important strategic stroke that cemented and made possible a hugely vibrant technological economy in Northern Virginia. I’m old enough to remember in the late ’70s or early ’80s when it was a generation after Dulles Airport was built. It was a ridiculous idea, built a million miles from anywhere, and like, “Why did we build that?” So it’s very difficult to judge some of these infrastructure investments except in the very, very long run. Even when you judge them in the very, very long run, you can make a judgment ex post as to whether they were a good idea, but even then, it’s going to be even more difficult to make a judgment about whether they were ex ante sensible or ex ante not sensible. If I think about Russia and its recent history, I’m never sure if I should feel it’s gone better than we could have expected or if it’s gone worse. If one redoes that whole history, and I’m not sure who is the relevant we here, but what could have been done differently and better with regard to Russia? Again, with the we variable the choice variable, being a bit undefined here, what do you think of as the lost opportunity in that regard, or was there none? Factually, if you had told any of us who worked with President Clinton as he prepared for his first summit with Boris Yeltsin in 1993 where the Russian economy, Russia’s government, and Russian relations with the United States were going to be in 2017, we would have been appalled.…

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