Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I’ll say one thing, especially for those academics who are listening. Listen, I totally respect randomized controlled experiments and the sorts of things academics do, but journalism has a mode of knowing that’s equally valid, and that is the interview. I sometimes get frustrated with social scientists who give us data about populations of people, but don’t take the time to interview any particular individual. I’ve had some interviews that were life-changing and that I remember to this day. My best interview, or at least my funniest, was with a comedian named Jackie Gleason, which was just two hours of his jokes. One, I was in Russia in 1991. There’s a coup staged by the Soviets, the dying Soviet Union, against Yeltsin. A lot of people, I hope, remember this moment. Yeltsin stood on a tank in front of the Russian parliament building and said, “I dare you to shoot me.” All the Democrats ran to surround him to be bodyguards. I go there. I’m in Moscow. I run into a woman. I hesitate because I know we have some Russian friends in the room. I hope I don’t mispronounce the name. As I remember, it was a 93-year-old lady named Valentina Kosieva. She was handing out sandwiches to the democratic protesters. I asked her, “Tell me your life story.” She said, “Well, I’d grown up in the general household of the czar. There was a Russian civil war right after the revolution. I was on the side of the Whites, the anti-communists. I was lined up to be executed. My mother begged, and the soldiers decided not to shoot me.” Her first husband was taken to Gulag in the ’30s. She never saw him again. Her two sons were killed in the Battle of Stalingrad. They were bayoneted by the Nazis. Her second husband — one day they raided her apartment. They said, “You have 15 minutes to leave, but he’s coming with us.” She never saw him again. She was a member of, I think, the Kalmyk people, which is a Muslim community there. They were sent to internal exile under Khrushchev. Every bad thing that happened in Soviet history happened to her. My brilliant interviewing technique in that interview was just, “And then what happened? And then what happened?” The power of that interview is living history. You see how these great sweeps of history influence one woman. She ends her days at what we then saw was the birth of democratic Russia, and she’s passing out sandwiches. As a journalist, I so defend the epistemology of the interview. Our problem is we don’t use data enough. Academics — their problem is they don’t use interviews enough. Now, the 1990s — you’re working for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels, I believe. Who was your mentor there? And what did you learn from them? By then, the adult world had cast me off. I think I stopped having mentors. I consider Buckley and Friedman my mentors because I was young and impressionable. I had bosses, and of course, that matters all through life. At The Wall Street Journal, my two bosses were a guy named Robert Bartley and a guy named George Malone. They were farm boys from Iowa and Indiana. Because they were Midwestern guys of a certain generation, they were very comfortable with long silences. Our editorial meetings would be them sitting basically parallel to the ground, staring off into the wall. As a New York Jew, I’m sitting like this. I’m saying to myself, “I will not break this silence. I will not break this silence.” That was an experience of learning to work with people who were of a different part of American culture than I was from. Do people have mentors when they’re in their 30s or 40s?…

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