Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…That’s well said. I think Mill understood this about Bentham. Bentham’s utilitarianism is the weakest part of his philosophy, but I think he’s a wonderful thinker. If you read more of him, you’d be very impressed. I’m going to let you create a reading list for me. Not a very long one, Tyler, though. You can give me 25 pages to start with that I may have missed. I want to just go back to that for a second if I could. Since it’s my program, and — well, it’s not really; it’s ours today. I’m semi-host today, but I want to ask you this. When I think about marriage — and my adviser is Gary Becker, his theories of marriage, his mathematical models of marriage — do you think it’s a reasonable thought to compare two people as potential mates for yourself, oneself? In other words, let’s suppose a person’s considering two different spouses, and you choose one, and they’re willing to marry you. As economists, we say, “There’s revealed preference. You picked the one you thought was better for you.” How would you begin to conceptualize what “better” means in that context? I think the risk, and I think that the easy way to think about it is more fun. Fun broadly defined, meaning day-to-day life will be better with this person than the other person. That’s my expectation. I think that’s a bizarre — the more where I’ve thought about this — I’m happily married. But this book I’m writing next, called Wild Problems, is about this kind of challenge. Is it really a meaningful statement, in the sense that there are so many different aspects of marriage and life, and all kind of choices we make like this, that aren’t about just what it’s like to be around them? It includes things like pride, it includes things like sense of purpose, includes things like meaning. When I take a job, obviously I don’t take the job that pays the most, necessarily. I take the job that I think will be the best, meaning a mix of nonmonetary and monetary benefit. Is it really a meaningful statement if one job gives me a huge amount of pride, and the other I’m embarrassed about? Do I really think I can trade those off and put a number on those? Ultimately, this Benthamite calculus to me is about this idea that we could put a scaler, a single number, after we’ve aggregated everything up. I think that’s a false claim.…

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