Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I would say it would be more that more people should read children’s fiction, because the rest of fiction performs other urgently necessary tasks. I think the right to elongate and experiment are jobs more of adult fiction. I would argue, rather, that adults should occasionally read children’s fiction for pleasure, but also for the unabashed politics of idealism that they have. If I think of some fictional works I read as a child, like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, there was a thrill to the complete newness of it that I now find harder to create because things are less new to me. How can we get back to what it was like to read as a child? Of course, to an extent it’s impossible because it is the freshness of new discovery that children — almost every scene they read feels to them unlike anything, they have so few collocates. But my argument — I wrote a book called Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, which you very kindly have. My argument would be that reading books intended for people in the process of early discovery can remind you, if not what it feels like, then something adjacent enough to that to remember that it existed. Therefore, it might give you a galvanic push towards seeking out other versions of that feeling of discovery. Because, of course, although we feel like our discovery time has largely passed, that’s fake. That’s not real. Your discovery time has not passed. There are still astonishments that await.…

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