Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Fair enough. Even still, can you tell me . . . My concern is Gen Z — they’re working hard, but so much of their effort is within the black hole of the prestige economy within social media. We can point to MrBeast as a well-known Gen Z person, but that proves the rule that it’s all about doing things to be recognized within this prestige economy, to get likes and followers. That’s to get prestige, and nothing comes out of that world to influence the world that the rest of us live in. Please tell me I’m wrong. I visited Anthropic and OpenAI. A lot of the people there were extremely young; I don’t know exact birth dates. They’re doing amazing things. None of them are famous, but their research teams are quite small. Those individuals are decisive. Again, with Emergent Ventures, I’m interviewing young people from ages 16, often through 25, through 30, five to eight times a week, every week of my life. They’re just awesome. They’re way better than kids were in my time. They’re smarter, they’re more productive, they’re more attentive, they’re more disciplined. I see there are problems at the median, but they’re just better in every way, and I don’t see how that fits into your account. First of all, I will grant that the internet, in general, makes it much easier for you to find the very top people. Let’s suppose that I was right, that because Gen Z now has to devote 5 to 10 hours a day, literally 5 to 10 hours a day, to servicing their network connections plus consuming content. They have to keep up with Netflix. They do YouTube Shorts. If we take 5 to 10 hours a day out of most of their lives, most of them will not be very productive. But there always are going to be geniuses. There always are going to be amazing young people, and you’re able to find them. Your anecdotal experience that you’re finding all these amazing young people doesn’t convince me that the average is getting better.…

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