Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, he was hugely influential on me and a lot of other people. It’s a real shame he’s not with us anymore. Who do you see as his kind of philosophical successors? Because I think of Nick Bostrom at the Future of Humanity Institute. Perhaps Nick Beckstead, who wrote this great dissertation on the overwhelming importance of shaping the long-term future. Are there other people who you think we should now look to in lieu of Parfit? I’m big fans of the two Nicks you mentioned. I don’t think of them as substitutes for Parfit; I think they’re doing something quite different. Nick Bostrom has an engineering mentality to his work that Parfit never did. Like, “What can we do? What should we do? How do we apply resources?” Maybe it’s the next step, but who is the next Socrates? We will see. Probably it will be someone from quite an unexpected corner, perhaps. I would also mention two influential figures: Nozick and Rawls. Rawls influenced a lot of people, but when you read Rawls on growth and the future, it’s incoherent. Rawls is afraid of economic growth. At times, he seems to endorse a stationary state because any savings makes the first generation worse off, and they’re the least well-off people. That to me is a reductio on Rawls’s argument, the entire argument. To me, also.…

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