Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Writing is always such a dangerous thing. [laughter] I remember a professor once told me back in the ’80s that writing a book was more dangerous than having a child because you could always disown a child if it turned out badly. [laughter] You could never disown anything that you’ve written. The Cato Unbound article, it was a thousand-word essay. It was late at night. I quickly typed it off. I sent it to someone else to review, who said, “There’s nothing controversial in here at all.” My retrospective was that if you actually ask someone to double-check things for whether or not it’s controversial, you already deep-down know that you should double-check it yourself. My updated version on it would be that — I made the case that I thought democracy and capitalism weren’t quite compatible — the updated version I would give is it’s not at all clear that we’re living in anything resembling a democracy. We’re living in a representative republic, but then that’s modified through a judicial system. Of course, that’s been largely superseded by these very unelected agencies of one sort or another, which really drive most of the decision-making. I think calling our society a democracy, whatever may be good or bad about democracy, is very, very deeply misleading. We’re not a republic. We’re not a constitutional republic. We are actually a state that’s dominated by these very unelected, technocratic agencies. The very difficult political question is, “How can you get an advanced, technological society to function in any way that’s more republican or more democratic at all?” Not at all sure how that is, but I think the challenge is that a lot of these agencies have become deeply sclerotic, deeply nonfunctioning, even though the alternatives to them, politically, often seem to be even worse. The Federal Reserve — lots of things they do, I don’t like, but then once you get people in Congress involved in dictating Fed policy, that always seems even worse. A follow-up on that, Peter. New Zealand arguably is the most democratic country in the world, I would say, or very close to the most democratic. Given that, New Zealand, overrated or underrated? Again, I think it’s more like a representative democracy or republic.…

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