Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…You want me to tell Italian women how to live? [laughter] I will say, I just got back. This is where you separate your own lived experience from the data because my ideology, my prior is that a low fertility, they should definitely fix that problem. But I was just out in Tuscany on a restaurant over a hillside, and we were surrounded by Italian families. And we were probably three-and-a-half hours into the meal before they served the entree. [laughter] I guess it was just expected you would sit there five or six hours because it’s Sunday afternoon. What are you going to do? But I don’t know. I can’t speak for Italian families. And I wouldn’t want to translate anything into happiness. I’m in arguments with people who do happiness research. I find the whole field doesn’t live up to — if you look at novelistic or musical expressions of happiness — Tolstoy wrote a story called Family Happiness. “Ode to Joy.” The literary and musical capturing of what joy feels like is so much richer and more nuanced than anything in the happiness data, that I find the happiness data very unsatisfying. All the happiness researchers say, “No, no, it’s really thick.” But to me, this is a failure, just a failure of social science. Anything you can reduce to data that’s as humanistic as joy and happiness . . . it seems to me there are so many different kinds of joy and happiness that are not captured in the data. I now have taken to clipping out. When I see a description of joy, I clip it out. They often involve rhythmic movement with groups of people marching or dancing. But they’re often a sense of what was formerly inside yourself merging with something outside yourself, and a sense that people get caught up in the sense of spiritual transcendence, whether you’re marching across a bridge in Selma or Emerson being the universal eye when he was out in the forest. It’s always the loss of sense of where the self ends that seems to produce joy. You sometimes describe yourself as a conservative, as I would do for myself. But I think we would all recognize there’s some level of stagnation in a society, where at that point you have to take chances, or you have to make radical changes. And conservatism in the literal sense becomes virtually impossible. Do you think we’re at that state right now? Or if we’re not, how will we know when we get there? Well, I’m an American conservative. My two heroes are Edmund Burke — and Edmund Burke’s core conservative ethos is epistemological modesty, the belief that the world is really complicated, and therefore the change should be constant but incremental.…

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