Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…I’d love to hear two or three anecdotes from the two of you on specific moments in which you’ve really made a difference in somebody’s ambition or aspiration. You talk about that at the back end of the book, and I’d love to get a couple of case studies of how you did it, how you zipped in there. I think it’s important not to self-deceive. I’ve had really quite a large number of people I know — some of whom are in this room — tell me I made a big difference. I’m quite convinced they’re sincere, but I’m not sure they know. I think there’s something quite useful to just being obsessive and continuing, and almost not trying to figure out too much. There are some odd ways in which I think our society is too data-driven. Just keep on trying to do it and repeat, and try to be a good example. If you’re trying too hard to measure your marginal product, you’ll maybe end up conforming too much or doing too many things that are measurable. At the margin, maybe the way to have an impact is to not worry too much about measuring your success. I don’t think that answer can work for everyone, but it’s how I’ve approached the problem. I feel without measuring it that it’s worked pretty well for me. I think that is a very good philosophy. Oddly, I think the simplest thing — I don’t know about EV — but certainly, I find what I’ve done over the course of my career that people seem to say has been useful for them is either just funding, or at least encouraging people to move — to Silicon Valley, ideally, if they’re in tech, but even just to a new city. They tend to mispropagate that at me. First of all, anyone, hopefully, would’ve nudged them at some point, but it’s really just that movement and that immigration pattern is I think really important.…

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