01 / belief
I would say in recent years, the book I’ve been pondering a lot is Hobbes’s Leviathan.
“I would say in recent years, the book I’ve been pondering a lot is Hobbes’s Leviathan.”
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- John Nye
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- Conversations with Tyler
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29 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I would say in recent years, the book I’ve been pondering a lot is Hobbes’s Leviathan.”
02 / belief
“I would like to see objective tests and standards used to judge quality whenever possible, and I think that the rise of an anti-meritocratic notion or the idea that meritocracy should be adjusted for social needs has made it very hard to have, I think, state-of-the-art production in many areas.”
03 / belief
“I think, in many ways, one of the things we underestimate is the extent to which the wars in Europe did not lead to greater destruction.”
04 / belief
“Without acquiring or making the effort to acquire a decent accent — I’m not talking about perfectly mimicking someone who’s fluent, but of getting a decent accent — you won’t, in my view, get a full understanding of what that language and that culture brings to you.”
05 / belief
“I would argue the political impetus, the imperatives of holding together such a large land mass and all the peoples in it, and worrying about its borders, overwhelms incentives to promote growth and development within the country.”
06 / belief
“Secondly, I felt, growing up, that the Philippines really was an intellectual backwater, and I had this mythic view in my mind of what the center would or should be like.”
07 / belief
“Moreover, I think there was slow growth in the sense that you were integrating a large, very poor population, both domestically and through immigration, and all these things contributed to what looks like slow growth.”
08 / belief
“I think I told you once that, as a boy, one of the most influential books to me was the book Memoirs of a Sword Swallower by Dan Mannix.”
09 / belief
“I believe the consensus is that pure economic factors weren’t going to drive it out, at least in the short to the medium run.”
10 / belief
“I would say that’s the conservative worldview — that civilization and order are not default states of mankind.”
11 / belief
“I agree with you, it really upsets people, and for that reason, we don’t see meritocracy in most venues, even in academia. But I think the real problem that you get in the United States is, given the ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States, then what you get is, you get tribalism along lines that recreate many of the things that I think the liberal republic was designed to get rid of.”
12 / belief
“Once you can do that, then it’s possible for, I think, the more interesting regional dishes that will also be interesting to foodies to get introduced as well.”
13 / belief
“War, Wine, and Taxes talks about the fact that it’s ironic that in the period we think of as liberal Britain, Britain had the fastest-growing tax revenues throughout the 18th century of any country in western Europe.”
14 / belief
“I think Caruana has maybe a one-in-four— maybe not even a one-in-three — one-in-four chance, at most.”
15 / belief
“Whether or not that’s an anomaly, or that’s the beginning of a totally different change in the way human beings organize themselves is, I think, for the future. But I think the assumption that political liberalism, as we’ve seen, that foments both increased individual freedoms as well as increased economic freedoms, plus economic growth, is either stable or sustainable is not clear-cut to me.”
16 / belief
“I think Vertigo, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest are all peerless.”
17 / belief
“I think the evidence is strong there — again, this is not my area — but the evidence is that that is one case in which the United States had institutions that were good enough to take advantage of the resource bounty.”
18 / belief
“I think there, it’s agglomeration of mass urbanization, industrialization, innovation, across the board in multiple manufacturing.”
19 / belief
“I think, to the extent that what we think of as modern economic growth began in the West and was a very uniquely Western phenomenon in the modern sense, only later adapted by Japan and then more recently by many Asian economies, it’s clear that Christianity played a very big role. And I think one of the things that, say, Fukuyama mentions in one of his recent books, and others have mentioned, is the role the Catholic Church played in promoting the nuclear family: banning cousin marriage without special permission, focusing on trying to unify romantic love with formal marriage, asking for the consent of women in the marriage vows, focusing on the need for celibacy and the need for monogamy, discouraging polygamy and the extended family.”
20 / belief
“I think we see a lot of things there, and it’s hard to tell how much of that is what’s happening interwar period and how much of it is the turn to socialism around the time of World War II.”
21 / prediction
“Within the decade, virtually all the major powers in Europe are locked into a free trade agreement with Britain and France because they’re afraid of being left out because the two major powers in the continent have negotiated this treaty.”
22 / evaluation
“The thing I’m really frustrated by is that it doesn’t matter whether people are writing from a socialist or a libertarian perspective.”
23 / evaluation
“Because I think we’ve lived through such a period of relative peace and order that we are taking for granted how unprecedented this is.”
24 / evaluation
“There’s a lot of discussion about this, but certainly I’d say the regional nature of the agriculture contributed to a lot of what we think of as good food, but it’s not just that.”
25 / evaluation
“One of the things that shocked me was that, from about the 1850s, or certainly the 1860s, to the end of the 19th century, France had, in fact, much earlier, going back to the ’30s, France seemed to have lower average tariffs than the British did, for I would say three-quarters of the 19th century.”
26 / evaluation
“I would say the Higher School of Economics in Moscow is the most successful university institution in Russia so far at doing that.”
27 / evaluation
“The good example is Francois I of France, who often had, because of the problems that people like Doug North have talked about, a credible commitment, could not borrow money except with very high interest rates.”
28 / evaluation
“Petersburg. And their inability to permit that or encourage it — or in fact, in my view, their tendency to discourage it because, for various complicated reasons — is part of what holds Russia back.”
29 / evaluation
“Finally, the other thing that occurred is that people forget that initially, the wine tariffs, which go back to the late 1600s and early 1700s, were primarily protectionist. They were an attack on France, but because of the high tariffs, the British were able to impose very high taxes on domestic alcohol, in particular things like beer, but also gin, whiskey, et cetera.”