I think that the interview at The American Interest is the best interview of Tyler that I can recall. I don’t really want to pick out any one excerpt, but semi-randomly–
Ambition is distributed in a funny way and not everyone is going to have it. And the people who don’t have it. . . . There’s not some future where they’re paid like $300,000 a year, but even so, they’ll do fine.
Concerning alcohol, he says,
I don’t think it’s feasible to ban it, but the evidence that it destroys lives is phenomenal, and I think we should shun it socially to an extreme. And it’s one of our great crimes as a society that we don’t do that.
The traditional vices tend to follow a pattern of being innocuous for most of the population but downright destructive for a tiny fraction, and we haven’t developed a good way to let most people enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, while keeping alcoholics from destroying their own lives.
It seems to me that the only way in principle would be a system of individualized permission for authorization or activity, such as we have with licenses, permits, prescriptions, or at the most general level, any information, object, or site secured to ensure limits on access. Most of these are backed up by state coercion at some point, but it’s not essential.
Consider how pseudophedrine is purchased in many states. It is kept in the secure pharmacy area, and you have to go to the pharmacy counter and ask to get a few bottles the “Old, Real Nyquil” (actually now usually only branded with the drug store’s own generic label).
And you have to swipe your driver’s license so that ‘the system’ can check if you have any red flags or are a problem user / ‘likely smurf’. The presumption is that everyone is allowed to buy limited quantities – more than enough to get a whole large family through a bad cold – but you can’t just buy gallons of the stuff, and some people are cut off for cause.
This system seems to ‘work’, in that it both lets most normal, responsible users have access with just a little annoyance and friction that was just part of the old shopping experience and wouldn’t even have been noticed by people in the pre-Amazon era while it also looks like it was effective in snuffing out a certain kind of domestic cooking by making it infeasible, which, alas, just means that the alternative synthesis routes for local production aren’t usually competitive against imports from foreign super-labs.
On the other hand, bye bye privacy. You simply can’t buy the stuff without a database entry with your name going into permanent state databases belonging to state, corporation, and whatever other entities with which the state and/or corporation decide to share that info.
Still, “we have the technology”, and it’s not hard to imagine such a system applied to alcohol. Perhaps one could ‘nudge’ it and keep a privacy-preserving option alive at a cost, by saying that, sure, you can still walk into a store and anonymously buy your alcohol with cash, but you’re going to pay ten times the normal excise tax, which you can avoid if you go through ‘the system’. If your privacy is so important, well, how much is it really worth to you?
Obviously there are bars and parties and other ways to access alcohol, so it’s more of a leaky gate than a firewall. But that’s ok and probably for the best to avoid being too obnoxious and intrusive. It’s probably enough trouble and cost to successfully target and push a lot of marginal problem drinkers into lower than life-ruining levels of abuse.
Then generalize for all the vices.
pseudophedrine is a very real example for me too, in the form of [old] Sudafed, which can be an important over-the-counter medication for scuba diving. Diving with mild sinus congestion can cause painful “sinus squeeze” while descending. A decongestant can relieve this but with the significant risk of “reverse squeeze” on the ascent if the congestion returns while at depth.
The problem with the ask-the-pharmacist solution is that it obfuscates the existence of a safe solution behind a safety wall that only enlightened insiders or older individuals with long memories are aware of.
I’m skeptical of the general applicability of these types of solutions. We can ask smart people like you to write the regulations but it takes someone like me to write the software that implements that regulation. It is really hard to solve these weird edge cases without bugs and false negatives. Making people go through hoops is generally a bad idea. Making people go through hoops that are more like incomplete mazes is cruel.
I find it hard to believe that a system like this wouldn’t include bars. Young people already have to show IDs to prove they are over the legal drinking age.
The best thing of Tyler Cowen is he is probably the most even keeled of modern realities and the future. So we get an endlessly drone on one subject that will change the world.
1) Probably the biggest aspect Tyler misses is why modern capitalist developed nation are becoming grumpier and unhappy with the world. I know there is always politician claims of this election is the most important of our lifetime but there is stagnation of people’s optimism of the world.
2) I am not sure why Tyler is so dismissive of the lower life expectancy. It really does seem the promise of capitalism is failing a number of our citizens which politically decreases support capitalism. Although I don’t think Bernie will be the D nominee (I give ~25% as of right now) but long term this is a threat.
3) I still think young people putting off family formation is going to be a larger society problem for capitalism (where is cheap labor coming from?) and effects people ambitions. There is good reason why the Singapore Solution (Late family formation with one child) has occurred but grow an economy and enforce creative destruction in an economy like Japan right now.
I listened to the Cowen podcast and at the end I was surprised that there was nothing that he said that I specifically disagreed with. I think there are truths in your criticisms, Collin, but I don’t think Cowen’s views are that far from your own. What you call grumpiness he calls craziness and the only real difference in opinion is that he thinks the degree of craziness is constant rather than increasing. It is hard to reconcile his mormon-like attitude towards alcohol with your claim that he dismisses the problem of lower life expectancy. His doubt about the efficacy of existing policies to decrease suicide and increase fertility is different than not believing these problems are real.
He makes me cringe when he gets into the details or analysis about issues surrounding STEM fields. When it comes to funding science research I wish someone would make a list of issues and ask Freeman Dyson what he would do (or mine his writing for answers). The same holds true for Henry Petroski for traditional engineering/infrastructure and Fred Brooks for software and other complex projects that design and build intellectual property. Perhaps there are younger equivalents of each that I don’t know about. The three STEM guys lack the libertarian instincts that Cowen has.
Some other important topics covered, in my opinion:
– veto power
– nation states
– American immigration as a numbers game vs. China
– the China Shock
– China always surprising us
I tend to agree my ‘grumpiness’ is equal craziness for a political standpoint. I tend to think we are not Guirri Giant Revolt but more of it is a lot easier to make internet statements and politically we are fighting between 40 yard lines. Trump trade agreement are fine but they are 5% reasonable changes on 20 year old trade agreements. How much effort was made to act like these TRADE deals that were the worst ever to political genius negotiator.
However, I think Grumpiness is different in that the population just has less optimism on the economy so there will be less good creative destruction in the economy. (In other words, US is a generation behind Japan.)
In terms of China, we have to remember:
1) The population is HUGE so the demographic are mitigate by ~200 or so poor farmer. China still has more poor farmers than Mexico population in the agriculture. It could be a problem but they have decades and other canaries (Japan,etc) in the coalmine. (Although not most press issue today but I do believe Ukraine demographic makes impossible to solve other pressing issues.)
2) China economy feels a lot closer to 1960s America with some 1980s Japan mixed in. Like Japan China has crossed over into automation manufacturing and able to grow wages. But also I do think China population have a high degree of optimism and government/economy trust that makes economic growth easier.
(The new virus will be interesting to watch government actions.)
3) China still doesn’t use the military although that may change. US two big Recessions (1970s Inflation, Great Recession) came on the heels of extended war, Vietnam & Iraq. (I still think Iraq was a bad war but also a Victory, being an empty one.)
4) China will have a debt crisis. All good economies have one but Keynes “Markets are Irrational longer than they are solvent” is important here. However, I do think they go way of Japan, not a collapse, a much slower growth.
“I don’t think it’s feasible to ban it, but the evidence that it destroys lives is phenomenal, and I think we should shun it socially to an extreme. And it’s one of our great crimes as a society that we don’t do that.”
Now I’m more sure I wouldn’t want to live in Tyler’s ideal world. I don’t think it’s possible to get society to shun things that most people regularly enjoy, short of making it a sin and imposing a constant, harrowing fear of damnation in everyone. Pretty much everything people enjoy in life is inevitably over-used to a point of self-destruction by a minority of people. Ridding society of such things may seem to have no cost if you view people as essentially a bunch of little GDP factories, or if you view pleasure as something to be enjoyed in the next life only after earning it through forbearance in this life, but otherwise, the cost of most people losing something they enjoyed that was innocuous to them cannot be ignored. I think it’d make more sense focus on finding ways to deal with addictive tendencies in general, rather than trying to eliminate from society the things people with such tendencies get addicted to, which, again, includes pretty much anything that induces pleasure.
“Pretty much everything people enjoy in life is inevitably over-used to a point of self-destruction by a minority of people.” Example: many people enjoy riding motorcycles. They stay more or less in similar velocity to cars and trucks. A small minority will treat their motorcycle like a video game, going as fast as possible, weaving in and out of traffic, until they slam into something and become quadriplegic or dead. Just about any consumer good or activity can be fatal in excess.
Tyler’s right about the crisis in romantic comedy. With the exception of Trainwreck it’s been a dire decade or more.
Put Trainwreck on a double bill with Broadcast News. Put a decade’s worth of rom coms about international assassins into a heap and set fire to them. Matthew McConaughey turned serious after Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Mandy Moore vanished after License to Wed. (She was the voice of Rapunzel in Disney’s Tangled next.)
And yet there are these romantics like Mike Mills, Marc Webb and Spike Jonze. How many movies are better than Her?
This is where Tyler goes wrong. Synecdoche New York was 2008. The Salesman was 2016. Manchester by the Sea was 2016.
Tyler likes the movies of the 1970s, and James Gray is busy making them now. David Lowery too. The Place Beyond the Pines is Derek Cianfrance.
Tyler says it’s a bad time for movies but Paul Thomas Anderson’s alive. Phantom Thread and The Master are perfect 1970s films.
Tyler says sex is over but he’s forgotten Jean-Marc Vallee. Jonathan Glazer. Jane Campion. Luca Guadagnino. Darren Aronofsky. Celine Sciamma.
Superhero movies movies haven’t crowded out other things. Tiny films made for no money are being made every day. Not just by the Safdie brothers. American Honey. It Follows. Certain Women. Lean on Pete. Chloe Zhao’s The Rider. Can You Ever Forgive Me.
Willem Defoe can make a Spiderman movie and The Florida Project. Jake Gyllenhaal can make a Spiderman movie and something low budget with Denis Villeneuve.
And half the Spiderman movies are excellent films. Wonder Woman too. Ragnarok was very funny. Scott Pilgrim is great.
Blue Ruin. Blue Valentine. Blue Jay. Not blockbusters, just really well done. Shoplifters. Game Night. Never Look Away.
I think superhero movies are the defendable hill that the Hollywood has retreated to. Hollywood’s business model is under siege by digital products and distribution. The question is whether physical big screens go the way of Drive-Ins and Blockbuster Video stores.
The demise of specific genres is a side-effect of the current phase of creative destruction. A new equilibrium will emerge.
I imagine the number of people who actually need to drink to deal with the writing of Cowen on many subjects is close to being equal to the number of people who drink.
The worst aspect of the libertarian movement is it’s pro-drug/pro-hedonism stance. It’s not about some kind of pragmatic/utilitarian stance on drug enforcement. It’s about how legalized pot is the most known issue people think of when they think libertarian and all of the candidates for libertarian party in the best presidential election possibility they will have in a generation all degree need to brag about what kind of pot they smoke.
Cowen may be a terrible human being, but moving the libertarian movement forward on this issue is worth praise.
Similarly Bryan Caplan is an even worse human being, but he at least has made encouraging smart people to have more kids one of his goals.
These people should just give up theirs libertarian nonsense and become conservatives, they’ve got Charles Murray like “don’t preach what you practice” written all over them.
Perhaps “hedonism” is a dimension that Cowen should have focused on in addition to government in his State Capacity Libertarianism post. Thomas Sowell certainly struggled with the libertarian label and joked that he is too pessimistic to be a libertarian.
What is common between Cowen’s shunning of alcohol/drug consumption and Caplan’s attempts at increasing fertility is that they are strictly non-coercive. This is yet another preference dimension. Your (asdf) preference for coercive authoritarianism is generally loathed in Western culture.
Not only is it uncharitable to call these men terrible human beings because of their beliefs, it is inaccurate in terms of their actions. People in glass houses, asdf.
Cowen and Caplan both support the importation of people who vote for and support authoritarianism, therefore they are authoritarians.
I don’t support anything that a normal person would call authoritarian. If you think a place like Singapore is authoritarian, then your definitions are useless.
Let’s take Bryan for a minute. He believes in open borders, but brags about living in an isolated bubble with basically no diversity (low IQ brown people) around him. He rails against the government and he’s a tenured professor at a government school. He whines about NIMBYs but he chooses to live in a community protected by zoning and covenants. He doesn’t practice what he preaches, and brags about!
I’ve also never seen them stand up for freedom whenever it would be too unpopular in their circle. They only emphasize freedoms elites already agree with, and they are often ones based on self indulgence and free riding. State Capacity Libertarianism is an attempt to stay within the Overton Window by a man who sees which way the winds are blowing.
I know you don’t believe in genetic IQ, but I do, and that makes these people and what they are espousing the worst ideas in the world today. Since not a single thing they support that is worthwhile would survive demographic apocalypse, there is nothing to put on the other side of the ledger.
I strongly believe in the heritability of IQ and it’s distribution within any definable group, including siblings. What I don’t believe is that the shape of curve has any useful predictive power compared to the accumulated knowledge embedded in our culture. I’d rather live in an American community with an average IQ of 100 than a North Korean community with an average IQ of 145.
I’d rather live in a non-totalitarian/communist country too. What does this prove? Jack shit.
Most of the world isn’t North Korea. In most of the world, IQ is always better. One day that regime will fall, and like in China, the IQ will still be there and they will recover. Places with low IQ will never recover.
An American community with an IQ of 100 is above average compared to most of the world, so immigration is an attack on such communities.
What Cowen/Caplan are trying to do is DESTROY such communities, to cover most of the country in dysfunctional communities with IQ well below 100.
I noticed you didn’t mention Singapore…or even South Korea. I would think you would choose these over West Baltimore.
By itself this is entirely reasonable and Caplan has addressed this… Caplan is a mere individual who has to live in the world that exists, not the world he advocates. As an individual he took advantage of a desirable government career, but as a policy pundit he advocates that government shouldn’t fund higher ed, including his own position, at all.
The stronger argument I see is that Caplan expects others to lose their legacy government privileges first, while he holds on to his.
Again, it’s reasonable to make one set of decisions for yourself as a mere individual and sincerely make different recommendations for society-wide policy.
Again, it’s reasonable to make one set of decisions for yourself as a mere individual and sincerely make different recommendations for society-wide policy.
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It’s both reasonable and cowardly. Heck, Caplan himself basically says his strategy when dealing with adversity is to completely capitulate and hope the person forgets him (talk about free riding). Caplan makes a REALLY BIG DEAL about being a utopian ideologue guided by objective universalist moral principals that are 100% true and of extreme importance. He doesn’t claim to be a pragmatist or realist, and he scolds anyone who doesn’t live up to his ideals (even the long dead) despite not living up to them himself despite being in an incredibly privileged position.
Beyond that, when you can’t even live up to your own ideals, it puts into question whether those ideas really have merit. Given his extreme opinions and moralistic rhetoric, you’d think he’d be disgusted with himself enough to try and live up to his own ideals a little.
That he doesn’t indicates to me that he doesn’t really have those ideals (or at least at some level knows they are bunk), its just a stance he picks out to market himself as an academic who wants to differentiate himself but still basically be in the Overton Window.
IQ and GWAS (Genome-Wide-Association Studies) A relevant collection of links and opinions of you are interested in wading into the weeds.
That was meant to be a reply to asdf.
I don’t see any links.
Are GWAS studies of IQ/educational attainment problematic?
There seem to be two sets of criticisms in the link.
1. Genome-Wide Association Studies haven’t found much. PolyGenic Scores assume that the effects of genes are additive, and there is certainly a lot of interaction.
2. The only research worth doing is research that tells us how we can make the world better. Since genes can’t be changed, gene studies are not useful. In fact, given the bad ways that genetic explanations have been and might be used, they shouldn’t be funded at all.
Number 2 is probably not a charitable summary–but I don’t think it is unfair.
As another link for asdf, Jay, and every other commenter who read a racist message between the lines of Charles Murray’s previous books, Quillette PODCAST 75: Charles Murray talks about his new book Human Diversity.
I literally have no clue what in these two links you consider relevant to this discussion. Can you spell it out for me?
Our discussion above turned to IQ (again), specifically from your comment above that ends:
I made the mistake of summarizing Ron Unz’ view in a response instead of just re-linking to his discussion of Richard Lynn’s “IQ and the Wealth of Nations”.
The Charles Murray interview makes clear that everything he has written in the past should be taken literally. There is nothing Lynn-like in his views or his assessment of the data. Your and Jay’s references to the Bell Curve made me question whether I naively read his work too literally and missed the subtext.
The relationship between race and IQ is still in play and the details are being hashed out in “Genome-Wide-Association Studies” (GWAS). I posted the link before listening to the podcast but Murray also says the future in this arena is all GWAS.
My understanding is that we have not yet figured out how to use GWAS or other tools to accurately determine which genetic combinations make for intelligent and healthy embryos. The technology may or may not get there over an unknown timeframe.
If we ever get there, then everyone will alter/select their children through IVF and we will get true eugenics on a substantial scale. One could even question if what came out on the other side is the same species as those that came before. Race differences, class difference, etc would evaporate in such a scenario compared to the difference between these new “humans” and legacy humans.
I hope with all my heart this happens, and I see keeping civilization (which is the product of societies with good genes) as a going concern for as long as possible critical to increasing the odds of it happening.
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Murray makes several claims in The Bell Curve which contradict the view that all human beings should be treated equally as individuals.
1) He states that immigration policy should treat people differently based on their genetic potential (implicitly saying that some are more “worthy” of being citizens than others).
In follow up interviews he’s repeatedly called for a moratorium on low skill immigration.
2) He calls for the reduction of welfare benefits to dysgenic mothers in our society, in the hopes this will reduce their fertility.
3) He states that when welfare is unaffordable, often because the the population is too poor due to bad genes, that even basic levels of welfare may be unaffordable. He specifically cites the third world as an example, and notes that if we keep getting immigration from the third world the same may one day apply to us.
4) He believes that moral obligation to fellow humans is not uniformly equal. That one should have greater moral obligation to those closer to you than those further away, even when those distinctions are based on arbitrary birth and not something the person has earned.
Further, he has stated that mass low skill immigration is a culprit behind “Coming Apart” trends in the working class and what he sees as a loss of cultural trust and political polarization.
He has repeatedly said that people have a unique moral obligation to their fellow countrymen that is not shared with other individuals. If moral claims are perfectly universal and perfectly equal, then favoring some on the basis of nationality is in the same class as favoring people on the basis of race, just as “arbitrary and unearned”.
Caplan for instance would certainly not share this view, and consider it a grave moral lapse on Murray’s part (which was leaving trillion dollar bills all over the sidewalk).
5) If you want his opinion on “gaps” due to genetics, ask him if he was a bookie in Vegas and has to set even over/under odds on what % of the gap was genetic what number between 0-100% would he choose. You can ask him and see if he says 0% or close to it. I doubt it based on what I read in The Bell Curve.
I don’t see anything in the interview that contradicts these statements in The Bell Curve or any of his follow up statements and interviews.
One question on Tyler Cowen. Read Cowen’s 9 points on Elizabeth Warren. Read how Cowen harshly criticizes these ideas as really, really terrible. Why does Cowen not strongly oppose such a presidency?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/the-economic-policy-of-elizabeth-warren.html
In this interview Cowen says “it’s scary to think [Trump] might get another term”. Cowen says things are going well in the US, Cowen even says Trump has been good for the economy… Given that, why would a second term of Trump be scarier than a Warren or a Sanders presidency? That doesn’t seem to add up.
I’m not sure that he ranks Trump’s craziness worse than Warren’s or Sander’s craziness and he states that Biden is the front-runner.
and later he makes clear that even if presidents are crazy, their impact is not that great.
RAD, I appreciate your answers, but they still don’t seem to add up… I can’t read Cowen’s harsh criticisms of Warren’s proposals and line that up with the view that Presidents don’t affect the economy much.
Maybe the disconnect is with how likely you think a Warren/Sanders presidency is. Cowen ranks it low, but he says anything is possible and gives Trump’s 2016 win as an example. My reading of Cowen is that he thinks it will be Biden vs. Trump and I don’t think he’d give either more than even odds of winning the next election. 8 years of Biden or Trump won’t matter in his opinion.
Perhaps its best to think of Cowen’s harsh criticism of Warren as an attempt reverse the downward trend in Democratic economic literacy.
Tyler’s alcohol comment is more appropriate to socialism:
I don’t think it’s feasible to ban it, but the evidence that it destroys lives is phenomenal, and I think we should shun it socially to an extreme.
Everybody who promotes socialism should be treated like they are promoting Nazis. Who were socialists.
Socialism is far worse than alcohol abuse, altho that’s bad too.
It’s insane, tho a nice elitist leisure class belief, to favor open borders while the State still has gov’t supported welfare. Those who favor open borders should first replace coercive gov’t taxes used for welfare with purely voluntary contributions — and only AFTER getting gov’t out of welfare, then accept unlimited immigrants. In the meantime, accepting more legal high IQ immigrants, and more hard working immigrants, would be economically useful to the US; altho also a brain drain on all those societies whose “cream” of smart hard workers is being skimmed off.
The general position on banning alcohol seems extremely ahistorical. I strongly recommend Ken Burns’ “Prohibition”. The net effect of Prohibition was that some major cities ended up being what they call “open cities”, where civil authority itself was at risk from the sheer concentrated amounts of money made available. Some say that Chicago may well still be an open city; the Pendergast Machine got Harry Truman as far as the White House….
And, FWIW, to the extent AA has a voice in this ( it may well be inappropriate but still ), I am told that they consider the alcohol a symptom and not the cause. The goal is something akin to that of a degenerate gambler; the payload is the misery….
Throw in that Europe has a much richer drinking culture and even fewer problems.
Also; Tyler’s bubble clearly doesn’t involve meth.