Tyler Cowen - Talent, Collapse, & Pessimism of Sex

Before the recording starts, Cowen suggests Dwarkesh ask Bryan Caplan about "early and late Caplan" and the ways the two are inconsistent, which he calls a friendly jab. He credits Garrett Jones with raising the point: in The Myth of the Rational Voter, education is presented as wonderful, and that no longer seems true, although it was true in the data Caplan drew on. Meanwhile Caplan does not think education teaches people much.

Dwarkesh asks why, on that view, education would make people favor a free market. Cowen answers that it once did, and that if it no longer does, it may now be teaching them bad things. His point is that education is teaching them something, which sits awkwardly with the claim that it teaches nothing.

Dwarkesh reports that he put a related question to Caplan. Caplan holds that education teaches nothing, so woke-ism cannot be a product of colleges. Dwarkesh pressed him: if these ideas began in colleges and are now in the wider world, what happened, and why did they move together? Dwarkesh does not think Caplan had a good answer. Cowen then jokes that the free pre-show talk is often better than the podcast itself.

Dwarkesh asks whether travelling to the past would differ in kind from travelling to other countries today. Cowen lists the practical needs: protection against disease, some access to the languages, and the obvious fact that a smartphone would not work. Adjusting for those, he expects it to feel much like travel today, but with bigger surprises, because nobody else has gone. In ancient Athens or at the peak of the Roman Empire, you would be the first traveller.

Asked whether reading a history book can substitute for visiting a place, Cowen says "Not at all!" He thinks we understand the past very poorly. If you have travelled appropriately in contemporary times, it should make you more skeptical of history, because you see how little you can learn about a current place from reading about it.

Travel versus History, and the historians lose.

Pressed on how travel changes the way he reads history, Cowen admits it may not be concrete. His first question is whether the author was there, and for a biography, whether the author personally knew the subject. He gives India as his example. He has been there six times and does not pretend to understand it. Before his first visit he had read a few hundred books on India and in some sense knew nothing; after visiting, the other things he read, history included, make more sense.

Dwarkesh asks for an explanation of Conquest's Second Law, the idea that any institution not explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing over time. Cowen first doubts that the law is true. The World Bank was centrist and state-ist in the 1960s and fairly neoliberal by the 1990s. Left and right are global and complicated, so the law does not hold in a simple way.

He does think a version of the law mostly held for the United States through much of the later post-war era. Since it is not universal, the real question is why the American intelligentsia shifted left. He points to political science literature on educational polarization. He does not call the question settled, but says it is not a huge mystery: issues realign in particular ways, and that is why the law holds locally.

Dwarkesh asks whether intellectual life has nothing inherently left-leaning about it. Cowen replies that choosing the words "left-wing" begs the question, because in many historical settings the term is not even well defined. He recalls a debate with Marc Andreessen, who tends to treat left and right as somewhat universal historical categories, which Cowen rejects. He asks what left and right meant in medieval times, notes that even in seventeenth-century England particular groups were very left or right on particular issues, and says the axes are fluid across real issues.

Dwarkesh suggests that whatever is considered left at the time tends to be what wins, and that the category is simply redefined afterwards. His example is prohibition, once a left-wing cause, whose opposite is now counted as left. Cowen agrees and points to the French Revolution against the 1830s restoration. He asks whether everything moved leftward between Robespierre and 1830, says he does not pretend to know, but notes it does not look that way. Dwarkesh adds Napoleon as a figure who might be the most left-wing or the most right-wing in history, and Cowen suggests he may be both.

Dwarkesh says that calling someone not very intelligent feels like noting a lottery result, while calling someone not hard-working feels more like a moral judgment, and asks where talent sits. Cowen says he does not know. His default is that most people are not very ambitious, and he is fine with that. It leaves opportunities for the ambitious, and there may be an optimal degree of ambition short of everyone being maximally ambitious. He does not go around angry at unambitious people or judging them in a moralizing way. He says much of him is on autopilot when it comes to judging people morally from a distance, and he does not wake up angry at someone in the Middle East, even if he thinks what they did was wrong.

Dwarkesh then asks why biographies of great people so often feature emotional neglect or abuse in childhood. Cowen says he would love to see data and is not convinced it is more common than among other people. Famous people with biographies tend to come from earlier eras, when children were treated worse, so the pattern could be correlated without being causal. He allows that a need to prove something might matter, with Napoleon, short and not always well treated, as the example. But from a distance Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg sound like upper-middle-class children who were treated very well, and the Collisons had great parents. Dwarkesh concedes the neglect cases may simply stick in his mind. Cowen calls it an important question and says he has never seen an actual result.

Asked what he learned about talent spotting that he wishes were not so, Cowen says he is relatively accepting of most realities. What disappoints him is how geographically clustered talent is, meaning where it ends up, not where it was born or its ethnicity. An application from rural Italy, where living standards may be perfectly fine, is probably not that good, because the people there who are actually up to something move to London or New York. He finds that a bit depressing, though he stresses it is not about the people.

Dwarkesh asks whether clusters might be explained cyclically, as in "hard times create strong men", with Renaissance Italy having grown complacent. Cowen says that might fit Italy, but most clusters, such as London and New York, have persisted for a long time and are not cyclical. They have had a great deal of talent for a very long time and will likely keep it, if not literally forever. Dwarkesh raises the case of Central European Jews who had to leave. Cowen agrees that war can destroy almost anything. German scientific and cultural talent took a big hit, and Hungarian Jews in mathematics are nothing like what they once were, though he is unsure how much of the trend remains.

Dwarkesh worries that finding a region with abundant talent now, such as India, Toronto or Nigeria, might be a one-time gain if the culture does not persist. Cowen separates two questions. Where talent comes from may be temporary, but where it goes is more persistent, and people will almost certainly keep going to London for centuries. Whether London still produces talent is less clear and may be more cyclical: it was amazing in the seventeenth century, and today he says he does not know. India's present position will be temporary but for a long time, because it is very big, has many centres and does not take prosperity for granted, and it is still pretty poor.