16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized

Transcript

Incomplete/WIP.

Eric: Hello, you found The Portal. I'm your host Eric Weinstein, and today I get to sit down with one of my favorite conversationalists, Tyler Cowen, who's here from George Mason University where he's a professor of economics. Tyler, welcome to The Portal.

Tyler: Thank you Eric.

Eric: When we were talking about what topics we could begin with, I didn't want to begin with economics, and you suggested “the Apocalypse” is a great place to start. The great benefit of this is that if we get past it, the rest of the conversation will be post-apocalyptic.

Tyler: The Apocalypse itself is economics of course, but I was just thinking that virtually any good theory of politics needs some notion of the Apocalypse. Let’s say you thought the time horizon for the universe or a human civilization were potentially infinite. You would then be so concerned with minimizing existential risk, that nothing would get done. Whereas if you think “well, you know mankind has another 800 years left on earth on average and by that time probably will have blown ourselves up or an asteroid will come”, then you think “what glorious things can we do with those 800 years”, and it's quite a difference in perspective. So an infinite time horizon might actually choke off rational thought about political decision-making.

Eric: So is there any possibility for keeping the apocalypse exactly 800 years away, like a donkey with a carrot dangled in front of it at a fixed distance?

Tyler: That would be the Straussian view; that you always think it's 800 years away. But think of it as like a problem from finance: you're writing a naked put on a security. Well, it's going to bankrupt you at some point, but any given month, any given day, the chance of that happening is probably quite small. So the Apocalypse may be like the proverbial naked put. It's out there, the chance is very small, the optimists always sound like they're right – in the sense they are right as Steven Pinker would claim – but at the end of the day, if the clock ticks for long enough, it’s boom and bye. But in the meantime let's do something grand and glorious.

Eric: Now Tyler, you have a sort of a portfolio of different ways of communicating with the world. Have you ever dragged Steven Pinker onto a podcast – which you do under “Conversations with Tyler” – or have you discussed his bizarre notion of optimism, on your famous economics blog “Marginal Revolution” which you do with your colleague Alex?

Tyler: My podcast “Conversations with Tyler” has an episode with Steven Pinker, and I sat him down in a chair the way you did with me and I said: “Steven, the cost of destroying the world by pressing a button is falling all of the time, every year. At some point it will only cost, say, twenty thousand dollars to take out a major city. How long do you think the world is actually going to last, given that the demand curve slopes downwards – when prices fall, people do more of things, destructive weaponry is becoming cheaper – how can you be optimistic?”, I asked him. No good answer. I would say evasion. He said “well, my theory is not predictive, it's just a way of thinking about it [and so on].

Eric: So, it instantly falls apart.

Tyler: It falls apart. I don't know if it falls apart instantly, because weaponry has spread more slowly than we might have thought. So you read nuclear theorists in the 50s and 60s, they think a third world war might be coming quite soon… they were wrong. You read worries about proliferation from the 80s and 90s, they sound horrible. I wouldn't say it's been great. North Korea, no one's happy about that. But at the same time the weapons have not been used, so there's something fundamental about the models we don't understand. You can ask the question: why didn't Al-Qaeda hire a bunch of stooges to go into a Tyson's Corner shopping mall with submachine guns and just cause some terror? That didn't happen, so the logic of choice of wielding destructive power is one of the issues in social science we understand least well, I would say. And there is perhaps some hope of salvation. So I'm not sure Pinker falls apart instantly, but I didn't feel Pinker defended Pinker very well. And on my blog Marginal Revolution I did review his book, and my worry is that there's an observational equivalence with how you look at the data. So you could say “well, deaths in wars have been going down, will continue to fall” – that's possibly true. But another model is: the more destructive the weapons are, the less frequent the wars. Things will seem great for quite a while, but the next war when it comes will be quite a doozy.

Eric: So in some sense this is the Great Moderation, which last time was about market volatility, and here it's about the volatility of human violence.

Tyler: Great Moderations maybe contain the seeds of their own destruction. Again, I would want to be cautious there, because we don't understand destructive decisions very well. Like why did Hitler invade Russia? We know a lot about it in the documented sense, but I don't feel it's understood very well.

Eric: Agreed. And I agree that we don't know why so few reservoirs have been poisoned with relatively low-tech options. The Las Vegas shooting for example showed what a small level of innovation in mass killing can do to really amp the body count, if that's what somebody is trying to optimize. I think that there is a huge mystery, but I don't think that Pinker – from what I understand of his basis for optimism – is really getting at that. People who listen to this podcast and have heard me elsewhere, have heard me complain that it's as if he's neglecting a potential energy term, but for violence. And so, the realized violence as you were pointing out has gone down – but the potential for violence is enormous, and as the cost falls, the access to violence of this particular nature seems to put it within reach of far too many hands.