Tyler Cowen - Talent, Collapse, & Pessimism of Sex

**Tyler Cowen** (0:00)
To ask Bryan about early and late Caplan, and which ways are they not consistent. That's the kind of friendly jab.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:07)
Okay, interesting.

**Tyler Cowen** (0:07)
Yeah.
Garrett Jones has tweeted about this in the past. So in the myth of the rational voter, education is so wonderful.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:15)
Like it makes you more free market?

**Tyler Cowen** (0:16)
Yeah. And like, A, it no longer seems to be true, though it was true from the day that Bryan took from.
And second, Bryan doesn't think education really teaches you much.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:25)
So then why is it making you more free market, yes?

**Tyler Cowen** (0:27)
Yeah, like it once did, even though it doesn't now.
And if it doesn't now, it may teach them bad things. But like it's teaching them something.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:35)
I have asked him this, so he thinks that it doesn't teach him anything, therefore that wokeism can be a result of colleges. And then I've asked him, okay, at some point, these were like ideas in colleges that are in a broader world.
What do you think happened? Why did it transition from one to the other? I don't think you had a good answer to that.

**Tyler Cowen** (0:50)
Yeah, you can put this in the podcast if you want. So I like the pre-podcast talk often better than the podcast.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:57)
Okay, well, yeah, we can just start rolling.
Okay, today it is my great pleasure to once again speak to Tyler Cowen now about his new book, Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives and Winners Across the World. Tyler, welcome to The Lunar Society again.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:13)
Happy to be here. Thank you.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:14)
Okay, excellent. I want to get talent in just a second, but I've got a few questions for you first.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:19)
Absolutely.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:19)
So in terms of novelty and wonder, do you think traveling to the past would be a fundamentally different experience to traveling to different countries today, or is it kind of the same category of thing?

**Tyler Cowen** (1:32)
You need to be protected against disease and have some access to the languages, and obviously your smartphone is not going to work, right?
So if you adjust for those differences, I think it would be a lot like traveling today, except there'd be bigger surprises, because no one else has gone to the past, right? Older people, in a sense, were there, but if you go back to ancient Athens or the peak of the Roman Empire, you're the first traveler.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:57)
Right, but like, so the experience of reading a history book, you think it's somewhat substitutable for actually traveling to a place?

**Tyler Cowen** (2:03)
No, not at all. I think we understand the past very, very poorly, and if you travel appropriately in contemporary times, it should make you more skeptical about history, because you'll realize how little you can learn about the current places just by reading about them.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:17)
Oh, interesting.

**Tyler Cowen** (2:19)
So it's like travel versus history, and the historians lose.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:23)
Right.
So I'm curious, how has traveling a lot just changed your perspective when you read a work of history? In what ways are you skeptical of it, that you weren't before? Like, what do you think they're probably getting wrong?

**Tyler Cowen** (2:34)
Well, it may not be a concrete way, but first you ask, you know, was the person there? Or if it's a biography, you know, did he or she know the subject of the biography? And that becomes an extremely important question.
So, like, you know, I was just in India for the sixth time. I hardly pretend to understand India, whatever that possibly might mean. But if I think, like, before I went at all, I'd read a few hundred books about India. Like, I didn't get nothing out of them. But in some sense, I knew nothing about India.
And now the other things I read make more sense as well, including the history.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:08)
Okay, interesting.
So you've asked this question to many of your guests, and I don't think any of them have had a good answer. So let me just ask you. What do you think is the explanation behind Conquest's second law? Why does any institution that is not explicitly right-wing become left-wing over time?

**Tyler Cowen** (3:22)
Well, first of all, I'm not sure that Conquest's second law is true. So you have something like the World Bank, which is quite sort of centrist status in the 1960s, but by the 1990s has become fairly neoliberal. Now, what's left-wing, right-wing in that? It's global, it's complicated, but it's not a simple case of Conquest's law holding, right? So I do think for a big part of the latter post-war era, some version of Conquest's law does mostly hold for the United States. But once you see it as not universal, you're just asking, well, why have parts, why is the American intelligentsia shifted to the left? So there's a political science literature on educational polarization.