You can’t follow Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution for long before you realize that this guy likes to travel, a lot. As far as I can tell it’s mostly long weekends, but it’s all over the world, well over a hundred countries on all continents. “Why?” I wondered, “Why does he spend so much time and energy on all that travel?” He doesn’t have to do it. He’s not jet-setting around the world to deliver papers at conferences and hold meetings with important people. Oh, sure, there’s some of that. But for the most part he goes to hang out, find the good local food, and get a feel for the place.
Becoming a vibe-master
Back in December of 2018 he wrote about this, Deconstructing cultural codes. Here’s what he says:
I’ve long been convinced that “matters of culture” are central for understanding economic growth, but I’m also painfully aware these theories tend to lack rigor and even trying to define culture can waste people’s time for hours, with no satisfactory resolution.
So I thought I would tackle this problem sideways. I figured the best way to understand culture was to try to understand or “crack” as many cultural codes as possible. As many styles of art. As many kinds of music. As many complex novels, and complex classic books, and of course as many economic models as well. Religions, and religious books. Anthropological understandings. I also learned two languages in my adult years, German and Spanish (the former better than the latter). A bit later I realized that figuring out how an economic sector works — if only partially — was really not so different from cracking these other cultural codes. For instance, once I spent three days on a boat (as keynote speaker), exclusively with people from a particular segment of the shipping trade. It was like entering a whole new world and every moment of it was fascinating.
Interesting. I believe him; I’ve no reason to believe otherwise. But I didn’t find this at all convincing.
My problem is with his intention to “crack” cultural codes. That’s not a technical term. Just what it means if vague. But then he mentions “anthropological understandings.” That’s vague as well. But anthropologists typically spend months and even years doing fieldwork among a single group of people. In the extreme, Dan Everett (a linguist) spent roughly three decades among the Pirahã learning their language and culture. Speaking for myself, I’m trained as a literary critic and have spent hours and hours over five decades writing detailed commentary on literary texts and movies, not to mention the work I’ve done analyzing my practice as a musician. As far as I’ve seen, Cowen hasn’t done anything comparable. Whatever he means by cracking cultural codes, it's not deep analytical understanding of cultural phenomena.
No, “cracking cultural codes” is not what Cowen has been doing, not for any substantial sense of “cracking.” But we now have a word for what Cowen is up to with all that travel: vibe. Oh, sure, we’ve had that word for a long time. But it’s only recently that it’s been used in a way that makes it apt for this context.
A vibe is NOT analytical understanding based on detailed descriptions. It’s a gestalt, a mood, a sense, an encompassing multi-modal image. THAT you can certainly pick up over the course of an extended weekend, especially one where you hunt out the local food. What could be more central to a culture than its food? The late Anthony Bourdain made a career of using food as a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding, for transmitting the vibes of many cultures to his audience. Cowen is a cultural vibe-master.
Cultural flourishing amid poverty
And this brings us to how I first found out about him. I was back in 2006, after Katrina had wrecked New Orleans. Cowen visited the city and wrote about it for Slate: An Economist Visits New Orleans. He wrote:
Since so many homes were destroyed, the natural inclination is to build safer or perhaps impregnable structures. But that is the wrong response. No one should or will rebuild or insure expensive homes on vulnerable ground, such as the devastated Ninth Ward. And it is impossible to make homes perfectly safe against every conceivable act of nature.
Instead – I’m now cribbing from an old blog post of mine – the city should help create cheap housing by reducing legal restrictions on building quality, building safety, and required insurance. This means the Ninth Ward need not remain empty. Once the current ruined structures are razed, governmental authorities should make it possible for entrepreneurs to put up less-expensive buildings. Many of these will be serviceable, but not all will be pretty. We could call them structures with expected lives of less than 50 years. Or we could call them shacks.
I haven't given the matter much thought but, on the face of it, the suggestion seems worth considering. Cowan made the curious mistake, however, of concluding that piece with this fairytale:
To be sure, the shantytowns could bring socioeconomic costs. Yet crime, lack of safety, and racial tension were all features of New Orleans ex ante. The city has long thrived as more dangerous than average, more multicultural than average, and more precarious than average for the United States. And people who decide the cheap housing isn't safe enough will be free to look elsewhere-or remain in Utah with their insurance checks.
Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. Low rents make it possible to live on a shoestring, while the population density blends cultural influences. Cheap real estate could make the city a desirable place for struggling artists to live. The cultural heyday of New Orleans lies in the past. Katrina rebuilding gives the city a chance to become an innovator once again.
While it is true that remarkable creative activity has managed to survive in unfortunate physical circumstances, I would think the proper view of this relationship is that creativity thus survived in spite of those circumstances, not because of them.
Cowan's disingenuous praise of creativity among the poor is an example of the kind of thinking that Walter Benn Michaels eviscerates in The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. The cultural creativity that sometimes manages to flourish amid poverty is, in Cowan's view, somehow supposed to compensate for that poverty or to demonstrate somehow that poverty really isn't such a bad thing. In Michaels's view such thinking is self-serving rationalization. He is right to critique it.
Even then, though – I’m no longer cribbing from that old post – I thought I was being a bit harsh on Cowen. Cultural creativity amid material poverty is a real phenomenon and needs to be understood. But it is a mistake to think that poverty plays an essential causal role in that creativity. Nor do I believe Cowen said that. But what he did say made it easy for a so-minded critic (like me) to read that between his lines.
Understanding the causes of human flourishing
Where am I going with this? I’m thinking of that recent study involving 200,000 people on six continents that found:
Across the whole sample of 22 countries, the overall national composite flourishing actually decreased slightly as G.D.P. per capita rose. The only high-income countries that ranked in the top half of composite flourishing were Israel and Poland. Most of the developed countries in the study reported less meaning, fewer and less satisfying relationships and communities, and fewer positive emotions than did their poorer counterparts. Most of the countries that reported high overall composite flourishing may not have been rich in economic terms, but they tended to be rich in friendships, marriages and community involvement — especially involvement in religious communities.
From which I conclude that cultural creativity amid material poverty is most likely the product of a rich network of connections (many connections, densely packed) between people through friendships, marriages, community involvement, and religious institutions. Such networks seem to weaken and fray with the social arrangements that accompany material prosperity. Why is that the case? More basically, has that actually been the case? If so, why?
It will take a generation of investigators to develop the rich descriptions we need as the basis for quantitative models, models, for example, that like those now being developed by researchers in the digital humanities, of these phenomena. We need those models to develop an analytic understanding of cultures-in-communities. And we need that analytic understanding to guide policy.
It seems to me that Cowen may be in a unique position to begin sorting through this problem. On the one hand he is trained as a social scientist, an economist. But he may well have a knowledge of cultural vibes that is unique in its variety. With his vibe-mastery, Cowen might well be able to play an important role in guiding that research.
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