Tyler Cowen, Straussian reading, and Žižek in Wakanda

A couple of years ago I decided to write a post about Tyler Cowen’s use of the term “Straussian reading.” Tyler has now posted an account of the matter that was given, I presume, by ChatGPT and sent to him by a reader, Jeremy David: Ask the beast. I posted a longish comment to that post based on some of the notes I’d made toward my post on the matter.

As for my own post, the notes became sprawling and unmanageable, so I never finished it. However, since Tyler has put the question on the table I decided to post some of those notes. Here’s how I planned to open my post:

If you read Tyler Cowen’s entries at Marginal Revolution then sooner or later you will find something referred to as “Straussian” or as a “Straussian reading.” You may know exactly what Cowen means or, like me, you may not. Oh sure, I was pretty sure that it referred to Leo Strauss, whom I know only as a teacher of and an influence on Alan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, a book I didn’t much like. Other than that, it’s a mystery.

Cowen is an economist and I’m not. He frequently uses terms of art – words, phrases, and acronyms – that are opaque to me. So I go to the web and see what I can see. Strauss wasn’t an economist but “Straussian reading” does and does not feel like a term of art. It’s a trope floating between a virtual cult-of-Tyler – he’s got a large and distinctive presence in the intellectual blogosphere, though no more than a modest presence in the Twittersphere (c. 160K followers), writes a regular column for Bloomberg, hosts a well-regarded podcast, and has recently become a philanthropist – and a larger and more diffuse aggregate floating in a libertarian conservative liberal sea – think of a frayed net on the water’s surface in a South Seas atoll.

When I went to the web I discovered that I’m not the only one curious about Cowen’s usage:

• Kevin Lacker, Straussian Reading
• KimStacks and bulksalty, ELI5: What does Tyler Cowen mean when he says “straussian”?
• Nigel Seel, Tyler Cowen: "a Straussian reading"

These are suggestive. I think the matter merits further investigation, and perhaps some actual thought on my part.

Somewhere in the middle we find this:

Ask an Encyclopedia

Perhaps Wikipedia can offer some insight. I found this in the entry for “Leo Strauss”:

In the late 1930s, Strauss called for the first time for a reconsideration of the “distinction between exoteric (or public) and esoteric (or secret) teaching”. In 1952 he published Persecution and the Art of Writing, arguing that serious writers write esoterically, that is, with multiple or layered meanings, often disguised within irony or paradox, obscure references, even deliberate self-contradiction. Esoteric writing serves several purposes: protecting the philosopher from the retribution of the regime, and protecting the regime from the corrosion of philosophy; it attracts the right kind of reader and repels the wrong kind; and ferreting out the interior message is in itself an exercise of philosophic reasoning.

There’s more, but that gives you the basic idea.

But does it help? Yes and no. It doesn’t tell me much about the meanings Cowen has or might have in mind when he alludes to the existence of a Straussian reading for this or that text (or movie). But it tells me that Strauss did have a doctrine about reading philosophical (and other) texts and that, whatever else he has up his sleeve, Cowen is alluding to that doctrine.

That philosophical, or other (serious) texts, have “multiple or layered meanings” is of no particular interest to me. That’s where I started from as a literary critic. If that’s all Cowen has in mind then the only work he’s doing by using the word “Straussian” is signaling that he’s in or a fellow traveller of the Club of Straussians. Let’s set that aside.

But that Wikipedia snippet is about more than the existence of multiple meanings. It’s about the meaning of texts written under the condition of political oppression. There’s definitely something to that.

Here’s a section on Žižek:

Žižek in Wakanda

I have little interest in the work of the ubiquitous Slavoj Žižek, but from what I hear, he doesn’t need anyone’s permission to have intellectual fun. I am pretty sure, though, that he inhabits a different region of the intellectual universe than the one traversed by Tyler Cowen – though, I note in passing, that they recently had a congenial conversation. Thus I was a little surprised to discover that he had published a Straussian reading of Black Panther. Is the Straussian Cabal more deeply and extensively embedded than I have heretofor imagined?

Žižek, S. (2018) Quasi Duo Fantasias: A Straussian Reading of ‘Black Panther’, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 3, 2018:

Things thus seem clear, confirming Fredric Jameson’s insistence on how difficult it is to imagine a really new world, a world which does not just reflect, invert, or supplement the existing one. However, the movie offers signs that disturb this simple and obvious reading — signs that leave Killmonger’s political vision radically open. Reading the film in the way Leo Strauss read Plato’s and Spinoza’s work, as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost, we can recover this apparently foreclosed potential.

A careful Straussian reading draws attention to signs that indicate that the obvious hierarchy of theoretical positions has to be inverted. For example, although Milton follows the church’s official party line and condemns Satan’s rebellion, his sympathies are clearly with Satan in Paradise Lost. (We should add that it doesn’t matter if this preference for the “bad side” is conscious or unconscious to the author of a text; the result is the same.) Does the same not hold for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, the final part of his Batman trilogy? Although Bane is the official villain, there are indications that he, much more than Batman himself, is the film’s authentic hero distorted as its villain...

So, back to Black Panther: which are the signs enabling us to recognize in Killmonger the film’s true hero? There are many; the first among them is the scene of his death, in which he prefers to die free than to be healed and survive in the false abundance of Wakanda. The strong ethical impact of Killmonger’s last words immediately ruin the idea that he is a simple villain. What then follows is a scene of extraordinary warmth: the dying Killmonger sits down at the edge of a mountain precipice observing the beautiful Wakanda sunset, and T’Challa, who has just defeated him, silently sits at his side. There is no hatred here, just two basically good men with a different political view sharing their last moments after the battle is over. It’s a scene unimaginable in a standard action movie that culminates in the vicious destruction of the enemy. These final moments alone cast doubt on the film’s obvious reading and solicit us to deeper reflection.

Cowen on Black Panther: *Black Panther* (evaluations, only minor spoilers), Feb 17, 2017

Christopher Lebron, ‘Black Panther’ Is Not the Movie We Deserve, Boston Review, Feb 17, 2018

Note that Žižek references Lebron in a note appended to his review.

That’s all folks!

Did Cowen approve that hot dog?

Hollis Robbins and Tyler Cowen on Uncle Tom's Cabin

Tyler Cowen interviews Hollis Robbins, who is a dean at Sonoma State University. (She also studied and worked with Dick Macksey at Johns Hopkins). She's an expert in African-American literature. The conversation was wide-ranging, as conversations with Tyler tend to be. I'm going to reproduce just this one excerpt. Why? Because, like Tyler, I didn't read Uncle Tom's Cabin until middle-age and I was surprised at how powerful it is.

COWEN: Why was Uncle Tom’s Cabin so effective in the fight against slavery? It was a best seller. Ostensibly, President Lincoln once said this was responsible for the Civil War. Why this novel?

ROBBINS: Well, have you read it?

COWEN: I have read it.

ROBBINS: How old were you when you first read it?

COWEN: Fifty-seven.

ROBBINS: Oh! How old are you now?

COWEN: Fifty-seven.

[laughter]

ROBBINS: You hadn’t read it before that?

COWEN: Correct. I’d looked at some of it, I think, in high school, but not really.

ROBBINS: That’s so interesting. Actually, when John Updike reviewed our version in the New Yorker magazine, he confessed that he had never read it before either. He also confessed to having put down our version because our annotations, he said, were too distracting, which I thought was fun. But, again, why do you think you didn’t read it?

COWEN: No one told me to. It is, in fact, one of the best American novels and one of the three or four best of the 19th century. Yet it’s become a school kid’s thing that you’re supposed to read, but nobody ever does. It’s gripping. It’s manipulative and interesting in informative ways.

ROBBINS: You’ve answered the question, then. It’s manipulative, interesting. What Stowe’s comparative expertise is, is creating these characters that live and jump out of the page. I wouldn’t call Uncle Tom a character that jumps out of the page, but his stalwart forthrightness, his devotion, his clarity of thought about what is right and what is wrong guide and ground the novel.

But we have Little Eva, who’s patterned a little bit on Dickens’s Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop. We have Topsy, who was just a sprite, an imp, sweet, generous, really extraordinary character. We have Simon Legree, who everybody knows as the avatar of a cruel overseer.

COWEN: Did the book convince more women or more men to oppose slavery?

ROBBINS: Well, the point of the book was to appeal to white women, frankly, to white Christian mothers in the North who could imagine their own child being taken from them.

In the first chapter of the book, Eliza, who is a light-skinned enslaved woman in Kentucky, learns that her son is going to be taken away from her, is going to be sold. She flees in the middle of the night and, in that famous scene, crosses the Ohio River on ice floes, which is a signal moment in American literary history.

In all of the illustrations and the paintings of this book, she is very, very light-skinned. If you take a look at any of these illustrations, white women readers would take a look and imagine themselves in that position.

COWEN: Harriet Beecher Stowe was Calvinist. Is this book actually a Calvinist book in terms of its implicit theology?

ROBBINS: No. This has to do a lot with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s relationship with her father, Lyman Beecher, who was a Calvinist preacher and whose doctrinal beliefs were so strong that he basically told his elder daughter, Catharine, that she was not going to be reunited with her fiancé in heaven because he hadn’t been saved, which is a cruel thing to say after your daughter loses a fiancé. Then saying, “Sorry, you’re not even going to be reunited in heaven.”

Harriet thought that that was a little bit too cruel, and so you see her Calvinism in her novel tempered a little bit by emotion. She thought —

COWEN: There’s free will in the novel, it seems.

ROBBINS: And there’s free will.

COWEN: Are there still Calvinists in American politics today?

ROBBINS: Well, it’s a good question. Do you think most of the candidates running for president today would even be able to say what Calvinism is? I tweeted this the other day.

COWEN: Mayor Pete perhaps, right?

ROBBINS: Perhaps, but can most Americans tell the difference between doctrines of Calvinism, Lutheranism, Methodism, Episcopalian? I doubt it.

COWEN: Is the portrayal of Uncle Tom in the novel in fact racist, as is sometimes alleged?

ROBBINS: Well, Uncle Tom is the racial epithet and has been almost from the beginning of the novel. I don’t think he’s racist. I think he is a character who works within his belief system as a character and does not fight back. He’s an avatar of nonviolence. Certainly, if you’re going to say that nonviolence and those who espouse it are racist, then you’re going to have a little bit of trouble thinking about where to put Martin Luther King.

Cultural Evolution and (Tyler Cowen’s views on) History [MR 7]

While Tyler Cowen’s monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026), is about intellectual history, I didn’t sense that Cowen had any overall view of history. Rather he seems to think of it as one thing after another, which it is, during which bursts of human creativity appear at irregular intervals and mostly later than they should. I decided to quiz Cowen’s AI about that. Before I present that dialog, however, I want to comment about the concept of cognitive ranks, which I have instead of a theory of history.

The idea was incubated during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins, where I was introduced to the thinking of Jean Piaget by Mary Ainsworth. As you know, Piaget argued that children’s conceptual development happened in stages, where each stage marked the emergence of a new cognitive mechanism. I read quite a bit of Piaget and when I did so I tried to imagine how the world must seem to a child having only those capacities that Piaget was describing, operation by operation, by minute operation. At the same time I was studying perceptual and cognitive psychology which gave me other ways of thinking about how we make sense out of the “booming, buzzing confusion” – to borrow a phrase from William James. Later on, after I had finished my undergraduate education, I learned that Piaget also applied his approach to the emergence of ideas in history, as in his slender book, Genetic Epistemology. That’s what came to interest me.

In my sophomore or junior year I took a course on the Scientific Revolution, where I read Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Earlier, in my freshman year, I had taken a two-semester course in art history. And I’d taken a bunch of literature courses. I couldn’t help but notice that these otherwise different topics “crossed” in a three century span. During the 15th through 17th centuries we saw the emergence of realistic depiction based on rationalized space, the Scientific Revolution, and the origins of the novel. Then I read Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962) in a sociology class. That same period saw the conceptualization of childhood as a specific stage of life with specific needs and capacities. Was this all just coincidence or did these separate phenomena have something in common beyond time frame?

And then there was the widespread recognition that the emergence of literary had society-wide effects on culture. Similarly, we have widespread cultural changed in the transition from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Modernism appears in the arts, music, literature, and the plastic arts, and physics undergoes a major change.

With all that under my belt I came across a slender book by Walter Wiora, The Four Ages of Music (1965). In a quick survey of the worlds’ music he argues for four stages based respectively on rhythm, melody, and harmony, with the fourth based on an eclectic use of a wide variety of techniques. I read that and wondered: Perhaps everything is like that? Is that the long course of cultural evolution?

I took that with me when I went on for my Ph. D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo. While I was getting my degree in the English Department, I spent a great deal of time in Linguistics studying cognitive semantics with David Hays. That work forced me to think about ordinary concepts, common sense knowledge as it is known, in great detail, comparable to the detail one learns in studying predicate calculus and symbolic logic, though of a bit different kind. But Hays was also interested in cultural evolution, so we started working on it. I worked out a version of the idea in my 1978 dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory,” where I applied it to the evolution of narrative forms. The idea then lay dormant until Hays and picked it up again in the late 1980s, leading to the publication of our basic article, The Evolution of Cognition (1990), followed by other articles by me and by Hays; Hays also wrote a book, The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks.

I think of the idea as a description motivated a certain conception of cognition. It’s descriptive because Hays and I don’t attempt to explain why this evolution happened; rather we observe that that is what has in fact happened. Our conception of cognition is, broadly speaking, constructivist, a term that has been applied to Piaget’s work. Ideas are constructed by cognitive mechanisms. Each cognitive rank draws on mechanisms not available at earlier ranks. In particular – and here I am drawing on Piaget’s conception of reflective abstraction – Rank N+1 treats the mechanisms and structures of Rank N as objects for examination and manipulation. Thus I am inclined to see order in the long-term history of ideas, an order based on the accumulation cognitive mechanisms, where Cowen tends to see adventitious emergence based on a local confluence of facilitating circumstances.

We look at the world in very different ways, which was the point of an earlier post, Welcome to Reality, Tyler; the AI’s got your number: Further Notes on Revolution, Marginal and AI [MR-3a]. I note, however, that I have no more use for Hegel and Marx than Cowen does.

And with that, here’s the dialog I had with Cowen’s AI. Note that, toward the end, I get around to asking about Girard. I didn’t have Girard in mind when I started this dialog, but, in thinking things over, I began to get a sense of why Girard would appeal to Cowen, though they’re very different kinds of thinkers. Cowen’s an empirical social scientist of the late 20th century whereas Girard is a 19th century grand theorist displaced to the middle of the 20th century.

* * * * *

What are Tyler’s views on history in general? I know he favors economic growth. But I don’t get any general sense of history from this book. It just seems to be that pinnacles of human creativity appear at unpredictable times that don’t seem to anything more than local order.

That's a perceptive gap to identify, and it's real. Tyler uses history throughout the book but doesn't have a philosophy of history in any strong sense. His historical examples — the slow development of botanical classification, geology, the Marginal Revolution itself spreading unevenly across decades — are deployed instrumentally, to illustrate why intellectual progress is non-linear and contingent. [See text: Ch.3 · The uneven diffusion of marginalist ideas as hi...] But he never steps back and asks what the overall shape of history is, whether it has direction, whether the peaks of creativity he identifies are connected by anything deeper than circumstance.

What you're left with is essentially a punctuated equilibrium model without the theory — bursts of insight separated by long plateaus, with the bursts explained by the convergence of multiple enabling conditions: the right institutions, the right communication infrastructure, the right social permission to think heterodox thoughts. [See text: Ch.3 · How enabling conditions converged for early eco...] That's not nothing, but it's also not a philosophy of history. It's pattern recognition dressed as explanation.

Tyler's deeper commitments, visible more on Marginal Revolution than in this book, lean toward a kind of progress studies framework associated with thinkers like Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen — the view that human progress is real, measurable, and has been accelerating, but is also fragile and contingent rather than inevitable. That's a Whiggish skeleton with the triumphalism removed. History goes somewhere, but it could easily have gone elsewhere, and the mechanisms are local and specific rather than grand and structural.

What's missing — and what your 1990 paper with Hays actually supplies — is any account of why complexity keeps increasing, why the peaks get higher even if their timing is unpredictable. Tyler sees the peaks. He doesn't have a theory of the underlying gradient that makes higher peaks possible over time. Your argument — that natural selection operates in an inherently complex universe, that greater differentiation yields more information without limit — would give him that gradient. History isn't just local order appearing at unpredictable times. It's local order appearing against a background of increasing universal complexity, which is itself directional even if not deterministic. Tyler has the observations. He's missing the substrate that would connect them.

Hegel and Marx

Interesting, especially in light of his extensive reading, which includes history of all kinds. History is just one thing after another. I wonder to what extent that might be a reaction against the grand theories of, say, Hegel and Marx. For that matter, does living historian offer some kind of grand theory? Well, there’s Pinker with his account of diminishing violence over time, though I know Tyler has expressed reservations about that somewhere in the MR blog.

Your instinct about Hegel and Marx is well-supported by the MR blog record. Tyler's relationship with grand historical theory is one of respectful dismissal — he's read enough to know why people find it compelling, and enough to remain unconvinced. [See text: Ch.4 · Tyler on empiricism defeating all the grand -isms]

On Hegel specifically: Tyler has looked at every page of the Phenomenology of Spirit but can hardly claim to have read it, and found the Master-Slave dialectic — usually considered the core — "a waste of time" he couldn't sustain attention through. That's not a refutation, it's a temperamental rejection. His bottom line: he doesn't think most people should spend much time with Hegel. So the anti-Hegelian stance isn't really argued — it's more like an allergy.

On Marx, Tyler is more engaged and more interesting. He notes that "Smith thought in terms of marginal tradeoffs" while "Marx, above all, focused on inframarginal and systematic effects." That's actually a sharp distinction — and it maps directly onto the gap in this book. Tyler is a marginalist by temperament even when critiquing marginalism. His final verdict: "marxism, as a political program, remains dangerous nonsense" and "Marx's blind spots were enormous." But he does count Marx among the great economists. So: useful diagnostician, catastrophic prescriber.

On Pinker, you're right that Tyler has expressed reservations. He prefers a weighted average of per capita and absolute measures of violence, arguing that killing six million Jews in the Holocaust is not "half as violent" if global population is twice as high — and that once you include absolute measures, the long-term trends are not nearly as favorable as Pinker suggests. More structurally, Tyler wonders whether the distribution is better described as "long periods of increasing peace, punctuated by large upward leaps of violence" — a warfare correlate to the Minsky Moment, with "great moderations" that each end with a bang. That's a genuinely different model from Pinker's, and it rhymes with your punctuated-equilibrium framing from the Hays paper.

On Enlightenment Now, Tyler's reservations go deeper: his main difference with Pinker may be that he believes there is "a certain amount of irreducible 'irrationality' in people, and it has to be 'put somewhere,' into some doctrine or belief system." That's not a Whig objection — it's almost a Burkean one. Progress doesn't eliminate the irrational substrate; it just redirects it.

Here are the relevant MR posts:

1. Steven Pinker on violence (2011) Tyler's most sustained critique of Better Angels, raising the absolute vs. per capita violence distinction and the Minsky Moment analogy for warfare. The core reservations you remembered are all here.
2. Enlightenment Now, the new Steven Pinker book (2018) Tyler's numbered-list response to Pinker's follow-up book, where he pushes back on Pinker's treatment of the Counter-Enlightenment and raises the "irreducible irrationality" objection.
3. Steven Pinker on slavery and the Enlightenment (2019) Tyler calls himself an admirer of Pinker and a long-term optimist, but insists that "what is sometimes called progress does also have a dark side." A careful, specific critique of Pinker's historical claims about abolition.
4. Hegel, or Department of Yikes (2008) The definitive Tyler-on-Hegel post. Short, direct, and tells you everything you need to know about why grand dialectical theories of history don't appeal to him.
5. What is valid in Marxism? (2004) Tyler's five-point attempt to extract what's genuinely useful from Marx, including the inframarginal/systematic effects point. Worth reading alongside the book's dismissal of Marxism as a "school" that lost out to empiricism.

Tyler Cowen, Tycho Brahe & Rank Shift @3QD

I’ve got a new paper at 3 Quarks Daily:

Tyler Cowen is the Tycho Brahe of Economics

It came about as a side effect of my writing and thinking about Cowen’s new monograph, Tyler Cowen, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026). I was interacting with Marge, the AI attached to the online text of the monograph, when I remarked: “So, he’s the Tycho Brahe of economics.” Marge replied:

That's a sharp analogy. Brahe had the best observational data of his era, ran an extraordinary research enterprise on Hven, trained Kepler who then used Brahe's own data to refute the model Brahe himself believed in. [...] Brahe couldn't make the conceptual leap to heliocentrism despite having everything he needed to do so — his intuitions were too deeply formed in the Ptolemaic rank. But he was indispensable to the transition precisely because of his institutional energy, his data gathering, his willingness to fund and train the next generation.

Emergent Ventures is Hven. Tyler is gathering the data — the people, the ideas, the unconventional bets — that someone with different intuitions will synthesize into a framework he himself can't quite reach. The book is his Tychonic system: a genuine attempt at synthesis that's more sophisticated than what came before, that captures real phenomena, but that preserves the central commitment — equilibrium, marginalism, the whole apparatus — that the next rank will have to abandon.

My first impulse was to put that observation in my introduction to the overall series of blog posts when I gathered them into a single document. But, after thinking things over, I decided that it would be more interesting to write it up as a stand-alone document, one I could publish in 3QD. So that’s what I did.

Now, if you’ve been following the series of blog posts, you know that I write quite a bit about the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I developed in the 1990s. I didn’t see any need to mention that in the 3QD article, but now that it’s been published I see that it’s quite directly relevant. One problem with the theory as Hays and I wrote about it, is that it’s easy to come away with the idea that the shift from one rank to another is a step function. That’s not at all the case, such shifts take decades and even centuries. But it was all we could do simply to articular the idea of different cognitive ranks.

However, this particular comparison, between Tyler Cowen, an economist in the 21st century, and Tycho Brahe, an astronomer from the 16th century, is about rank shift. Tycho was participating in the transition from a Rank 2 model of the solar system, the geocentric model inherited from Ptolomy, and the Rank 3 model, initiated by Copernicus. Cowen is participating in the shift from Rank 4 economics, which is the focus of his monograph, to a possible Rank 5 economics, which doesn’t quite exist yet. But, who knows what the future will bring?

* * * * * *

You can download a PDF:

• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/168873753/Tyler_Cowen_is_the_Tycho_Brahe_of_Economics
• ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/407286640_Tyler_Cowen_is_the_Tycho_Brahe_of_Economics

Why doesn’t Cowen mention Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions? {+Cowen as a conventional thinker.} [MR #8]

In the course of working through the Chapter 3 material on botany and biological evolution in Cowen’s marginalism monograph I was suddenly struck by the fact that in this account of a scientific revolution, the marginalist revolution in economics, Cowen never mentions one of the most important books of the last half century, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). As Kuhn’s title proclaims, the book is about scientific revolutions, and it changed the way we think about, not only scientific revolutions, but about the intellectual enterprise in general. Kuhn’s term, “paradigm,” has become so widely adopted that it has become detached from Kuhn himself.

I decided to query Cowen’s AI about it.

Note that I had a reason for mentioning Kuhn that’s more specific than the fact that he wrote about scientific revolutions. Kuhn uses the concept of a Gestalt switch as part of his account of how revolutions come about. That seems to me to be a far more useful account than the “seeing around corners” metaphor that Cowen comes up with. Here’s how he introduces the idea (pp. 62-63):

Looking at an economy and trying to figure it out is – more than most economists realize – like staring at a very large number and trying to factor it. It is not only hard, but you don’t know where to start. “Should I try dividing it by 323,477?” Well, maybe, but it won’t be obvious that this is the correct way to proceed. Alternatively, you could say, using economic language, that the marginal cost of producing economic insight is very high, but it can be maintained, preserved, and transmitted at relatively low marginal cost. Lower than the marginal cost of learning how to paint like Johannes Vermeer.

There is no “brute force” method for obtaining fundamental economic insight. Rather, you need to peer around a corner and see something that the other people have not already seen. And once you see and grasp it, you cannot easily forget it, again reflecting the asymmetry of this path toward knowledge. So often I have heard economists make proclamations like: “Once you start thinking about the world in economic terms, you can no longer unsee those things. ”

That is exactly correct, but it is truly hard to see them in the first place. In essence, I think economics was so late to develop because it was so hard to peer around its corners. To see supply and demand in their proper workings.

Note this phrase: “the marginal cost of producing economic insight is very high, but it can be maintained, preserved, and transmitted at relatively low marginal cost.” Kuhn has that well-covered with the idea of a Gestalt switch. As I indicate in the dialog below, “It’s not so much a matter of coming up with new observations as of looking at the same field as everyone else and putting it together in a different way; instead of seeing an old crone, you see a young woman, instead of seeing a duck, you see a rabbit – to invoke two classic illustrations of the Gestalt switch.” 

The full dialog is below the asterisks.

* * * * *

Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions

Is there any evidence that Cowen. has read, and absorbed, Thomas Kuhns megahit, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? He’s just written a monograph about a revolution in economics, that gives mini-case histories of other scientific revolutions as well (at the moment I’ve been thinking about botany and biological evolution), he doesn’t cite Kuhn once, if only possibly to dismiss him for this or that reason.

The Kuhn omission is real and it's damning. The search turns up nothing — no mention of Kuhn anywhere in the book, no engagement with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the blog in connection with this work, nothing. And yet the questions Tyler is asking are precisely Kuhn's questions.

Consider what Tyler is actually doing in the book. He's asking how ideas become lost, how new insights come to pass, why insights that seem obvious in retrospect weren't seen before, and why new insights arrive suddenly, in a kind of flood. That is a précis of Kuhn's project. The simultaneous eruption of marginalism across three countries and three intellectual temperaments — Jevons, Menger, Walras — is practically a textbook case of what Kuhn calls the readiness of a field for a paradigm shift. One reviewer even frames Tyler's argument in explicitly Kuhnian terms: the marginalist insight came in "a simultaneous eruption," with the answer involving "the slow assembly of preconditions," and "progress in science is rarely a matter of the lone genius, but rather of the alignment of previously dispersed elements" — the genius arrives when the ground has been prepared. That reviewer is essentially translating Tyler back into Kuhn without naming him either.

And here's where your Gombrich point connects directly. Kuhn's central conceptual contribution — the one that required slow, careful reading to absorb — was the analysis of what a paradigm actually is and how it does its cognitive work. What does it mean to see the world through a paradigm? How does anomaly accumulate? What happens cognitively and socially during a crisis period? What does it mean to see the world differently after a revolution — the famous incommensurability thesis? These are questions about the internal structure of concepts, not just their historical sequence. Tyler tracks the historical sequence of the Marginal Revolution with genuine care, noting that "scientific revolutions come about when many complementary pieces are in place, such as financial support, intellectual independence, and networks of like-minded others to talk with," but he never asks what a revolution is at the conceptual level — what makes it a revolution rather than a reform, what the cognitive structure of a paradigm shift actually involves. [On Gombrich, see note below–BB]

That's the Gombrich parallel you're drawing. Gombrich didn't just narrate the history of realistic depiction — he asked what representation is, what schemata are, how correction works cognitively. Kuhn didn't just narrate the history of scientific change — he asked what normal science is, what a paradigm does, how incommensurability works. Tyler does neither. He narrates. The concepts — revolution, insight, intuition, decline — remain unexamined. [See text: Ch.3 · Tyler's conditions for scientific revolutions]

From marginalrevolution.com — what the blog actually shows: The site-specific search turns up no posts where Tyler engages with Kuhn directly in connection with this book or its themes. The closest thing is:

1. Stephen Pimentel's review of The Marginal Revolution A review Tyler himself flagged as excellent, which frames his argument in terms of "slow assembly of preconditions" and the alignment of dispersed elements — language that maps onto Kuhn without invoking him. Tyler endorsed this framing without noting the Kuhnian resonance.
2. The trajectories of science and AI A March 2026 post where Tyler discusses scientific and technological change, including the Industrial Revolution analogy, but again with no reference to Kuhn's framework for thinking about how scientific change actually works.

The silence is consistent across the book and the blog. Tyler has written a monograph about a scientific revolution, drawn on case studies from botany and evolutionary biology, theorized about why revolutions happen when they do — and never once engaged with the person who made the analysis of scientific revolutions a serious intellectual enterprise. That's not an oversight you can attribute to ignorance. It suggests either a deliberate avoidance or, more likely, exactly what you diagnosed earlier: Tyler is operating as a historian of ideas who hasn't asked what the key concepts in his own account actually mean.

[Note: The AI is referring to Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960). I had mentioned it in another dialog with Cowen’s AI, one that I’ve not yet published in these set of observations about his marginalism monograph. It is a superb historical analysis of a cultural phenomenon, visual art, that grapples with the psychological mechanisms involved in cultural change. Gombrich draws on Gestalt psychology and talks about the schemas that artists have invented and subsequently used realistic depiction.]

Gestalt switch

I’ve got a specific reason for asking. Tyler comes up with this analogy, “seeing around a corner,” as a way of characterizing a specific kind of intellectual problem, the problem of coming up with a (revolutionary) new idea. Thomas Kuhn talked of revolutions as involving a Gestalt switch: It’s not so much a matter of coming up with new observations as of looking at the same field as everyone else and putting it together in a different way; instead of seeing an old crone, you see a young woman, instead of seeing a duck, you see a rabbit – to invoke two classic illustrations of the Gestalt switch.

Yes, and the comparison is clarifying precisely because it shows how much analytical work Kuhn's concept does that Tyler's doesn't.

"Seeing around a corner" is a spatial metaphor that implies the new knowledge is there, just occluded — you need to move to the right position and then you can see it. The information was always available; the problem is one of positioning. That's actually a fairly conventional epistemology. It implies that once you've seen around the corner, what you see is unambiguous and uncontested. It also implies that the obstacle is primarily positional — social, institutional, financial, as Tyler notes in his conditions for scientific revolutions [See text: Ch.3 · Tyler's complementary conditions for scientific...] — rather than cognitive or perceptual.

Kuhn's Gestalt switch is doing something fundamentally different. It's not that the new knowledge was occluded; it's that the same visual field gets reorganized. The duck and the rabbit are looking at identical lines on the page. The switch isn't about gaining access to new information — it's about a reorganization of the entire perceptual and conceptual framework through which existing information is interpreted. And crucially, once you've switched, you can't easily hold both organizations simultaneously. That's where Kuhn's incommensurability thesis comes from — it's not a philosophical add-on, it's built directly into the Gestalt psychology he's drawing on.

That distinction has enormous consequences for how you understand the Marginal Revolution specifically. Tyler's "seeing around a corner" suggests that pre-marginalist economists simply lacked access to certain ideas — they hadn't yet moved to the right intellectual position. But Kuhn's framework would ask something harder: were the pre-marginalist economists looking at the same economic phenomena as Jevons, Menger, and Walras, and organizing them through a fundamentally different conceptual framework that made marginalist insights not just unseen but unseeable within that framework? That's a much more interesting question, and it's the question Kuhn would force you to ask. [See text: Ch.3 · Tyler on why economic insight is hard to grasp]

Winston Marshall discusses AI with Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen @ 31:59: “The groups that are best at using AI are small groups of individuals who work well together and are smart and technically able.”

YouTube copy:

In this episode of The Winston Marshall Show, I sit down with economist, author, and columnist Tyler Cowen for a conversation on artificial intelligence, the race between America and China, cyber warfare, and why the AI revolution will reshape every aspect of modern life.

We explore the growing battle between the Trump administration and leading AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, the risks of AI-driven cyber attacks, national security, effective altruism, and why Cowen believes the world is entering the most significant technological transition since the Industrial Revolution. We also discuss whether AI represents a greater geopolitical challenge than nuclear weapons, how governments should regulate it, and why the coming years could be both extraordinarily dangerous and extraordinarily prosperous.

The conversation also examines the future of work, economic growth, surveillance, healthcare, longevity, education, and whether AI will deepen state control or instead empower individuals. Cowen explains why he believes AI could eradicate many diseases, transform productivity, and fundamentally alter the relationship between governments, corporations, and ordinary citizens.

Finally, we turn to Britain's economic decline, immigration, productivity, energy policy, debt, and why Cowen believes the UK urgently needs a new economic direction before its long-term decline becomes irreversible.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:10 AI Cyber Warfare & Why The Next Few Years Matter
05:00 Trump, Anthropic & Who Controls AI?
10:20 Can Britain Defend Itself In The AI Era?
15:19 Why AI Is Like World War II
19:20 Effective Altruism & The Future Of AI
23:23 Is AI More Dangerous Than Nuclear Weapons?
27:04 Will AI Cure Disease & Extend Human Life?
30:00 AI, Surveillance & The Risk Of Totalitarianism
35:00 Jobs, Education & How AI Will Change Work
40:31 AI, Space & The Next Global Arms Race
45:00 AI, Religion & The Future Of Faith
49:07 Is Britain Already In A Debt Crisis?

Tyler Cowen has thrown in the towel and is waiting for the machines to take over. [Marginal Revolution Notes #1]

Tyler Cowen has announced a new monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, which you can access here. You can download it in various formats or interact with the online AI version. I read through the opening page or three and then skipped to the fourth and final chapter, “Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?,” which I've read in full. 

I note, more or less in passing, that as he heads to the end he starts thinking about the role of intuition in thinking. He’s lamenting that intuition, particularly intuitions stemming from the marginal revolution, no longer seems to work in economics. I’ve been thinking a lot about intuition myself, though to somewhat different ends. I’m more interested in how it functions in thinking and where it comes from. But that’s an aside.

I may or may not comment on the rest of chapter later on, but I have to comment on one strand of thinking. Cowen decides he has to denigrate all previous work oriented toward understanding language:

Suffice to say, LLM construction has for the most part ignored linguists and philosophers, and that also means ignoring their intuitions. LLM construction also ignored a lot of people in the AI field who insisted neural nets were a dead end. Instead, in a relatively short number of years humans invented new ways of modeling language and reasoning through language. That research program has proven wildly successful, as we have much better models of language and reasoning than almost anyone had been expecting. [...]

The classic breakthrough paper behind LLMs was a 2017 study titled “Attention is All You Need,” where in this context attention is defined by GPT-4 as “a mechanism that learns to focus selectively on parts of an input sequence, giving it ‘attention,’ while encoding a sentence or piece of information. This allows the model to treat different words or characters with different levels of importance, providing a ‘weight’ that aids in better understanding and decoding of information.” The paper was not titled “More Linguists are All You Need,” or for that matter “Marginalism is All You Need.” In other works [sic], given some of the most complex human systems, we came up with ways of understanding them that were new. To be clear, neural nets were not new, since the ideas and also the practice (in much weaker form) have been around for decades. High-powered, well-functioning neural nets, however, are new in the contexts of providing excellent results for general linguistic ability and general reasoning.

That struck me as a bit much, so I had the following conversation with the AI version:

* * * * *

From very near the end: “In other works, given some of the most complex human systems, we came up with ways of understanding them that were new.”

In what way is an LLM a way of understanding how language works? After all, we don't understand how LLMs work. They're as mysterious as the human brain.

This is a genuinely sharp philosophical puzzle, and Tyler is aware of the tension even if he doesn't fully resolve it. The claim on page 69 is really about predictive and generative success rather than mechanistic understanding in the traditional scientific sense. LLMs model language in the sense that they can reproduce, extend, predict, and manipulate linguistic structures with stunning accuracy — they've captured something real about how language works, even if we can't fully articulate what that something is.

Think of it this way: pre-LLM linguistics tried to understand language by building explicit rule systems — grammars, syntactic trees, semantic formalisms. That approach assumed understanding meant writing down legible rules. LLMs blew past all of that without using any of those rules. Tyler's point is that this constitutes a new kind of understanding — one where the "knowledge" is distributed across billions of parameters rather than encoded in human-readable propositions. It's understanding in the way a master chef understands flavor without being able to fully articulate the chemistry.

But your skepticism has real bite. There's a meaningful difference between a system that performs understanding and one that provides understanding — to us. Tyler arguably conflates the two. When he says "we came up with ways of understanding," the "we" is doing suspicious work: humans built the tool, but the tool's internal representations remain largely opaque even to its creators. The "Attention is All You Need" paper Tyler cites gave us the architecture, but interpretability research — like Anthropic's mechanistic interpretability work ��� is still in early stages of figuring out what's actually happening inside. So Tyler is perhaps better read as saying LLMs are a new instrument for engaging with language rather than a new theory of it — more telescope than Newtonian mechanics. [See text: Ch.4 · Tyler's claim about new ways of understanding c...] [See text: Ch.4 · How LLM construction bypassed traditional langu...]

I note that saying it is "more telescope than Newtonian mechanics" is a much weaker claim.

You're absolutely right, and this is a genuine tension in Tyler's argument that he doesn't fully reckon with. He wants LLMs to be doing something analogous to what marginalism did for economics — providing a new analytical framework for understanding complex systems. That's a strong claim. But if LLMs are really more like telescopes — powerful instruments that let us see further without explaining why what we see looks the way it does — then the analogy deflates considerably.

The stakes matter for Tyler's broader argument in Chapter 4. He's positioning LLMs as replacements for frameworks like marginalism, not just better tools for testing existing frameworks. A telescope doesn't replace Newtonian mechanics; it generates data that mechanics then has to explain. If LLMs are telescopes, we still need the theoretical framework that makes sense of what they're showing us. Tyler gestures at this on page 66 with the discussion of researchers who use LLMs to generate simulations and then build structural models from those simulations — which is actually the more defensible version of the claim, because there a human-legible theory does eventually emerge. [See text: Ch.4 · The multi-step process that generates legible t...]

So Tyler may be overstating his case when he frames LLMs as providing genuine understanding of language. The honest version might be: LLMs are extraordinary telescopes that may eventually prompt new theories — but we're not there yet. That's still impressive, but it's a quieter revolution than Tyler's rhetoric suggests. And Tyler, to his credit, is usually better at hedging than his most enthusiastic passages imply.

Frankly, that won't do. The technology is impressive on its own terms. It doesn't need this kind of empty rhetorical cheer leading (though perhaps investors do). It sounds to me like Tyler has given up on understanding the world and is just waiting for the machines to take over – to indulge in a bit of hype of my own.

Conversations with Tyler: A Special Conversation with Nicholas Copernicus, Adam Smith, and William Stanley Jevons

I was feeling impish this morning, so I gave Claude 4.6 Sonnet (Medium) the following prompt:

Back in the 20th century Steve Allen did a series of TV shows called “Meeting of Minds,” where people from different time periods were brought together to have a discussion. I want you to imagine a special episode of “Conversations with Tyler” in which Tyler Cowen moderates a discussion between Copernicus, Adam Smith, and Stanley Jevons on economics. For reference I have placed three documents in the project folder. Two books by Tyler Cowen, one on marginalism and the other on the Great Economists (GOAT), which has material on Adam Smith.. There’s a shorter document by Copernicus (in Latin), filename, “Copernicus on economics.”

I’ve appended its response below the entirely imaginary Five TC Bucks note. Click on the image to see the detail. Note that ChatGPT did the image, not Claude.

Conversations with Tyler: A Special Episode
Tyler Cowen in Conversation with Nicholas Copernicus, Adam Smith, and William Stanley Jevons

[Recorded live at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. The set is the standard one — a small round table, minimal lighting, no audience. Tyler Cowen sits across from three guests who have, for the purposes of this episode, been freed from the constraints of mortality and non-overlapping centuries. Copernicus speaks through a translator when needed, though he proves surprisingly comfortable in English, given how many languages he actually commanded. Smith retains his Edinburgh-via-Kirkcaldy cadence. Jevons is precise, energetic, and fidgets with what appears to be a small logometer.]

* * * * *

TYLER: So let me start with something that might seem unfair to Nicholas, but I think actually redounds to his credit. Tyler Cowen — the other Tyler Cowen, me — has written that astronomers of the sixteenth century were sometimes better economists than the economists of the same period, because there essentially were no economists. And that you, Nicholas, were one of the first people to state the quantity theory of money. Now here's my question: did you think of yourself as doing economics, or did you think of yourself as solving a political crisis?

COPERNICUS: The distinction you draw would not have occurred to me. I was asked by the Diet of Prussia — by the princes, by the king's administrators — to address a practical emergency. The currency of this land had been debased so many times, by so many hands, in so many mints, that commerce had ceased to function in any stable way. The goldsmiths prospered — they were the only ones who could extract the silver from the degraded coin before the next debasement arrived. Everyone else suffered. So yes, I was solving a political crisis. But a crisis requires a theory, or you are merely thrashing. You cannot prescribe a remedy for a disease you have not diagnosed.

TYLER: And your diagnosis was what exactly?

COPERNICUS: That money is a mensura — a measure. It is like a unit of length or weight. If your ulna varies from day to day, you cannot do carpentry. If your currency varies in its silver content from month to month, you cannot do trade. The injury to commerce is the same in both cases, but the monetary injury is more insidious because it proceeds occulta quadam ratione — by a kind of hidden logic. People notice a bad harvest immediately. They do not immediately notice that the coin has been shaved, but they feel its effects: prices rise, foreign merchants refuse your money, the best craftsmen leave for regions with sounder currency.

SMITH: If I may — this is exactly the confusion I spent considerable effort untangling in Wealth of Nations when I took on the mercantilists. They believed that the accumulation of specie was wealth. What Canon Copernicus is describing from his Prussian experience is that even that modest goal — hoarding silver — is self-defeating. The moment you debase the coinage, you have, in a sense, exported your silver to every foreign merchant clever enough to melt the coins.

COPERNICUS: Precisely. The goldsmiths and those who know the quality of metals — they are the only beneficiaries. They collect the old coin, extract the silver, sell it at a premium, and leave behind a pile of copper. My recommendation was blunt: stop minting until the existing coin has restored its value, establish at most two mints for all of Prussia, and make the coin of one mint and one standard.

TYLER: Gresham's Law, essentially, before Gresham.

COPERNICUS: Before whom?

TYLER: Thomas Gresham. He gets credit for the principle that bad money drives out good. Roughly a generation after you stated it.

COPERNICUS: (pause) This is the way of things. Copernicus waits for Copernicus. In astronomy as in monetary theory.

JEVONS: I want to press on the word "measure," if I may. Canon Copernicus treats money as a standard — a fixed reference against which goods are priced. But what I discovered, or rather what I was forced to discover when trying to establish whether the value of gold had actually fallen after the Australian and Californian gold rushes of the 1850s, is that money itself has no fixed value. It is itself a commodity whose degree of utility — whose marginal utility, to use the language I was then working out — varies with its quantity. The quantity theory you describe is already implicit in this: flood the market with debased coin, and each unit of coin buys less, not merely because there is more of it, but because its intrinsic silver content is lower and everyone knows it. 

[Note: I did an Ngram search on “marginal utility” and found that it didn’t have an appreciable presence in books until a bit after 1880. Jevons did not use the phrase. He talked of “final degree of utility.”]  

COPERNICUS: I will not quarrel with the analysis, though your language differs from mine. What I found is that the regions of Prussia which had maintained good currency were also the regions with flourishing workshops, skilled artisans, and abundant goods. The regions with debased currency had become idle. You say this is because the marginal utility of a sound currency is higher. I say it is because craftsmen and merchants are not fools: they will go where their labor and their goods are honestly compensated. 

[I wonder what Copernicus could have understood by the phrase, "marginal utility"?] 

TYLER: Adam, let me come to you here. Smith, you spent a great deal of Wealth of Nations attacking mercantilism — the view that national wealth consists in the accumulation of precious metals. But you also granted mercantilists more credit than many of your defenders are comfortable with. You said their arguments were "partly solid and partly sophistical." What did you actually concede to them?

SMITH: What I conceded is that commerce and defense are entangled in ways that pure theory does not capture cleanly. The Navigation Acts — requiring that trade to Britain's colonies be carried in British ships — were bad economics by almost any reckoning. They raised prices, restricted trade, enriched a narrow set of interests at the expense of the broader public. But I wrote, and I meant it, that defense is of more importance than opulence, and that the Navigation Acts, whatever their economic defects, had served to maintain British naval power. One cannot always afford the luxury of consistent principle. (small smile) Though I tried to be consistent as often as possible.

TYLER: Jevons, here is a question directed at you specifically: why did it take from roughly 1776, the publication of Wealth of Nations, until 1871, the publication of your Theory of Political Economy, for economics to absorb the idea that value is determined at the margin — by the last unit, not the total quantity? Smith understood the diamonds-water paradox but did not resolve it. You resolved it. What took so long?

JEVONS: I have thought about this a great deal, and I believe the answer is that the resolution required mathematics, and economics had declined to use mathematics, or rather had not yet learned that it could use mathematics. The idea that utility diminishes with quantity is not — once stated — particularly obscure. Galileo came close to it. My precursors in the British literature, Jennings and MacLeod, came close to it. But close is not enough. You need to be able to state the law precisely, apply it to a schedule, differentiate, and find the first-order conditions. You need calculus, or at least the habit of mind that calculus cultivates. Once I had that tool in hand, the whole of exchange theory reorganized itself very quickly. I felt it opening up.

Getting a boost from Marginal Revolution, or into the weeds with stats [#EmergentVentures #WorldWideWall]

Last Thursday, October 25, 2018, I ran up a post entitled, Is this the beginning of the #WorldWideWall ?. The post consisted of five tweets from Leonard Bogdonoff, who had gotten a grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures “to create a genealogy of street art, using machine learning.” That got my attention for two reasons: 1) I’m interested in Emergent Ventures, and 2) I’m interested in both graffiti and machine learning.

When I looked Bogdonoff’s tweets that morning I realized that, for all practical purposes, he’d begun work assembling what I have been calling the World-Wide Wall, all of the world’s outward facing graffiti and street art assembled into one gigantic and searchable object in cyberspace via photographs on the web. So I assembled that post and then emailed a link to Tyler Cowen in which I congratulated him on a shrewd first pick. I came this > < close to saying “the eagle has landed.” Tyler emailed me back, indicating that he’d post a link on Saturday. Saturday roles around and there it is, the link:

 

That shows web traffic to New Savanna for the previous week. That spike is the effect of Cowen’s link on my web traffic.

This chart shows the top 10 posts for the preceding week, measured starting the 27th:

At 854, the #WorldWideWall post is first. Most, though not all, of those hits are traffic from Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution, which he runs with Alex Tabarrok. The next two posts, Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll, and “Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed”, are the most popular posts here, and have been up for several years.

Here’s shot of the previous week’s posts that I took on Sunday, the 28th:

The effects of Cowen’s link are still quite visible.

And again, earlier this morning:

Cowen’s spike is still prominent, but another spike has appeared. I haven’t got the foggiest idea what’s driving it. The increase in traffic is probably distributed across many posts.

This post shows the top 10 posts for the immediate week, measured backward from this morning:

Again, “WorldWideWall is tops, Ninja Scroll is second, but Pink Elephants has slipped into fourth behind “The toke that took World Wide Web and smoked the #MSM”, about Elon Musk. That post is related to graffiti and Bogdonoff and so may have benefited indirectly from Cowen’s link, but not, I feel, enough to account for that new spike. If I had more information I might be able to figure this out. But I don’t.

Finally, this chart shows New Savanna’s traffic over the span of its life from April 2010 to present:

Notice that there’s a huge increase in traffic for roughly 2016. I have no idea why that happened. At one time or another I thought it might be centered on my photographs, but I really don’t know.

More later.

Addendum: I found the source of today’s spike: Oman. Here’s a chart of today’s traffic grouped by country of origin:

Oman is at the top with 558 hits, followed by the United States, which generates by far the largest fraction of my traffic, and then Ukraine, which also provides a fair but of traffic. I have no idea about the source of that traffic from Oman; it could be just one or a half-dozen curious people. Who knows? The fact that no single post shows an unusual uptick in traffic suggests a small number of people each browsing a bunch of posts.

Bardolatry, Tyler Cowen edition: Is Shakespeare a real person or a mostly mythic being?

Economist and uberblogger Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution is featured in a podcast at Financial Times, Cardiff Garcia’s Alphachat. The podcast mostly about Cowen’s recent manifesto, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, but the final moments take the form of a desert island ‘quiz’ for Cowen. At about 1:09:56 Garcia asks Cowen “Shakespeare or your fifteen favorite novels published in your lifetime?” Cowen’s reply:

Shakespeare beats anything you can come up with, unless it’s Shakespeare or everything else. Shakespeare’s gonna’ win. Anything you’re even tempted [...] Not many [novels] do I need to read five times, but there are easily 20, 25 Shakespeare plays I could just read the rest of my life N number of times and not get sick of them.

Really? Is this a real judgment or is it Cowen’s way of affirming the deeply enshrined and utterly conventional view that Shakespeare is beyond a shadow of a doubt the best writer ever?

Addendum 6.15.2017, TC: "Shakespeare is very likely the deepest thinker the human race has produced, so these are worth careful study!"

It’s not that I don’t think Shakespeare is good. He is surely in the first rank. But that he is so very good that he occupies a pinnacle by himself, that’s different.

I don’t believe that. Nor do I disbelieve it. I simply don’t know how to evaluate it as a judgment about quality. That assertion has more to do with mythology than identifiable excellence.

I mean, think about it for a minute: Has the world never seen other writer’s of Shakespeare’s excellence? Are there no other texts as good as his 20 or 25 best plays? How do you make such a judgment?

Now, we can talk about Shakespeare’s cultural influence, and that discussion will be about what he was doing in the context of his times. But that’s a different kind of discussion from one about his excellence.

Finally, in Shakespeare’s case, we’ve got to consider the fact that Shakespeare is just old enough that his work is a bit foreign to us. He uses words that we no longer use and he uses familiar words in obsolete ways. He’s thus difficult, not because he’s deep (though, yes, he IS deep) but because he’s a bit foreign. Maybe one reason Cowen could read and reread him time and again is because he has to do so to become accustomed to the language. But that’s not about excellence. That’s something else. That’s strangeness.

* * * * *

See also a post from a few years ago, That Shakespeare Thing.

Tyler Cowen on wealth, coal, space, AI, & stuff

Rob Wiblin interviews Tyler Cowen about his latest book, Stubborn Attachments.

The core:

WIBLIN: If I had to pick out 50 words from the book that summarized it, I would choose this quote from page 32, which is, “We can already see that three key questions should be elevated in their political and philosophical importance. Namely: number one, what can we do to boost the rate of economic growth? Number two, what can we do to make civilization more stable? And number three, how should we deal with environmental problems?”

Does that seem like a key quote to you, as well?

COWEN: Absolutely.

Wealth and growth:

COWEN: I’d rather have a pocket calculator. I do think population will stabilize and start to decline, though probably not by very much. If you take Earth with, say, an average of 10 billion people lasting for centuries, but not lasting for 50,000 years, and do the calculations, you’d get at my modal prediction.

WIBLIN: But there’s many more of them than there is of us.

COWEN: That’s right.

WIBLIN: Do you think that quality of life will also go up, with high probability?

COWEN: Not forever, but for the foreseeable future. We’re in the period right now. We’re doing more to improve living standards than the world ever has before. That will have big ups and downs, but I don’t see why it has to stop.

WIBLIN: What about people who say, “I don’t care about welfare that much, I care about other things.” Do you think this argument for long termism goes through for them as well?

COWEN: I think it does. I have some early books, some of them on the arts, that argue wealth is good for aesthetic values. It depends what other values people care about, but wealth supports many different opportunities.

The whole point of wealth is to enable a kind of diversity and choice within a framework where, if there’s some other thing that people value, we can have more of that too.

WIBLIN: Do you think, like me, that there’s a chance that a future technology could make human life just a hundred or a thousand times better than it is for people today?

COWEN: I don’t know that we have a meaningful metric for saying that, but I suppose I don’t think that’s possible. I think we can make it twice as good and quite a bit longer, but I don’t think it will be inconceivable to what we can imagine now. [...]

WIBLIN: In the book, and, I guess, here so far, you’ve been focusing overwhelmingly on the importance of increasing economic growth, kind of getting to a better future faster. When we’re talking about growth here, we might imagine time on the X axis and welfare being generated in the universe on the Y axis, and you want to increase that faster.

Why focus on increasing the rate rather than making sure that that doesn’t go to zero?

COWEN: Well, keep in mind the core recipe is the rate of sustainable economic growth. If it’s going to go to zero, you’re knocked out of the box. So you’re maximizing across both of those dimensions, and I think, empirically, there are a large class of cases where more growth and more stability come together.

National defense is the easiest way to see that. If your society stays poor, someone will take you over. And those who take you over are probably nasty and will harm you. It’s not the only way in which growth and sustainability come together. But at most margins, they do. So there’s a wide enough class of cases where we can do both things at the same time.

Space travel:

WIBLIN: Let’s say that humans do continue for thousands, perhaps millions of years, but for some reason, we decide to never leave Earth. So we don’t use the resources that are available elsewhere.

COWEN: Which would be my prediction, by the way.

WIBLIN: Okay.

COWEN: I think space is overrated.

WIBLIN: Okay. It seems that, in your view, that should be a horrific tragedy, that almost all the value that humanity could have created had been lost in that case.

COWEN: Space is hard, right?

WIBLIN: I’m not so sure, but go on.

COWEN: It’s far, there are severe physical strains your subject to while you’re being transported, communication back and forth takes a very long time under plausible scenarios limited by the speed of light. And what’s really out there? Maybe there are exoplanets, but when you have to construct atmosphere, there’s a risk diversification argument for doing it.

But simply being under the ocean or high up in the sky or distant corners of the earth, we’re not about to run out of space or anything close to it. So I don’t really see what’s the economic reason to have something completely external, say, to the solar system.

WIBLIN: It seems you’re okay with the idea that we can turn more matter and more energy into more value. So what is it? Five times by 10 to the 22 stars out there in the accessible universe at the moment? Literally, as the galaxies recede, it’s declining by about a billionth per year.

But if you’re in favor of growth and creating more value, it seems like almost all the value . . . No matter what you value, it has to be out there in all of that matter that we can reorganize. Given your desire for growth on Earth, I don’t understand how it could be the case that you wouldn’t be upset that we might just stop at the boundaries of Earth’s atmosphere.

COWEN: Oh, I’m upset about it, I’m just not very optimistic. If you put me in the legislature, I’ll vote to increase funding for space exploration. But relative — especially in the Bay Area — relative to other people I speak to in this kind of fringe group of intellectuals who think about space, I’m more pessimistic than just about all of them.

But it’s also that I’m more optimistic about the earth. The ocean of course is enormous — it could be platforms, it could be underwater. Deserts, places that can be terraformed, cities in the sky — you do want diversification, protection against a big nuclear war. Maybe for that you need other planets. There’s the moon, there’s Mars — they’re actually big enough to have diversification.

Intersectionality:

COWEN: Intersectionality is grossly underrated by people on the right. Intersectionality I take to be the notion that if you’re a member of more than one either minority group or group that’s discriminated against, your multiple membership in discriminated groups creates problems for you in a potentially nonlinear fashion.

Social justice warriors on the left far overstate the problems of intersectionality. It’s an idea that ought to be considered important. It should be embraced by the middle and not attacked or celebrated on the two extremes. So the idea is not where it should be. It’s become overly politicized. We need to resurrect a more sensible version of it.