Tyler Cowen: Economic Growth & the Fight Against Conformity & Mediocrity | Lex Fridman Podcast #174

The following is a conversation with Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and co-creator of an amazing economics blog called Marginal Revolution, author of many books, including The Great Stagnation, Average Is Over, and his most recent, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Antihero. He's truly a polymath in his work, including his love for food, which makes his amazing podcast called Conversations with Tyler really fun to listen to. Quick mention of our sponsors: Linode, ExpressVPN, SimpliSafe, and Public Goods. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, given Tyler's culinary explorations, let me say that one of the things that makes me sad about my love-hate relationship with food is that w- while I've found a simple diet, plain meat and veggies, that makes me happy in day-to-day life, I sometimes wish I had the mental ability to moderate consumption of food so that I could truly enjoy meals that go way outside of that diet. I've seen my mom, for example, enjoy a single piece of chocolate, and yet, if I were to eat one (laughs) piece of chocolate, the odds are high that I would end up eating the whole box. This is definitely something I would like to fix, because some of the amazing artistry in this world happens in the kitchen, and some of the richest human experiences happen over a unique meal. I recently was eating cheeseburgers with Joe Rogan and John Danaher late at night in Austin, talking about jujitsu and life, and I was distinctly aware of the magic of that experience, magic made possible by the incredibly delicious cheeseburgers. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Tyler Cowen. Would you say economics is more art or science or philosophy or even magic? What is it?

Economics is interesting because it's all of the above. To start with magic, the notion that you can make some change and simply everyone's better off, that is a kind of modern magic that has replaced old-style magic. It's an art in the sense that the models are not very exact. It's a science in the sense that occasionally propositions are falsified.

(laughs)

There are a few basic things we know.

Yeah.

And however trivial they may sound, if you don't know them, you're out of luck. So, all of the above.

But from my outsider's perspective, economics is sometimes able to formulate very simple, almost like E = MC squared, general models of how our human society will function when you do a certain thing. But it seems impossible or almost way too optimistic to think that a single formula or just a s- set of simple principles can describe b- behavior of billions of human beings, well, uh, with all the complexity that we have involved. So do you have, do you have a sense there's a hope for economics to, to, uh, to have those kinds of physics-level descriptions and models of the world? Or is it just our desperate attempts as humans to make sense of it, even though it's more desperate than, uh, than, uh, rigorous and serious and actually predictable, like a, like a physics-type science?