#413: Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins

A person is being meta-rational when he or she understands how smart or well-informed he or she is in a given topic area. In my view, meta-rationality is hard to come by. People typically don't defer to the views of experts when they ought to. Sometimes, the expert might be wrong, but if you're playing the odds, the expert is probably right. People are far too confident about too many things they shouldn't be confident about.

Steve Levitt, the 'Freakonomics' guy, wrote a great paper where he took some people and looked at their major decisions. For some of the people, a coin was flipped, and if the coin said they had to make a big change, they made the big change. The people who made the big changes were happier than those who didn't. Of course, it depends on the person and context, but in general, read that Steve Levitt paper, think about the coin flipping, and, more often, make the big change. It's a risk, but it seems that, on average, it pays off.

The real enemy of writing is days where you get nothing written. If you write something every day—I don't care how much or how little it is—it's going to add up, and over time, you'll get more done each day. So, just make it an absolute rule. ... Just do it every day. Get better at it every day. Don't take any excuses. Do it.

I think, in general, we should do much more to boost the rate of economic growth, devote fewer resources to the elderly and much more to the young, take more chances, travel more, learn other languages, and be much much more interested in foreign cultures.

I'm very suspicious about recommending books to people because there's the risk they might listen to what you say, and if you're recommending to them the book that's not the most valuable next book they should read, in a sense, you're wronging them.

I think the most efficient way of learning at the margin, for most smart people, is travel.

Dominant moods or emotions tend to cease hold of us, even if we're very smart. Often, smart people go wrong because they're better at feeding more information into their chosen mood.

I like to quit writing before I get tired of writing. That way, I'm hungry to come back the day after.

We innovate less, especially outside of the tech sector. Our incomes grow more slowly. We move around the United States at roughly half the rates we used to. We're now unable to pull off grant projects, such as putting a man on the moon. Almost all of our federal government's spending is now locked in—much of that going to the elderly. We're a less dynamic society.

The returns to understanding how to build a good Twitter feed are very high, and right now, many of us should be building coronavirus Twitter feeds.

I'm a software idiot, so if I'm writing a book or a column, I just use Microsoft Word. I'm still struggling to figure out how it works.

Every day, you want to be reading, you want to be talking, you want to be thinking, and you want to be exercising. Do it at as intense of a level as you can.

The United States, it seems, has let the coronavirus get into its healthcare system, and they did nothing about it for six weeks. This could end up being a huge crime of omission.

So many people in philanthropy obsess over measurement, and they end up tending to do the same thing. I'm actually, at my margin, somewhat anti-measurement. I don't want everyone to be anti-measurement, but my view is: if I need to measure, you failed.

I worry families are not having enough children. We're seeing depopulation in many countries. Religious families have more children, and religious people tend to be somewhat happier.

My goal isn't really to teach economics; it's to improve my own ways of thinking, and maybe people will learn some of that as I go along.

Periodically reading serious fiction is something people stop doing after they hit a certain age—maybe 30 or 40. It forces you to be open to the complexities of how humans actually are.

I'm convinced that we never know ourselves—we really don't, and that's part of the great tragedy of life, but it also makes life interesting.

One of my favorite questions to bug people with is: 'What is it that you do to train that's comparable to a pianist practicing scales?' If you don't know the answer to that one, maybe you're doing something wrong or not doing enough.

I think it's lost some of its newness sex appeal, but I would be astonished if long-form—or even not-so-long-form writing—as long as it's of high-quality ... I don't see that going away anytime soon.

I feel I've been very fortunate in life, and I think I have the most even temperament of anyone I know. I literally don't have unhappy days. It would be hard to say I've had zero in life, but I think I'm almost weirdly never unhappy.

My diet is just eat what you were going to eat, but eat two-thirds of it.

Tim once paid for a tour of the underground San Francisco homeless economy.