I feel like I have a better understanding of [[Tyler Cowen]].
He’s both an optimist and a pessimist, depending on what you’re comparing to:
He thinks that the world is getting better, decade by decade, that what the west is doing, messy as it is, is working.
But he also thinks that the world is messy and complicated and political and hard to predict, and so it hard to do much better than we’re doing. There are marginal improvements to be had in small spheres, but the people who dream of big overhauls or who have theories of how institutions are massively underperforming are naive.
He’s not a true believer. He doesn’t trust his own inside view very much. But he also separately understands that true believers are one of the key drivers of progress. And he identifies those people who have ideologies and who buy into their ideologies, who are smart and careful thinkers, because he thinks those people drive progress, even if they’re over-optimistic and naive. This is why he hires people like Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson.
Tyler broadly believes that the whole milieu of everyone pursuing their inside views, their ideologies that they believe in, generally drives things to get better, even though any individual ideology is wrong or overstated. He’s interestingly MTG-Green, embracing of Blue, rather than Blue himself.
musings and rough drafts 