New Podcast Release: Tyler Cowen
The latest episode of "Lives Well Lived," the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, is now available.
In this episode, Kasia and I had the pleasure of speaking with Tyler Cowen, an economist and author with a remarkable range of interests and insights. Here are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can now listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
On the Possibility of Alien Life:
Kasia de Lazari-Radek: "You have an extraordinarily wide range of interests beyond economics. Over the last couple of years, you have written five articles for Bloomberg about unidentified flying objects and whether aliens have visited. Do you think that there is a significant probability that aliens have visited our planet?"
Tyler Cowen: "Well, if the question is have literal physical aliens come to Earth, I think the chance of that is very, very low. It's simply hard to move bodies across space. If the question is have something like AI-driven alien drone probes visited Earth, I think there's a reasonable chance of that. I don't feel I have a good number for you, but I think it's clear if you look at the discourse, there's a lot of things our government knows it is unable to explain. It does not mean those are alien drone probes. I simply think it should be on the table as an explanation and that if you're familiar with the literature surrounding the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox, there's so many habitable planets out there: Why isn't someone here? You know the prior is not that this is an absurd or highly unlikely thing to happen. The prior is there's some reasonable chance it could be the case."
On Managing Time and Priorities:
Katarzyna De Lazari-Radek: “How do you divide your day to put so much into it, and to know all those things?”
Tyler Cowen: “Well, I don't watch very much TV other than, say, a presidential debate. Our child is grown. We're recording this podcast at 8 a.m. That's unusual for me. Typically, I just write every single morning. Saturday, Sunday, Christmas, my birthday, whatever. And then in the afternoon, all kinds of different things happen. But if you get something written every day, and I suspect Peter has experienced the same, it adds up to a lot.”
Peter Singer: “It surely does.”
On the Importance of Reading:
Kasia de Lazari-Radek: “So how about reading then?”
Tyler Cowen: “I read when I can, when I travel, in the evening, sometimes in the afternoon. So yeah, you know, I have a lot of meetings, teach, give talks, typical activities, but I always make sure in the morning I get writing done.”
On Economic Inequality and AI:
Kasia de Lazari-Radek: “Your book Average is Over talks about the widening gap between those with special skills, for example, those who are able to work with AI, and those who cannot. This problem hasn't gone away over the past decades, just the opposite. But do we have an answer to it? Do we just have to accept increasing economic inequality with all that brings, or do you have suggestions for how we can close or at least reduce the gap?”
Tyler Cowen: “Well, current forms of artificial intelligence I think are likely to bring a revolution in the biological sciences. And that means that over time people will live much longer. I don't think they'll ever live forever. That will spread unevenly, but eventually, I think most of the developed world people will live 10 or 20 years longer. And almost everyone will enjoy that, at least if they take decent care of themselves. So that's a kind of big increase in equality. And it may be more important than the fact that we'll have more billionaires. So there are some ways in which current AI technologies help lower earners.”
On Climate Change and Market Failures:
Peter Singer: “Markets quite frequently fail because they don't price in the externalities. And of course, the most glaring example of that is the costs of greenhouse gas emissions which is not included in markets for fossil fuels in most places today anyway. And I think it's pretty much nowhere included in the cost of meat although producing meat, especially beef and lamb, contributes significantly to climate change. Isn't that an example of a market failure that's really quite catastrophic, so catastrophic that it could render most of our planet uninhabitable?”
Tyler Cowen: “I don't think it would render most of the planet uninhabitable, but I would accept most of the rest of what you said. I look at it this way. There's been discourse about climate change for a while now, and people typically have focused on more regulation. But what we've learned over time is that regulations now are so intense it can be very difficult to build a new energy infrastructure. So if you want to build a nuclear power plant in the United States, which is quite green, that's essentially become impossible.”
A Life Well Lived
Peter Singer: "So let me perhaps wind up in this way. If I can summarize what you've been saying about a life well lived, it has an Aristotelian flavor to it, I would say in that, firstly, it's a life in which you have strength and health. It's a life in which you have skills, and competence, you develop those, so that's like personal virtues that you develop, personal qualities. You do that in the context of close and loving relationships with others. And you use the strengths and the skills and the competence and the life that you have living with others to make a positive contribution to other people or more broadly, other sentient beings. Is that a reasonable summary of how you would see a life well lived?"
Tyler Cowen: "That's a good summary. Yes, at least how I'm thinking about it right now. Again, it develops. But also it is a very virtue ethics perspective of things, but it doesn't mean that I'm a virtue ethicist and not a consequentialist. But I think there is also something there where, and you know this too with rule consequentialism, where it can be a lot easier sometimes for you to guide your day-to-day actions by trying to find what type of virtues or characteristics or however you want to describe them will lead to the best consequence than it can be by trying to make all of those calculations a priori. So I would also kind of caveat what I'm saying with, I think there's a lot in developing virtues, even though you're thinking about the ultimate goal of ensuring the best kind of life for all."