The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 46 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Cowen: Most of Eastern Europe is depopulating and will never catch up
“Parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe you know, Poland maybe is catching up to the West, but most of it is being depopulated and emptying out. And it basically will never catch up.”
Cowen: Giving someone a book as a gift is slightly cruel
“If you give a book away, the danger is a person will read it just because it's a gift. Unless you think it's the book they should be reading. It's actually a slightly cruel act to give someone a book.”
Cowen: Automation will widen income inequality while boosting consumption for the poor
“So the world will be a lot more productive because of automation and smart software, and this will give us a lot of consumer goods for free. So we'll have this super sharp divide between the rich and the poor in terms of income, but in terms of actual consumpt…”
Cowen: Rational individual choices for safety make society collectively worse off
“So a lot of these decisions to settle in and be safe and comfortable, they're individually rational. Like, it's good to be safe, right? Stress is, is, is a bad thing. But when our society collectively makes this decision, there are ways in which we're all wors…”
Cowen: America exhausted the low-hanging fruit of early industrial technologies
“We exhausted a lot of the low-hanging fruit from combining fossil fuels with powerful machines and electricity and communications, and that, that's all to the better, but we've now entered a world where people find it hard to imagine a future very different fr…”
Tyler Cowen: Complacent societies cannot survive indefinitely without restoring economic dynamism
“But that said, a country cannot remain complacent forever. And I argue that eventually, you know, something has to give, you need a way to pay the bills, you need dynamism again, and you start seeing disruptions in your complacent life.”
Cowen: Autonomous vehicles could worsen road traffic congestion via errand trips
“Self-driving cars could make the problem worse, you know, because you'll send out your car or your vehicle on all kinds of errands. Oh, go to Whole Foods and pick me up some smoked salmon. I'm hungry. And there may be fewer people on the road, but the people t…”
Cowen: Millennials face a high risk of impoverished retirements
“It's much harder for millennials to save, and I fear they will have impoverished retirements. Especially since the fiscal budget on the federal side is problematic as well.”
Cowen: Minimum wage increases put people out of work
“Minimum wage increases put people out of work. Sometimes it's a small number of people. Sometimes it's a large number of people, but I think jobs are very important, and I would look for different ways to raise wages, which we do need to do.”
Cowen: Minimum wage hikes raise food prices and dissipate initial gains
“So if you raise minimum wages, say that raises food prices, there's good evidence for this, and other poor people have to pay more for their food, And a lot of those apparent first round gains get given back and they dissipate.”
Cowen: Bitcoin is a legitimate, enduring asset and not a bubble
“I think it's a perfectly legitimate asset that will endure and have a high value. I'm not sure its value is going to go up any at this point but it's for real, and it's not a bubble.”
Cowen: Online education is one of humanity's greatest achievements
“Online education, as we have it, is one of the world's greatest achievements ever, and we've put almost all of it in place in, say, 15 years.”
Cowen: Parents should expose teenagers to high-quality adult role models
“Expose your child in teen years to as many of your friends who might be possible role models as possible. Like at some margin, they're just not going to listen to you anymore. They're not going to watch your behavior anymore. They know what you're about. They'…”
Cowen: Computers will not replace sales, marketing, or management anytime soon
“So there's always room for sales, for marketing, for management, including in the distant future. Computers will not be doing that for us anytime soon.”
Cowen: Regional economic divergence rather than convergence will continue
“I think countries and also regions within countries we won't see so much convergence. We'll see a lot of divergence. So it used to be in America, in the post-war era, America's poorer cities were essentially catching up to the wealthier cities. But nowadays, s…”
Cowen: Simple, boring digital habits beat ambitious tech as killer apps
“I think my intuition is people like simple, boring things, ah, much more than you might imagine. I mean, people just love spending time on Facebook and sending back and forth short, silly, or not very informative messages. And that's been the killer app for so…”
Cowen: Most newspapers will become ventures owned or supported by the wealthy
“I don't think you can fund most papers by ads. I think they will end up as ventures owned or supported by the very wealthy.”
Cowen: Local reporting will shift to blogs and expose scandals
“There'll be a lot of local reporting on blogs or blog-like entities, and if you want to find it will be there. So if you uncover a scandal about some local official, the world will find out.”
Cowen: US cities are more racially segregated, but suburbs are not
“If you mean racially segregated, cities are more racially segregated. Suburbs are not. So that's a mixed story.”
Cowen: The world is in a G-Zero order beyond US control
“So we now live in a GZERO world. America cannot dictate world affairs.”
Cowen: The US is returning to 19th-century polarization and dynamism
“Maybe in some ways we're going back to the America of the late 19th century. With a polarized politics screwy media you know, in some ways, higher levels of violence, and more dynamism, too.”
Cowen: The US must adopt congestion pricing like London and Singapore
“So London has applied a congestion charge going into the central city. It has worked. Singapore has congestion charges for its roads. They have worked. In this country, we need to do the same thing.”
Cowen: AI will soon outmatch human consumer decision-making
“Artificial intelligence will tell you what to buy and how to buy it, and at what price. People who think they can beat the algorithms will make a lot more mistakes, so know when you should defer.”
Cowen: Epistemic modesty delivers higher returns than high IQ
“Having good judgment there is becoming more important than just being like the smartest person or having the highest IQ. So a kind of epistemic modesty, I think, is showing much higher returns than it used to.”
Cowen: Online education is one of history's greatest achievements
“Online education, as we have it, is one of the world's greatest achievements ever, and we've put almost all of it in place in, say, 15 years.”
Cowen: Finish only one in ten books you start reading
“Classics I read cover to cover. Almost by definition of a classic. Most books I don't finish. Very good books I finish. Maybe one book in 10 I'll finish. But I don't mean that as any slight to the books. You've always got to think, Well, you know, chapter seve…”
Cowen: Giving someone a book is often a slightly cruel act
“If you give a book away, the danger is a person will read it just because it's a gift. Unless you think it's the book they should be reading, it's actually a slightly cruel act to give someone a book.”
Cowen: Blockchain has found no killer apps beyond Bitcoin in 10 years
“I don't think we found killer apps for the blockchain yet, other than Bitcoin, and we've had blockchain for 10 years.”
Cowen: Cumulative reading volume is what enables fast reading
“The more you've read, the more you know what's coming in the books you're reading, so the easier and quicker it is to read them.”
Cowen: People dismiss others primarily to feel superior and in control
“I think both, but mostly the latter. People want to feel good about themselves. They want a kind of easy path to virtue, to truth, to feeling in control. We love to feel somewhat in control.”
Tyler Cowen: Capturing attention is hardest among high-income earners
“Of course, it's much harder to get everyone's attention. Most of all, people who have high incomes because there are so many demands on their time, but there's your email flow, there's Twitter, there's Facebook, there's being texted.”
Cowen: Media competition rewards authentic, niche-focused creators over incumbents
“A lot of media companies, of course, have lost out, so it rewards people, Who in some way are authentic, or dedicated, or can target a niche, and do something really interesting.”
Cowen: Global scale expands economic returns to scarce resources
“By a global setting where you can sell to billions of people across more than a hundred countries, and that really will increase those rewards to the scarce factors.”
Cowen: US productivity growth is down outside of tech
“Rates of productivity growth have been down outside of the tech sector.”
Cowen: Expose teenagers to quality adult friends as external role models
“Expose your child in teen years to as many of your friends who might be possible role models as possible. Like at some margin, they're just not going to listen to you anymore. They're not going to watch your behavior anymore. They know what you're about. They'…”
Cowen: Modern managers need philosophical knowledge about human motivation
“As more people become more specialized, there's a separate class who become more synthetic and less generalized and more almost like philosophers. The manager is like a philosopher. They need to understand the human condition and
What motivates people?
Which p…”
Cowen: Books lose their world-shaking transformative power as you age
“When you're young, it's quite easy to read books that will shake everything you know, and those are the quake books. So for me, you know, a quake book was reading Friedrich A. Hayek. A quake book was reading the early science fiction I read in my life. A quake…”
Cowen: Source evaluation is a vital skill, yet most people do not improve
“If you're going to be a generalist, one of the best things to be a generalist in is evaluating the quality of sources in your Twitter feed, online, everywhere. That is so important, and it's skyrocketing in significance. Most people, they're not getting that m…”
Cowen: Reading agreeable books is less interesting and often boring
“Overall, I'm more interested in reading books I disagree with than books I agree with. A lot of books I agree with, they could be quite good, but they tend to bore me.”
Cowen: The 'devalue and dismiss' intellectual habit severely impedes learning
“There's an intellectual move, which I call devalue and dismiss. And you know, try not to do devalue and dismiss. You learn much less. And it's always justified, right? Again, unless it's Magnus Carlsen playing chess, or maybe a computer program playing chess, …”
Cowen: Trying to prove yourself right in arguments is usually a mistake
“I would say on average you're right less than half the time because there's so many fights where both sides are wrong. So trying to be right or establishing being right or proving being right is usually a mistake. Most of the time you're wrong, and it's hard t…”
Cowen: Intellectual improvement requires actively confronting personal analytical errors
“You want to really figure out what are your mistakes. You're like, most of the time, not making the best chess move, intellectually speaking. And if you face up to that, you'll improve. If not, at some point, you'll ossify, and you can play devalue and dismiss…”
Cowen: Contemporary television is overrated while movies are underrated
“I think movies are actually much better than TV. TV now is a bit overrated and movies underrated.”
Cowen: Global demand for safe assets keeps US rates artificially low
“And I think those rates staying so low, Is a sign that there's all this wealth out there in the world, Russia, China, but not really that many safe places to put it. So they buy us government securities, which is perfectly understandable, but it lowers our rat…”
Cowen: Successful saving requires dogmatic, rule-based personal finance systems
“I think the people who save well have methods and systems almost like a religion.”
Cowen: Incremental learning compounds over decades to create massive intellectual advantages
“Another way to think about it is the value of compound interest. I refer to it as the value of compound learning. Like, just keep on learning. Let the years pile up in your favor. Learn X percent a year. It will compound and stay alive on this earth, and maybe…”