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Wired Interview with Yuval Harari & Tristan Harris

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Wired Interview with Yuval Harari & Tristan Harris

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Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris interviewed by Wired

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Podcast interview between Sam harris & Tristan Harris

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Podcast interview between Sam harris & Tristan Harris

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Waking Up With Sam Harris #71 - What is Technology Doing to Us? (with Tristan Harris)

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Thought provoking presentation on the impact of digital assistants on our brains and other things...

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Thought provoking presentation on the impact of digital assistants on our brains and other things...

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I was lucky enough to see this live and it kind of haunted me for weeks.

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Machines Have Feelings Too | Sophie Kleber | House of Beautiful Business

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The Kids of Today- podcast episode on "All in the Mind"

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The Kids of Today- podcast episode on "All in the Mind"

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This is a fascinating and important podcast about the research around the screens/phones and kids, particularly if you are a parent! And more so if you are a parent of a pre-teen or teen! Listen to both stories to get a balanced perspective.

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Lynne Malcolm: What's going on with the kids of today?

John Protzko: For a couple of years now I've been excited by this idea of the complaint about 'kids these days' essentially, and how for millennia humankind has complained about the children of the day and how they are going to be the downfall of civilisation. What's interesting and exciting about the delay of gratification test, the Marshmallow Test, is that it's one of the few tests that we actually have many, many decades of research on and a relatively standardised way of administration. And so we can actually ask the question; can kids wait, can they delay gratification better over the past 50 years?

Lynne Malcolm: John Protzko, post-doctoral scholar at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm.

John Protzko's research into a famous psychological measure of childhood self-control first conducted during the 1960s, shows a very surprising trend today. More about that later.

Meanwhile, are today's teens any happier than they used to be?

Jean Twenge is Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, and she's author of iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy-and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.

Professor Twenge has been doing generational research in the United States for 25 years.

Jean Twenge: Right around 2012 I started to notice some pretty big shifts in teens; emotions, how they said they were feeling, how they said they were spending their time, and I realised there was a pretty big generational shift there between the millennials and those who came after them. That led back to those born around 1995. So I define iGen as those born 1995 to 2012, and they are the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with smart phones.

Lynne Malcolm: Jean Twenge draws from several large nationally representative surveys of young people in the US. One of them, called Monitoring the Future, has looked at teenagers every year since 1976. She's observed some clear differences between millennials (those born from the early '80s and through to the late '90s) and the younger group she refers to as iGen.

Jean Twenge: So there's a number of pronounced shifts. Really the most striking break between the two generations is in how they say they feel and in their basic view on life. So millennials are very optimistic, very happy, happier than previous generations, at least when they were teens, had very high expectations, high self-esteem, even entitlement, just a lot of positivity.

But then right around that 2012 time period, happiness started to fall, life satisfaction started to fall, self-esteem plummeted. More and more teens started to say that they felt like they couldn't do anything right, that they felt useless. These are classic symptoms of depression. More started to say they felt lonely and left out. So there is this a real breakdown in well-being among teens that shows up among other big government screening surveys as well in terms of clinical level serious depression increased by 50%, the suicide rate has doubled among teen girls. So we went from a generation that was very optimistic and positive and happy, at least for the most part, to one that is not as happy, even depressed, has a lot more negative emotions and fewer positive emotions.

Lynne Malcolm: So before we look at the possible causes of this, what are some of the other aspects or characteristics of the iGen that perhaps are more positive and not as serious as this?

Jean Twenge: iGen has a very strong work ethic, say compared to teens five or 10 years ago. They are more likely to say that work is important to them and that they are willing to work overtime. They are very practical in their jobs, their outlook on jobs and their outlook on the workplace, and their expectations are not quite as high as the millennials were, so they've come down to earth a little bit which has some advantages.

iGen is also not growing up before they are ready. So as teens they are less likely to drink alcohol, to have sex, to go out without their parents, to have a drivers licence and to have a paid job compared to previous generations when they were teens. So that's with some trade-offs. There are some things that are very clearly good there, like fewer teens drinking alcohol and fewer teens having sex. But then working and driving, there are some advantages to that certainly in terms of safety, but it also has the potential downside that they might end up going to university or into their first job without as much experience with independence. But still, a lot of advantages for safety. iGen is probably physically the safest generation ever.

Lynne Malcolm: Whilst it may be that teens in the iGeneration behave in more cautious ways, Jean Twenge is very worried about their mood and mental state. The research she's drawn on was conducted in the United States, but there's similar concern in Australia. Mission Australia's latest Youth Survey which came out at the end of last year, showed that one in four young people are at risk of serious mental illness and it warned that this is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. In America, Jean Twenge says, the iGeneration is on the brink of a mental health crisis.

Jean Twenge: Yes. So there's a national screening study that looks at major depressive disorder, so that's the most serious form of depression, and the percentage of teens in the US who fit the criteria for that and have suffered from that in the last year. That increased by 50% in a very brief period of time, between 2011 and 2015. The suicide rate has doubled among teen girls, among teen girls ages 12 to 14 it has tripled.

The Centres for Disease Control who keeps track of these type of public health statistics, published a paper in November showing a very large increase in emergency room visits for what's called intentional self-injury, so it's self-harm like cutting or taking too many pills, and that tripled among girls aged 10 to 14. So I think those statistics, all from government funded sources, do unfortunately paint a picture of a mental health crisis.

Lynne Malcolm: And you suggest that much of this deterioration in the mental health of young people could be traced to their phones. What's the evidence for that and what is the mechanism that causes it?

Jean Twenge: Most of this shift happened between 2012 and 2015, a pretty short period. This is a very unusual pattern for shifts in characteristics among young people. Usually you get changes that roll out over a longer period of time. So the advantage of that is it's such a short period that you can say...ask the question; what changed during that time that might explain why teens' mental health suddenly fell apart? So the economy here in the US was improving over that time, so it seems unlikely that that was the cause. There are economic things like income inequality had been growing since the 1980s.

Really by far the biggest change in teens' lives in that pretty brief three- to four-year period is the growth of smart phones and social media and teens spending more time online. So the smart phone was introduced in 2007 with the first iPhone, and at first it was just a few people who had it and then it grew right at the same time teens' health started to fall in 2012, that's when the smart phone gained market saturation, it was the end of that year, that's when the percentage of Americans with a smart phone crossed 50%.

So that period of 2012 to 2015 is when the phone went from being something that a minority of people had to something almost everybody had and had in their hands all the time. Perhaps as a consequence, over that same time period, teens started to spend less time with their friends in person. In-person social interaction for teens had been declining for a while, but it really, really accelerated as smart phones became common and teens started to spend a lot more time communicating through social media.

Lynne Malcolm: The Monitoring the Future Survey, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the United States, has surveyed teens since the mid '70s. The data showed a clear relationship between the amount of time young people spend on their screens and their degree of happiness. Jean Twenge:

Jean Twenge: There what you see is if you look at all the different ways teens can spend their time and see how that correlates with their level of happiness, pretty much everything that you can do that is not on a screen is linked to more happiness; spending time with friends in person, going to religious services, sports and exercise, even homework. Everything is; off a screen, more happiness. Everything that is on a screen is linked to less happiness; social media use, internet, texting, television, all of it. It's a really, really stark pattern.

So it's not just happiness though. In another survey, it's one administered by the Centres for Disease Control, of high school students, they ask about four questions that are risk factors for suicide; feeling depressed for two weeks or more, thinking about suicide, making a plan to commit suicide or actually having attempted suicide in the past, these are all clear risk factors. And they also ask about the amount of time that teens spend on electronic devices. So teens who spend five hours or more a day on electronic devices are 71% more likely to have at least one of those suicide risk factors compared to teens who spend less than an hour a day.

Lynne Malcolm: There is also a very big concern about the level of anxiety that teens have, I know in the United States but there is also a concern here in Australia about anxiety. How is anxiety fuelled by smart technology?

Jean Twenge: We know from surveys of college students that levels of anxiety are increasing in much the same pattern, with the increases really kicking in after 2012. We don't have great data from these surveys that look at electronic device use and relating them to anxiety. However, anxiety and depression are very, very closely related to each other, they are kind of two sides of the same coin. So if you are seeing these links between electronic device time and depression and unhappiness, it is a pretty reasonable guess that you'd see them with anxiety as well.

Lynne Malcolm: So what evidence is there that use of smart technology actually causes a decline in teens' mental health?

Jean Twenge: So the studies that I've been talking about are primarily correlational, and in that case it is difficult to tell whether it it's screen time causing screen time or depression causing screen time. Maybe depressed people are more likely to spend time on social media or on screens. But there are several studies that suggest that is not what happens, at least most of the time.

So there is, for example, two studies that follow people over time and they find that spending a lot of time on social media leads to unhappiness, but being unhappy doesn't lead to spending more time on social media. Another randomly assigned people to give up their Facebook page for a week, or not. And those who gave up Facebook ended the week happier, less depressed and less lonely. Those are just three studies, there are many others. There's one out of a natural experiment where people had to give up Facebook for work, and, especially among the young adults, they were happier. And then there are several other longitudinal studies of both adults and of teens that show when screen time is increased, then lower well-being tends to follow. So all of those studies get a lot closer, and in the case of the experiment, do a pretty good job of really showing that there is definitely causation from the social media and screens to unhappiness. There could be some going the other way around, but most of these studies point in the other direction, that it really is the screens that are the cause, although we do need more research to try to better answer that question.

Lynne Malcolm: Over history there has always been a bit of a tendency for older generations to be critical of younger generations or to despair about the decline of younger generations in some way. Is it possible that this is an example of that tendency, just being concerned about the kids of today?

Jean Twenge: No because these are surveys of teens themselves and their own behaviours. So, for example, the rise in self-harm and the rise in suicide, that's based on the behaviour of teens and the increases in unhappiness and in depression and in loneliness. That's what teens are saying about themselves, so I don't actually see how that relates at all.

Lynne Malcolm: So do you think teens themselves are seeing the links between their technology use and their mental health?

Jean Twenge: So in the interviews that I did for the book, for iGen, it was a very interesting how many teens, even those young enough to not even be able to remember a time before the smart phone, they were aware of the downsides of being on your phone all the time, even though many of them did it and felt it was mandatory, just based on the way teen social life is now. But many of them told me how much they hated it when they were trying to talk to a friend and their friend was looking at her phone. Adults complain about the same thing. Many of them said, 'Yeah, you know, we just don't go out. My parents tell me these stories about all the fun they had when they were teenagers, and we just sit at home and watch Netflix.' So I think many of them are aware of some of these downsides, but it's difficult because they feel compelled to participate in social media with this immediacy that is almost mandatory these days.

Lynne Malcolm: Jean Twenge, psychologist from the University of San Diego. Her latest book is called iGen. You'll find details on our webpage.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. We've heard from Jean Twenge about the effect of smart technology on the mental health of teenagers. But what about young kids' level of self-control? Has that changed over generations?

Woman: Okay, so I have one marshmallow for each of you. And here's the deal, you can either eat it now or you can wait until I get back and you can have two. Okay? So eat it now, or wait till get back and you can have two. I'll be back...

Child: If we wait you'll give us two?

Woman: Yes, if you wait you'll get two, or you can eat it now, whichever you want. Okay, I'll be back in a little bit.

Child: If you wait until she gets back, she'll give you two. She still won't give you two because you ate it.

Child: But I didn't eat a single one...

Lynne Malcolm: A recording of kids being given the famous Marshmallow Test. It's from a series of studies which were first conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s at Stanford University. John Protzko:

Woman: Oh, what happened?

Child: She ate hers.

Woman: Oh, okay. You waited, you get two. Good job. You can eat it.

John Protzko: The Marshmallow Test, as it's called, is a test of children's ability to delay gratification. So the set-up is generally the child is seated down at a table with a treat that they get to choose ahead of time, so it's not always a marshmallow. You give an array of treats to the child and let them choose their favourite. And then you have a plate with one of those treats and a plate with two of those treats and then the researcher says that they have to leave the room, and if they can wait until they get back they can have the two treats but if they can't wait, they ring the bell or they just go ahead and eat the one treat but they only get the one treat. And the amount of time that the child waits until breaking, essentially, is an index of how well they are able to delay gratification.

Lynne Malcolm: John Protzko, psychologist at the University of California. He explains that this study of children's ability to delay gratification is still going on today.

John Protzko: It's very interesting research to see the long term, decades later, associations or correlations between how long the child was able to wait when they were four and a half years old and measures like propensity to engage in crime, how much money they make, drug use, things like that. So the correlation between their young ability to delay gratification and later positive outcomes is very exciting work.

Lynne Malcolm: And so it's indicating from that early work that if they are able to delay gratification then they have a better journey ahead in life?

John Protzko: That seems correct. The thing is, we don't actually know if it's causal. We know that it predicts, we know that ability to delay at a young age predicts a lot of these positive outcomes later in life. What we don't know yet is that it's causal. So we don't know if you change a child's ability at, say, five years old to delay gratification, if that has any downstream effects. That research just hasn't been done and it is I think probably one of the great places for this research to go.

Lynne Malcolm: So if I were to ask you whether you think kids are better or worse at delaying gratification today than they were 50 years ago, what would you say?

Psychologist John Protzko decided to investigate.

John Protzko: What's interesting and exciting about the delay of gratification test or the Marshmallow Test is that it's one of the few tests that we have many, many decades of research on, and a relatively standardised way of administration. Intelligence tests, IQ tests have a longer history, and that research has been done by Jim Flynn and now dozens and dozens of other researchers. But for a lot of the questions that we have we just don't have that long of a history administering the same tasks. The Marshmallow Test is one that we do, and so we can actually ask the question; can kids wait, can they delay gratification better over the past 50 years?

So we looked at all of the published and even unpublished literature that we could find. So we reached out to people, reached out to the developmental psychologists and we aggregated all of the data on people who administered this delay of gratification test, this Marshmallow Test. And we analysed, after taking into account age, because this is something that you get better with as you get older, so we took that into account when we analysed the data; has this delay time actually changed over the past 50 years? And it turns out it has and it hasn't been going down. If anything, kids are getting better at this test and they are being able to delay gratification for longer than they were 50 years ago.

Lynne Malcolm: And in the process of that you asked experts to predict what they think the result was going to be. How correct were they in their predictions?

John Protzko: So this is my favourite aspect of this entire study. Everyone is very excited about the fact that delay times haven't been going down, if anything they have been going up. But to me the more exciting thing was before we analysed the data...so we didn't know what the results were going to be. We asked 260 experts in cognitive development to predict whether they thought delay times would go down, meaning kids are getting worse at delaying gratification, whether they would stay the same or whether they would go up. About 52% of these cognitive developmentalists thought that delay times would go down, and about another third thought that there would be no change. So overall the vast majority of experts essentially thought that they agreed with this 'kids these days' idea, that kids these days must be getting worse at delaying gratification, and it turns out that that wasn't the case. So to me that shows that this idea that we keep thinking the worst in kids even affects the experts who study cognitive development, who work with children, even they are affected by this tendency to just think that society is going down.

Lynne Malcolm: And so what have you concluded from the results that you saw as to why kids are getting better at delaying gratification?

John Protzko: I wish I knew, to be honest. So as I said, we've known about Flynn effects, so the fact that IQ scores are increasing for about 30 years now, and there's still not a definitive answer as to why it's happening. There are a lot of candidates but we don't have the answer yet. And so when I saw the fact that delayed gratification scores were increasing, my first thought was maybe it's the same cause. Whatever is causing IQ scores to go up, whatever that is, could be affecting delay of gratification ability as well. But it's too new to make a firm statement on what could possibly be driving this.

So some of the biggest candidates for IQ scores going up involved changes in nutrition, prenatal nutrition and early life nutrition. Another one is schooling, differences in schooling and the way schooling approaches IQ tests. So if you look at maths textbooks over the past few decades, elementary school maths textbooks, you see earlier in time they focused on maths, on addition, subtraction, multiplication. And as you get more recently you see maths textbooks essentially putting in items from IQ tests. So that's an interesting partial explanation for why you see changes in IQ scores.

The interesting thing about changes in IQ scores is that it has now been studied in many different countries and some countries it is still going up, some countries it has stalled, some countries it has even reversed and is going down. So questions like that help narrow down the range of possibilities for IQ scores.

Unfortunately, for delay of gratification we really don't have that data. Almost the entirety of the data that we used in our analysis was from America. There's a couple of studies in England, there's one in China, there's a couple of other countries here and there but if it is done in another country we generally have one data point from that country, so we just don't know if scores are changing in specific countries. So definitely taking a new look at delay of gratification over time and over generations even I think will in the future help us understand at least some of the possibilities for why it's happening.

Lynne Malcolm: It's a fairly common assumption that kids' ability to delay gratification may have diminished these days because of the influence of modern technology, like phones and iPads. John Protzko isn't so sure.

John Protzko: So technology is always the villain in these stories, at least in the modern era. We now point to smartphones and tablets and children and that's got to be the reason that the children are in decline. When I was a child it was home video game systems. Before that it was television, before that it was radio, before that it was cars, before that it was novels. We always seem to latch onto the new technology and say this is the reason. But to me the interesting thing is we start off with the idea that kids are worse, and then we go looking for a reason, so we grab onto technology.

There are associations between certain types of technology use and certain psychological measures, but in the same vein we don't know that it's causal. People don't really do the experiments, we don't really have enough data essentially, enough experiments to really know; what happens if you just don't let kids use tablets or any electronics for six months, what actually happens to them? That's another good point of research. But I think technology is always painted as the villain in modern times, and I think the reason is it's what's most saliently different between when I was a kid and when young children are kids. So it is the most obvious thing that we can point to and say, ah, this is what is different and so this is what must be causing kids to be worse.

Lynne Malcolm: John Protzko's main research focuses on interventions to increase intelligence, but recently he's exploring how societies throughout history tend to perceive the kids of today.

John Protzko: So in the context of this 'kids these days' study and delay of gratification, my interest has really been on why do we keep thinking this. It's a claim about the decline of society because of children that you can see repeated for millennia, literally millennia, so it's not just something about modern technology. People in ancient Greece were complaining about this, people in what is now ancient Iraq were complaining about children. So clearly to me it seems that there is something about the way that the human mind works that makes us think this, that we look at children and just think, wow, that's it, this is where it all goes down. And that's my new interest in this, has been trying to figure out why do we do this and are there ways that we can prevent people from having this bias, this 'kids these days' bias. And so we've started some new research on this. not enough data to really have an answer yet. So the two goals there are why does it happen, and can we do something to change it?

Lynne Malcolm: So it's a psychological phenomenon that you want to get to the bottom of.

John Protzko: It doesn't seem to me like it could be cultural, since it's been happening for millennia. So it's possible that it's just an outcropping of the way that the mind works. There's something about maybe memory, the way our memories work that causes us to have this belief.

Lynne Malcolm: John Protzko from Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

You'll find more information from today on the All in the Mind website.

Thanks to producer Diane Dean and sound engineer Isabella Tropiano. I'm Lynne Malcolm, thanks for your company, till next time.

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Some surprises from the updated results of a famous psychological test involving marshmallows-and, when it comes to mood and happiness, teens of today may be on the brink of a mental health crisis-due to the widespread use of smart technology.

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And here is a great interview with Jaron Lanier

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And here is a great interview with Jaron Lanier

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in addition to the review of his book, which is posted below...

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Jaron Lanier’s case for deleting social media right now | The Ezra Klein Show

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An Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport has also written multiple books about improving performance at school and in the workplace.

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Does quitting social media make you an unemployable Luddite? Computer scientist Dr. Cal Newport doesn't think so. In this eye-opening talk, he debunks three objections commonly offered up as rationale for keeping that all-important Facebook account.

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Frederic Laloux - Reinventing Organizations 

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Frederic Laloux - Reinventing Organizations 

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RSA Replay: How to Become a Soulful Organisation

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Ezra Klein brings you far-reaching conversations about hard problems, big ideas, illuminating theories, and cutting-edge research. Want to know how Mark Zuckerberg intends to govern Facebook? What Barack Obama regrets in Obamacare? The dangers Yuval Harari sees in our future? What Michael Pollan learned on psychedelics? The lessons Bryan Stevenson learned freeing the wrongly convicted on death row? The way N.K. Jemisin imagines new worlds? This is the podcast for you. Produced by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

When we talk about the future of work, we usually focus on artificial intelligence, robotics, driverless cars. The future of work, we're told, is a future where humans cease to be necessary.

Ai-jen Poo wants to refocus that conversation. When we think about the future of work, she says, we need to think about care workers. Home care work - caring for the elderly and for children - is the fastest-growing occupation in the entire workforce, expanding at five times the rate of any other job. By the year 2030, child care and elder care jobs will be our economy's single largest occupation. If you're talking about the future of work and you're not talking about care work, you're doing it wrong.

Poo is a MacArthur "genius" grant-winning activist and organizer. She began her career in New York City, organizing domestic workers, and eventually lobbied New York state to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Thanks to her efforts, seven other states have now passed similar legislation.

Today, Poo is the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the co-director of Caring Across Generations, and the author of The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. In this episode, we talk about how she managed to organize a population of workers that spend most of their lives behind closed doors, why she calls herself a "futurist," and the central paradox of care work in America - that the folks who care for those we love are often the most undervalued and least protected.

Books:

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

Year of Yes by Shonda Rimes,

My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem

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Ai-jen Poo: the future of work isn't robots. It's caring humans.

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When we talk about the future of work, we usually focus on artificial intelligence, robotics, driverless cars. The future of work, we're told, is a future where humans cease to be necessary. Ai-jen Poo wants to refocus that conversation. When we think about the future of work, she says, we need to think about care workers.

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"No single paper is that good", says Bryan Caplan. To really understand a topic, you need to read the entire literature in the field. And to do the kind of scholarship Bryan's work requires, you need to cover multiple fields. Only that way can you assemble a wide variety of evidence into useful knowledge.

But few scholars ever even try to reach the enlightened interdisciplinary plane. So how does he do it?

Tyler explores Bryan's approach, including how to avoid the autodidact's curse, why his favorite philosopher happens to be a former classmate, what Tolstoy has that science fiction lacks, the idea trap, most useful wrong beliefs, effective altruism, Larry David, what most economics papers miss about the return to education, and more.
Listen to the full conversation Read the full transcript
TYLER COWEN: I'm here today with Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, a very good friend of mine, a moral man. Each of his last three books has made a major impact, most recently, the best-selling The Case against Education. Welcome, Bryan.

BRYAN CAPLAN: Thanks so much for having me, buddy.

On writing papers and books

COWEN: Let me start with a sentence you uttered to me a week ago. You said to me, "No single paper is that good."

CAPLAN: [laughs]

COWEN: What did you mean by that?

CAPLAN: What I meant by that is that if you look at any individual piece, in social science specifically, it's very hard to see that a reasonable person would fundamentally change their mind based upon any one of them.

People often have an idea of, there's the really good papers where you should have a mind quake, and you never see the world again in the same way after that. For me, all of them fail to measure up to that standard. I think the way that you really learn something is by reading a vast empirical literature.

The direct cause of this was . . . I think Noah Smith had a challenge: "Name the two or three papers on each topic that are really convincing." I was thinking about that and said, "Honestly, I can't think of any papers like that unless you're going to cheat and count a literature view as being that kind of a paper."

Just realizing that the way that you actually achieve social science knowledge isn't by finding the one crucial - might be a natural experiment that shows exactly how the world works - but by assembling a wide variety of evidence and then muddling through.

COWEN: So, say you write an interdisciplinary chapter for one of your books. Tell us a little more of how you do this and how you calibrate what you're reading against actual reality.

CAPLAN: My procedure, which I've been pursuing more and more as I go along, is first of all, I start with the big topic. I'm usually using Google Scholar to try and find what has anyone written on this big topic? I go through the first 20 or 30 pages of Google Scholar views, but then that to me just gives you a ballpark of what's really going on.

Then I try to subdivide every topic into lots of separate subtopics, and then repeat that same process of going through Google Scholar just to see what is it that almost anyone has said about this topic. When I actually get the papers, then I actually will go and look at the references and see if there's more stuff that I should be looking at here.

I get those papers and go back to Google Scholar, and eventually the process does converge. I do have some stopping rules. I generally don't worry too much about empirical papers written before 1980.

COWEN: You also then email the people who've done this research, right?

CAPLAN: Mm-hmm.

COWEN: Tell us about that.

CAPLAN: When I'm going through and reading papers, oftentimes I'll find that there's something I don't understand very well or something that seems questionable. Usually, as long as the authors are living, I do try to actually reach out to them and get clarifications.

The next thing is when I've got what I think is a good, solid draft of a book. That's where I enlist my RA and say, "Get me all the emails of all the living people I've cited in the book so far," and then email all of them with two offers.

One of them is an offer to show them the entire manuscript. The other one - so that I'm not over on the far right side of the Laffer curve  - is to say, "Or, if you're busy, then I could just tell you the exact pages where I discuss your works, so at least you can tell me whether I'm accurately summarizing your work or not."

For me, what I do is so interdisciplinary so I'm always worried about this autodidact's curse, where you've read a ton of stuff but you still haven't actually talked to anyone who knows what's going on. This is one of the things that I try to do to deal with especially the wisdom of a field. Oftentimes there's wisdom in a field, where it's known to people who have thought about it for a long time, but they don't write it down.

What I do is so interdisciplinary so I'm always worried about this autodidact's curse, where you've read a ton of stuff but you still haven't actually talked to anyone who knows what's going on. This is one of the things that I try to do to deal with especially the wisdom of a field. Oftentimes there's wisdom in a field, where it's known to people who have thought about it for a long time, but they don't write it down.

Of course, that's very hard for the autodidact to find out. "What is the wisdom in your field that you don't write down?" This is where I try to reach out to people. Generally, I would say I get about a 15 percent response rate for the people saying they'll at least read something, so I feel like it does give me some good quality control.

COWEN: One area you've read a lot in, but I think never quite focused on, is personality psychology. What's the most interesting thing you've learned from personality psychology?

CAPLAN: I do have one paper on this, " Stigler-Becker versus Myers-Briggs." Let's see . . . the single most interesting thing about personality psychology . . . At least one thing that might be a good answer is that cheerfulness loads on extroversion.

There's something actually very social about happiness. When you read this, it makes so much sense - how little of happiness seems to be about material possessions and how much of it is about having good relationships with other people.

You can think about animals. When I read you something about animals, the animals that laugh, they're all social animals. Dogs laugh, chimpanzees laugh, humans laugh. You never hear about a tiger laughing, these very asocial animals. At least that's one that I often do think about, is this connection between social interaction and being happy.

On how Bryan Caplan became Bryan Caplan

COWEN: Now let's go back in time a bit and try to figure out, how did Bryan Caplan come to be Bryan Caplan? You grew up in the Valley north of Los Angeles in a town called Northridge. How did that specific location influence you and help shape what you've become?

CAPLAN: I know that you like to say that I'm a regional thinker, just like all people are regional thinkers. When I go back, it's easier to see what was going on. Honestly, no offense to my friends out in Northridge, but when I get there, it's like, "Wow, this is such an intellectual wasteland. No one wants to talk about ideas out here."

There's no curiosity. It's so insular, where people just are not curious, even what's going on outside of the state of California. It's not like we only care about America. Californians talk about California all the time.

When you read the newspapers there, it's like, "What's happening in California?" To me, it's a lot like when you're in Canada, everybody's always like, "What's happening in Canada?" Well, why is that important?

This navel-gazing aspect of Californians - I see a lot of what I'm doing as reacting against that and being very intellectually curious and very interested in the world.

Although, not so much to me it's a reaction. It does explain why I felt so dissatisfied growing up. Remember, this is before the internet, so to go to the library and be able to get a good stack of books was the best that you could do in those days for intellectual enrichment.

I really do envy my kids for what a cornucopia of wonder that they have if they want a feast for the mind.

Honestly, no offense to my friends out in Northridge, but when I get there, it's like, "Wow, this is such an intellectual wasteland. No one wants to talk about ideas out here."

There's no curiosity. It's so insular, where people just are not curious, even what's going on outside of the state of California. It's not like we only care about America. Californians talk about California all the time.

COWEN: Michael Huemer. Who is he? And why is he important, especially for you, but not only?

CAPLAN: Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I actually met him my freshman year at Berkeley when we were both undergraduates in Paul Feyerabend 's Ancient Philosophy class, which, by the way, is the only class so bad I ever just stopped attending.

[laughter]

CAPLAN: Because he just didn't talk about ancient philosophy. He only wanted to talk about action at a distance, and how that is possible.

Anyway, I met Michael Huemer there, and out of all philosophers, he came to have the biggest influence on me. There were many issues that I was grappling with, a lot of it under the influence of Ayn Rand, where the more I learned in philosophy, the more dissatisfied I became, and yet I couldn't think of anything else that made any sense.

Mike Huemer, as a student, wrote a bunch of essays that said, "Wow, this seems like it really actually solves a fundamental problem of philosophy in a way that's so much more satisfying than any of the others."

He was a big influence to me there, and then over time, he really built on this. He now has this amazing corpus of work.

For politics, he has this book, The Problem of Political Authority, which out of all the books of libertarian philosophy - almost every single one, if there were some nonlibertarian who said, "What's a good book to read?" I'd be kind of embarrassed to give them the book because "Here it is, but . . ." It's not really very convincing to someone that doesn't already agree.

I think what's great about this book, and really all of Mike's work, is he always tries to start off with premises that make sense to people that don't already agree, and then try to get somewhere. And the amazing thing is, he does get places, actually.

COWEN: A lot of people who grow up young with what you might call nerdy interests, they read a lot of science fiction, and you don't seem to have been very interested in science fiction. You were intensely interested in learning about Joseph Stalin and the history of communism.

What's the fundamental feature in Bryan Caplan-think that has made you, unlike most other nerds, so much more interested in Stalin than science fiction?

CAPLAN: [laughs] Let's see. Well, I'll say, I was very interested in dictatorship from a young age.

COWEN: And this comes from growing up in Northridge, right?

[laughter]

CAPLAN: I don't think so. I had a lot of bad attitudes as a kid.

CAPLAN: Yeah.

COWEN: Like what?

CAPLAN: Like I read a book about dictators, and honestly, I have to say, I was reading and saying, "Oh, this is so cool, getting to be a dictator." There was a lot of pent-up hostility and resentment towards things as they were.

Reading it, it's like, "If only I could be one of these bloodthirsty tyrants, then everyone . . ." Terrible, but that's the honest truth of it.

Even when I got to fifth grade, I read this big book. It was like 10 biographies of different dictators. When I really got interested, though, I was very interested in European history, when I was in the 11th grade. I put a lot of time in reading that.

It was only later, actually, when I got into libertarianism that I became interested in first of all, not being a dictator, and going, "Oh my God, these people were actually terrible."

Yeah, everybody knew that. I kind of knew it, but at the same time, it was sort of like someone who reads through a crime where on the one hand, you know that it's terrible, but on the other hand, it's like, "Oh, but he's so clever. He almost got away with it."

When I became interested in libertarianism, then became interested in the exact opposite and what that's like. And that's where Stalin is, of course, a focal figure as, at least up until his time, the most totalitarian leader in human history - someone who combined an ideology, rationalizing it with a personality that actually craved it, combined the technology that allowed it to really be done in practice.

That got me really excited. In terms of why that rather than science fiction, I guess for me, the main thing about most science fiction is it lacks - not all of it but most of it - it lacks what I call emotional truth, where there's just not a lot of interest in the inner lives of the characters. To me, that's the interesting thing about any story, is the inner lives of the characters.

COWEN: You love Tolstoy, right?

CAPLAN: Yeah. You love Tolstoy because here's a guy who not only has this encyclopedic knowledge of human beings - you say he knows human nature. Tolstoy knows human natures. He realizes that there are hundreds of kinds of people, and like an entomologist, he has the patience to study each kind on its own terms.

Tolstoy, you read it: "There are 17 kinds of little old ladies. This was the 13th kind. This was the kind that's very interested in what you're eating but doesn't wish to hear about your romance, which will be contrasted with the seventh kind which has exactly the opposite preferences." That's what's to me so great about Tolstoy.

To me, pure genre fiction has no appeal. Especially anyone who ever tells me that science fiction is good because it's scientifically accurate, this is where, "Oh god, that's the best you can say for it is that there's no sound in space?"

Wouldn't you much rather watch a space opera where the characters have a rich inner life and where there's drama and where the storytelling sucks you in and makes you care whether the character is disintegrated than whether the character disintegrates in a scientifically correct way?

COWEN: When did you build the Museum of Communism? Tell us what that is.

CAPLAN: I did this in graduate school when I didn't want to do my real work. I spent a lot of time - not just in undergraduate but in graduate school - reading stuff that was totally, at least mostly, a waste of time careerwise. I was just really interested in it. I had a passion for it.

You have to remember these are the very early years of the internet, when all the suppressed urges that I had to go and pontificate suddenly had an outlet. If the internet existed when I was in high school, I might have actually failed out of high school because I would have put so much energy into creating web pages, like "This is my take on each of these different topics."

The first time that the web was working well enough where you could actually do this - at least where I had enough knowledge to make it work - was 1993, 1994. Then to me, I put, I think, more time into my internet projects than into my actual studies, counting class time and everything else.

If the internet existed when I was in high school, I might have actually failed out of high school because I would have put so much energy into creating web pages, like "This is my take on each of these different topics."

So the Museum of Communism - this is one where I wanted to go and put together all of my thoughts about the history of communism. I would say that's it's maybe 7 percent done. Almost all that 7 percent was done during my graduate school years, the parts that actually I really completed.

I had sections on the Marxist and czarist origins of communism, which is building on a rich historical literature. Obviously, there's the Marxist roots but then people saying that there's a lot of continuities with czarism. That made a lot of sense to me in sort of thinking of Lenin as being the Marxist czar of all the Russias.

Then I had a FAQ, frequently asked questions, where I went over what was known about the numbers at the time. Since then, I've learned quite a bit more about the numbers, especially numbers for deaths in the gulag seem in the literature at the time overstated by quite a bit.

But I've never gone back and updated. Obviously, that would be something that I would do, is bring it up to date with better data that we've got now.

On the bias towards action

COWEN: Now let's turn to your new book, The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. One theme you stress throughout are the costs of excess credentialism.

To be hired as a bartender, maybe it's a real advantage to have a college degree. This encourages too many people to go to college. At the same time, there seems to be a waste of talent and a lot of bureaucracy and paper credentials, hard to get second chances, and so on.

What deeper disease about our society do you think excess credentialism reflects? That is, if you try to explain it almost as an anthropologist, like here's why we're really so screwed up to have done this, what's your answer?

CAPLAN: At least a big part of it is what psychologists call action bias and the idea that we just ought to do something. People take a look at the world, and they see, look, there's a bunch of people that don't have very good jobs. There's a bunch of kids from those families. It seems like they're probably going to turn out like their parents. Let's do something about it.

Let's go and create a big education system and encourage everyone to spend as many years as possible in the system. Then in the end, of course, the hope is that this will lead to not just social mobility, but to a whole society where almost everyone has a really good job.

Yet again, if my book is right, the main result seems to be not that everyone gets good jobs, or at least every college graduate gets a good job, but rather employers ratchet up the educational expectations to be considered worthy to be a secretary or to be a bartender at a nice bar.

COWEN: You think, in our society in general, this action bias infests everything? Or is there some reason why it's drawn like a magnet to education?

CAPLAN: Action bias primarily drives government. For individuals, I think even there there's some action bias. But nevertheless, for the individual, there is the cost of just going and trying something that's not very likely to succeed, and the connection with the failure and disappointment, and a lot of things don't work out.

There's a lot of people who would like to start their own business, but they don't try because they have some sense that it's really hard.

What I see in government is, there isn't the same kind of filter, which is a big part of my work in general in politics. You don't have the same kind of personal disincentives against doing things that sound good but actually don't work out very well in practice.

Probably even bigger than action bias is actually what psychologists call social desirability bias: just doing things that sound good whether or not they actually work very well and not really asking hard questions about whether things that sound good will work out very well in practice.

Again, I think of this as primarily a disease of government because it's so based upon what people say rather than trying to do a comparison between what we thought was going to happen and how things actually turned out.

COWEN: But your book on parenting - that also criticizes action bias. Parents think they need to do all kinds of things. They actually don't. It's not just government. It's like we all as human beings . . .

The Straussian version of the Caplanian themes is the whole world is infested with action bias and that if you understand action bias at a deep level for decisive actions . . . For nondecisive actions, rational irrationality kicks in. You have two blades, the scissors. You put them together, and you can then explain a 2018. Yes, no?

CAPLAN: That sounds oversimplified. You are right that parents feeling like it's really important for them to do things . . . When they don't do things, this is going to mess their kids up.

I think that is a big part of what makes parenting so unpleasant in the modern US - the sense of "If I'm not acting all the time to go and help my kids, then I'm a failure, and my kids will be failures."

I think there is a lot more going on than just those things. In general, my work is . . . Unlike, say, Robin, I do have a resistance to monocausal things and explanations that seem like they're overbroad. I do try to narrow it down and think about one thing at a time.

My general view is, you get a better general theory of things if you work on a lot of particular issues first and then step back, like we're doing now, and say, "Are there some commonalities?"

On signaling and the return to education

COWEN: Am I correct in thinking that a lot of existing papers on the social return to education or the private return, they neglect the fact that a high percentage of students drop out?

CAPLAN: Yeah, actually, this is, in fact, there's maybe about seven papers in economics that specifically interact completion probability with the rate of return.

COWEN: Out of how many would be the total pool roughly?

CAPLAN: Thousands.

COWEN: Only seven.

CAPLAN: Yeah.

COWEN: What causes that bias to come about?

CAPLAN: Here's the key thing. There's a lot of papers on completion probability, but they are generally segregated from the rate of return. A lot of people try to figure out, how can we get completion probability up?

Of course, the reason, if you're saying, "Well, why do you want to get completion probability up?" For an economist, "Well, so we can get the expected rate of return up." Meanwhile, over in the realm where they're doing the rate of return, they usually do it the wrong way, which is by looking at the payoffs for people who successfully complete.

The most superficial story is just that people do it because the data is constructed that way. Because normally, the measure of education that economists use asks, "What is the highest number of years of school that you have successfully completed?" Then they just run the regression and kind of forget exactly what the measure even is.

I think this does reflect a general pro-education bias, especially among people or economists who work in education - labor economists, education economists - where they just aren't looking that hard for reasons that education might be overrated.

COWEN: How much does noncompletion risk lower the return to education? How much does this bias matter?

CAPLAN: Wow, so, let's see. Of course, it varies a lot by the level. For high school, then, it's modest, so maybe reducing it by something like 30 percent. But on the other hand, for college, where the completion probability is a lot lower than it is for high school, then I think reducing it by 40, maybe even 50 percent.

Again, it's one where there's nonlinearity, and so it's hard just to do the simple back of the envelope. But the thing to remember is not only - the on-time completion rate for full-time students doing four-year degrees, something like 40 percent.

COWEN: And overall . . .

CAPLAN: The key to remember is, since there's also this big literature on the sheepskin effect, saying that a lot of payoff for college - most of the payoff - comes from graduation year. This means that if you only get three years, you don't get three-fourths of the payoff, you get maybe 15 percent of the payoff.

COWEN: Overall, if we look at higher education - just the first four years, or one hopes that it is four years - what percentage of that time do you think is best explained by the signaling hypothesis?

CAPLAN: My general best guess overall is about 80 percent. In the book, I actually use a constant number, at least for high school on. It's one where, on the one hand, it seems like there's more obviously useless things in college, but on the other hand, you're also more likely to find a major that will tie into your actual job.

So, at least it's not obvious to me that the right number is different from 80 percent, so that's what I'll go with.

COWEN: What do you think is your single best piece of evidence for your view that it's 80 percent?

CAPLAN: Let's see . . .

COWEN: Or just for your view that it's high, not exactly 80.

CAPLAN: The single best piece of evidence there is just to look at the curriculum. There's data on how people actually spend their time in high school, broken down by course material. For college, there isn't the same kind of data, but there is data on just the distribution of majors.

Again, just to see the small amount of K-12 time spent on any kind of studying that seems plausibly to be future job related. Then similarly, in college, you see just these - the rareness of majors that are plausibly vocational.

There's a lot of people saying, "Well, I mean, hardly anyone is doing your traditional humanities anymore. There are not many people doing history or English anymore."

Again, that doesn't mean they're switching to STEM. They're switching to things more like communications where, at first glance, you might think it's vocational until you realize how few jobs there are in that field compared to the number of people that are graduating with that major every year.

COWEN: Now let me put on the table a number of reasons why some people, including, often, myself, haven't agreed with you as to why signaling is so important. I'll give you the last word in each case.

CAPLAN: [laughs]

COWEN: I'm just going to go through a bunch of these. If we look at, say, Singapore and South Korea, they have maintained world-leading positions for their economies, often in fairly advanced areas. Could they have done anything like this with, say, the levels of education they had in 1980?

CAPLAN: Yeah, I think that I don't see what the problem would have been at all. Most of the education they're getting is stuff that they're not going to be using in their jobs. They may have a higher percentage in STEM, so it may not be as wasteful as what we're doing.

The material that they actually are studying in school is not very related to the job, and the way that people get good at their jobs in those countries, just like almost any country, is learning by doing. The main thing going on is that they are spending years jumping through hoops in order to finally be allowed.

Normally, I hate it when people go and find one new story as proof of something. But there was a recent one from South Korea so vivid, where even if you say that it is cherry picked, still, that such a cherry exists says something.

This was a story about, the government in South Korea wanted to hire four janitors, and most of the applicants had college degrees. In the end, they hired three BAs and one AA to be janitors there. This disease of credential inflation seems to be serious in countries where people think of education as something that's central to their success. I don't think so.

COWEN: We would all agree, most workers don't go back to school. Some do, of course, but most of them don't. But wages change a lot over the course of a worker's lifetime. If the signal from education is fixed and then wages are changing for many decades, doesn't most of the wage story have to be human capital theory rather than signaling theory?

CAPLAN: Of course, the obvious story for change is just that people are acquiring more experience.

You could have a strong version of the signaling model where you have an idea about, first of all, average productivity, and then you have an idea about average productivity gain, and then there's not much connection at all. I don't think that 's right.

What I would say is, it is reasonable to think the signaling share goes down over time, and there is evidence this is so. However, how quickly does it go down and by how much? That's where - there is a whole literature called the employer learning statistical discrimination literature where they do try to measure this.

The usual view there is that, at minimum, you're talking about a 10-year wait before you start getting reasonable credit even for your IQ, which is one of the easiest and most observable, most testable traits that employers value. So it makes perfect sense to me, there's a lot of other traits where it may take a very long time.

Furthermore, as I say in the book, if the model of actual employment in the real world were, "Hire someone, see if they're good, and then if they're not as good as you thought, fire them," then I think your story'd make a lot more sense.

There's even a special word for this in what I call the termination community, the group of people who specialize in firing. They call this de-hiring. We're not firing you, we're de-hiring you. We're encouraging you to find an opportunity elsewhere where you can become somebody else's problem.

The way that actual jobs usually work is, when you get someone who's disappointing, they have to be really bad to get fired unless there's a recession. If you do want to get rid of them, it's much more common for there to be a little conspiracy between the bad employee and the employer to help the bad employee get another job someplace else.

As I found doing the research of the book, there's even a special word for this in what I call the termination community, the group of people who specialize in firing. They call this de-hiring. We're not firing you, we're de-hiring you. We're encouraging you to find an opportunity elsewhere where you can become somebody else's problem.

Once you realize this is actually a big part of the modern labor market, the idea that someone could basically go from one job where they're a burden to another job where they're a burden to another one.

COWEN: Let me pursue this speed-of-learning question because it's important. Let's say you've hired someone, or you have a new colleague, or you have a new coauthor. How long does it take you to figure out how good they are?

CAPLAN: Yes. Hmm. For my own purposes, that's easy because for me, the main value of a colleague is lunch.

[laughter]

COWEN: So it takes one lunch.

CAPLAN: Because I'm judging, one lunch is . . .

COWEN: Steve Pearlstein started coming to our lunches, and you were telling me within a week how great he was, right?

CAPLAN: Yes.

COWEN: And you have not wavered since.

For me, the main value of a colleague is lunch.

CAPLAN: Yes, because there's not a lot of inference in what I care about. On the other hand, if you're an employer running a business, it's not primarily about whether you like the person, although that's important, too. It's what they actually contribute to productivity. There's issues with figuring out how much someone is part of a team.

Again, the key thing out of this whole literature on actual firing and de-hiring is that, even after the employer has full information, this does not mean it's going to be reflected in wages anytime soon. That can take a lot longer.

Because - and people don't like firing, and they often conspire to help a worker that they don't like to get another job where, once again, they're overpaid. Then the way that actual pay is handed out, again, it's very unusual to do an absolute pay cut, so really very unusual to even give a person zero raise if other people are getting raises.

These are all things that really slow things down. So even after you've handled the purely intellectual problem of how good is the person, there's this other problem of, right, how quickly does the system actually react to it? And how well does that information disperse throughout the system?

COWEN: Talk me out of this dilemma. If the speed of learning is very quick - let's say you know in three months how good a worker is - it seems implausible that you would need 12-plus years of schooling to learn the same thing.

If the speed of learning is very slow - let's say you need 10 years to figure out who's good and who isn't - then it seems educational signaling is actually highly productive because it helps you slot the better workers into the better jobs. So you can kind of pick your poison, but you've got to choose somewhere on the spectrum.

Either way, it seems the cost of signaling won't quite be that high. Or am I wrong?

CAPLAN: Yeah, you're wrong. Let's just take for granted that at the end of three months, any employer can know the truth about any worker.

There's still a big problem, which is, what has to happen before you can work for someone for three months? You have to be hired. What has to happen before you're hired? You have to actually stand out in an interview.

What has to happen to stand out in the interview? You have to get interviewed. What has to happen to get interviewed? You have to have your résumé not thrown in the trash.

I think of a lot of what people are signaling is just, they're signaling to get opportunities. They're signaling to get a time to actually talk to the employer and convince them that they are worthy.

I really much like the analogy of getting your big break in Hollywood. There are a lot of actors right now, I think, who are really good. But until they actually get a chance to star in a movie, it's very hard for them to convince anyone that they have this talent.

They can go and show up to try to get an audition, but again, just to get enough of people's attention to show them and to get them to put the energy into you.

Remember, hiring people is really expensive. You're taking the time of some of the most valuable employees at a firm, who are the people who need to be there to judge whether a person's good enough, and you are distracting them.

Think about this: Say you've hired somebody who's a disappointment. At what percentile does someone have to be before it even is profitable just to fire them and then go back to the drawing broad?

Obviously, somebody's in the 45th percentile of expectation, you don't want to fire them and go back to the drawing board. Maybe you want to go back, like maybe the 30th, the 25th percentile is there.

Obviously, this is about the big cost of hiring someone and just sorting them out at that stage. The fact that employers are not in the business of giving chances, they're in the business of making money. Chances are expensive to hand out.

COWEN: The other Straussian reading of Caplan: Is it just labor markets work very, very poorly? Yes, no?

CAPLAN: They work a lot more poorly than a lot of economists think. And they work poorly in different ways than economists think. There's sort of a standard list that economists have of ways that labor markets are messed up.

The more times people talk efficiency wages, that's the real problem. How about the problem of employers don't want to fire people who are incompetent? How about that problem? It's not one that sounds very good, but it's one that I think is very serious.

Or again, for all the talk that people have about discouraged workers and how unemployment rates understate the severity of the unemployment problems, they're ignoring discouraged workers.

I always remember, "Sure, but what about the megalomaniacal workers?" The workers that think they're too good for any job for which they're actually qualified for, and they keep searching around and staying in the numbers, even though it would be like me claiming to be an unemployed brain surgeon. I'm not an unemployed brain surgeon; I'm not a brain surgeon at all.

In general, the world's more complicated. Especially, the problem here is that the behavioral economics revolution, or like psychology in economics, does not really enter labor economics nearly as much as it should.

Especially like economists, when they do psychology, they only read a few parts of psychology, and there's a bunch of other areas they just don't pay much attention to that I think also are leading to some tough results.

Again, of course, this doesn't mean that you don't have government policies that are amplifying a problem. Sure, any time you have human beings dealing with each other face to face, there's going to be things that are badly screwed up.

COWEN: Let me ask a very general question, trying to put together your thought as a whole. You're saying, across a lot of margins in terms of learning, formal education doesn't matter that much, right? It matters for signaling.

Also, in your book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, you're saying, at least within certain margins of acceptable behavior, parenting doesn't matter that much. You believe in both of these two views. Schooling doesn't matter that much. Parenting doesn't matter that much.

CAPLAN: Sure.

COWEN: So the way social customs are carried forward today compared to 1910 or 1950, something has changed that. It's not parenting, and it's not schools. So again, the deep Straussian reading of Bryan Caplan - what is it?

CAPLAN: In terms of the economy, a big part of how people get good at their jobs is just by practice, like I said. A major difference between practicing today and practicing 100 years ago is there's better kinds of practice to emulate.

In terms of the economy, a big part of how people get good at their jobs is just by practice. A major difference between practicing today and practicing 100 years ago is there's better kinds of practice to emulate.

COWEN: But not "good at their jobs," just social mores, customs. Parenting and schooling in your take don't matter so much. Something is changing these that is mostly not parenting and not schooling. And they are changing quite a bit, right?

CAPLAN: Yes.

COWEN: Is it like all technology? Is the secret reading of Bryan Caplan that you're a technological determinist?

CAPLAN: I don't think so. In general, not a determinist of any kind.

COWEN: I was teasing about that.

CAPLAN: Yeah. Much prefer multicausal theory or polycausal theories to what's going on.

I would say in terms of why modern culture has changed these ways, the story of just people are richer, and that makes a big difference. I think there's a lot to that. Just the way that people are much more freaked out about taking chances with their lives - that seems to me to be a big part of being in a rich society where you just have a lot to lose.

Also, you can live comfortably without risking your life. Just being a richer society, I think that matters a lot.

In terms of other things that seem changed, just the much greater availability of entertainment - this is something that I think has replaced a lot of things that people were doing in earlier periods. I think the wide availability of entertainment probably explains a lot of religious decline.

COWEN: And it beats the influence of parents in some ways.

CAPLAN: Yeah. Another thing - this is something you can get out of Judith Harris  - is that it can be that individual parents don't matter. But if there's an entire generation of parents that are a certain way, that can matter a lot. And that wouldn't be picked up by standard empirical methods.

If you had a couple of weird parents today, then you might still turn out to be a normal member of adult society. But on the other hand, if you were raised in a society where all the parents were very different, probably a very different outcome.

I remember Judith Harris had an example in her book where there were some Orthodox Jewish parents who decided to move to Israel to live on a kibbutz because they said, "Look, as long as we're in America, we can't control our kids. We got to go to a place where all the kids are controlled by parents like this. So we have basically blocked out the outside world."

COWEN: Culture writ large really matters a lot; individual cultural decisions hardly matter at all. You're flipping the Ayn Rand story. It's really like the big macro aggregate that persuades people as expressed through entertainment, business practices, and wealth. But individualistic efforts, they're puny. They don't matter so much.

CAPLAN: I think Rand's view is actually very similar to mine. Remember, she was angry about the world because she thought that most people were heavily influenced by their cultures. That outraged her, that just because you grow up in the culture of Russia, that you're a Russian.

She's there saying, "No, I don't care where you are. You should be an Aristotelian. Doesn't matter you were born in Moscow or you had this background. We should all be reading the great works and the great minds, especially me," for her of course. Your background shouldn't matter very much.

In the end, the reason she wrote about this is, she looked around and saw that people are generally very conformist - Fountainhead, the "second-handers," the people who form their views of what is meaningful based upon looking around at others. She didn't write about this because she thought it was rare. She wrote about this because she thought it was normal but terrible.

I think very much at least in the same ballpark for me, I am very individualistic. Of course, if this were the normal thing, everyone else would be doing it. Then there wouldn't be anything special about me doing it. In a way, if you don't think the culture's really important, it's hard to be an individualist because then you aren't different from other people.

On fixing schooling

COWEN: Now let's talk about education policy. Let's say we agree with your basic take on education: There's educational failures. There are connected labor market failures. And the question is what should we do about this?

What if someone came to you and said, "Well, take South Korea. Government there spends relatively little subsidizing higher ed. But signaling costs are high. In Germany, the whole system is more or less free. People go on strike if they're asked to pay 10 marks or 10 euros a semester. And in Germany, a lot of the universities are mediocre. But the German economy does fine. So isn't the solution to too much signaling, in a sense, nationalize the sector and lower quality and get people less interested in it?"

CAPLAN: I think this is a classic case where there's multiple omitted variables. When someone says, "Look, the government funds it all, but they don't spend very much. So the way to get spending down is for government to increase spending" - I think that is one of the strangest inferences I've heard in social science.

Government spending is generally going to be piled on top of whatever other spending is there. We see that there's countries where the total spending is low, but government's spending it all. I wouldn't say that shows that government spending reduces spending. I'd say that government is spending in countries where otherwise the private demand would have been lower on its own.

Fun fact: it seems like the US spends as much as a share of GDP on Medicare plus Medicaid taking care of a small part of the population as a lot of other countries do taking care of the whole population.

So you might look and say, "Wouldn't it be great if we just did what other countries did?" I say, "Well, is what other countries do to spend in an American style for everybody? Or is it to go and spend in the style of other countries on everybody?"

I think what would happen in the US, or really almost any country that were to follow your advice, is that they would just have even more spending. Especially the US. If the US took socialized medicine, we wouldn't even have Medicaid for all. We would have Medicare for all. Americans would be horrified at the idea of anyone getting anything less than the very best treatment, and the cry of death panels has enormous resonance here.

Your general point: government subsidies increase spending. If it seems like they don't, it's probably because you haven't looked closely enough.

COWEN: Have K-12 vouchers underperformed? In general, how do you interpret that data?

CAPLAN: I would say yes. This actually barely appeared in my book because it was not really central to any of the topics I was talking about. But my understanding of research on K-12 vouchers is a lot of people thought that they would substantially raise standardized test scores. And it's hard to see a big gain there.

This is puzzling because it sure seems like there's way better ways to improve test scores, starting obviously with just teaching the test. Many people say people are teaching the test all the time. Whenever I actually look at my kid's schools, like, what are you talking about? There's three practice tests. If I wanted to teach the test, there would be a hundred practice tests. That's how I would handle it if you told me, "Get test scores up."

I think the main thing that we learn from this is that most parents don't care about test scores. When you give them a choice, they aren't looking around for the school that will raise kids' test scores the most.

They're looking around for other things. Part of it is just convenience or location. Probably another big part of it is whether the kids are happy. I think we agree this is actually one of the most undervalued benefits of school choice, just giving kids some options so that kids that are crying and miserable at one school can go and take that money and go to another school.

COWEN: If there's overinvestment in education, you talk about changing or getting rid of some subsidies. Could you imagine there being a role for government in making the signal more continuous or more convexified?

For instance, you could allow federal funds for certificates rather than just degree programs. You could imagine governmental nudges to give people a three-year option, a two-year option. There are a lot of one-year alternatives to colleges popping up the way two-year community college could be treated.

There seems to be a lot we could do but maybe aren't doing to create or produce signaling options that waste fewer resources. What should we do there?

CAPLAN: What I would say is definitely worth some experiments. When you're spending an enormous amount of money, you can take off 2 percent of it, and then use standard social science random assignment to really learn something.

It's not as bad as there being a big literature saying that highlighting is totally ineffective for improving student learning. Yet almost every kid in America still has a highlighter. It's actually on the list of mandatory school supplies for Fairfax County: "You must have a highlighter." This is an item that science says you don't need. Yet everyone must have one to be at school.

It's been pointed out that a high percentage of government spending on healthcare is for medical research, but only a very small amount of education spending is for education research.

The main disappointment there is, despite all the education research, it seems like it's not very often actually used for any education policy. Medical research, you might have a similar pessimism, but I don't think it's as bad as that at least.

It's not as bad as there being a big literature saying that highlighting is totally ineffective for improving student learning. Yet almost every kid in America still has a highlighter. It's actually on the list of mandatory school supplies for Fairfax County: "You must have a highlighter." This is an item that science says you don't need. Yet everyone must have one to be at school.

On things under- and overrated

COWEN: Are you up for a round of overrated versus underrated?

CAPLAN: Absolutely.

COWEN: OK, let's start with effective altruism.

CAPLAN: Underrated.

COWEN: Why?

CAPLAN: In general, when people are thinking about charity, it's mostly about feelings. I hate to use the word, but it's a very artistic experience where people . . . It's the warm glow. "What is it? Does this make me feel good?"

I think effective altruism is all about, let's try to get some actual measures of how much good is being done and to raise the status of that. Rather than thinking of someone who asks, "How many lives is this going to save?" as being a Vulcan who doesn't really care about people, to reframe that. No, he's someone who cares a lot. That's what you would do if you actually cared about people.

I know that we talked about this. We blogged about it. I would just say, remember, most people have never heard of effective altruism, So it's totally underrated relative to almost anyone else. If you were to go and look at the main philanthropic societies in the United States, how many of them have ever heard of effective altruism? It's just some nerdy thing out in the Bay Area.

The general idea of trying to go and spend money in a way that does the most good and using science in order to accomplish that seems great. The idea that this isn't a generally good approach seems very odd to me. Of course, I do think that once you start thinking in this way, it also has all kinds of other good effects.

It makes you realize there's a bunch of things that people in politics are super concerned with that we should just never worry about again in a triage sense, that they're just so small that we've already spent more mental energy than we ever should. There's a bunch of other things hardly anyone worries about that we should think about a lot.

COWEN: Socrates, overrated or underrated?

CAPLAN: Underrated. Yes.

COWEN: Why?

CAPLAN: Because of the dialogues. This to me is a much better kind of philosophy. Most philosophy is really just a monologue. It's just a person going and rambling on, and most of them do ramble on without really trying to listen to the audience or think about what people in the audience would already know or find a starting point.

What Socrates does is, he's at least trying to go and talk to his philosophical opponents like they're human beings and find some common ground. "Let's find some premises that we both agree are, at least tentatively, a good starting point." The Socratic dialogues, out of all the stuff in ancient philosophy, I think that is close to the top of what I would enjoy reading to get something out of.

COWEN: Robin Hanson.

CAPLAN: Underrated, of course.

COWEN: But highly rated.

CAPLAN: Highly rated but still underrated. Just the sheer intellect of Robin is, for me, still hard to fathom. Just the way that I have told Robin stories that I've told a hundred other people, and only he notices a logical error in the story. That to me is super impressive. Just the sheer intellectual enthusiasm.

Even the topics - when he gets on what I think of as sci-fi topic, those are the parts where I am least happy. But again, if you just read the blog, the range of things that Robin has thought about is actually vast, just in terms of breadth and depth and just sheer curiosity.

I've said this quite a few times. When people get really mad at me, that doesn't bother me. When someone gets angry at Robin, this is what actually outrages me. I just want to say, "Look, to get angry at Robin is like getting angry at baby Jesus." He's just a symbol and embodiment of innocence and decency. For someone to get angry at someone who just wants to learn . . .

COWEN: And when they get mad at me?

CAPLAN: Eh, I understand that.

COWEN: Camping, overrated or underrated?

CAPLAN: Overrated.

COWEN: Why?

CAPLAN: Social desirability bias. It's getting back to nature and enjoying the great outdoors. But there's a lot of really unpleasant, uncomfortable things going on. I say you can get the good stuff out of the great outdoors while staying in a hotel. It is the kind of thing people think will work out a lot better than it actually does in practice.

That was actually almost the only vacation I had when I was a kid, was camping. I have some good memories but also a lot of bad things. Again, so much of the good stuff, we could have kept 90 percent of it while getting rid of the bad stuff by staying in a hotel.

COWEN: You're sent back in time to the year 527 AD. Let's assume you're good enough at learning languages. Where would you pick? And why?

CAPLAN: Wow, 527. Let's see. Probably Byzantium.

COWEN: Why?

CAPLAN: First of all, of course assuming you're good at languages, Greek as a Western language would be easier. I think that is actually the biggest city in the Western world at the time. It's the one where you'd still have at least a modest amount of Greek and Roman thought which has been preserved. Really center of civilization by that point.

That would be the place where you're most likely to have smart people around - there's things that you can do with your mind - and least likely to get ripped apart by barbarians.

COWEN: What would your job be? Once you've learned the languages.

CAPLAN: The temptation to become a government adviser under those circumstances would be painfully high. As to whether I could actually find some role there where I would not be morally horrified is a tough call.

If I could get away with just being a teacher, if I have what I know, then to actually go and found a school and teach economics 1,300 years before the rise of modern economics and try to jump-start the Industrial Revolution and economic growth and social science and everything else. Emotionally, that would have by far the strongest pull on me.

If that weren't available, then there's room in business, banking, moneylending, shipping. I think I could learn those. Wouldn't be thrilled. But it beats rowing an oar.

On Capalanian aesthetics

COWEN: Here's a general question I have for you about what you might call a Caplanian approach to things. It starts with aesthetics, but maybe it doesn't end there.

If I think about some of the things you like or love, I think of, say, 18th century classical music, Wagnerian opera, certain traditions within graphic novels, a number of TV shows - one would be Ali G -  Chinese opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, Larry David. You could add much more to the list.

It's always seemed to me there's a broadly consistent pattern behind all those tastes. But I've never been able to put my finger on what it is. Now that we're all here today, I would like for you to tell me what that pattern is. What's the common theme?

CAPLAN: For me, I feel like I have to start between splitting the comedy off from everything else. The comedy seems to be very different.

But for everything else, for anything that presents itself as serious art, for me what I would say is, I like what some people love. If there is something where there's a group of fanatical, devoted people who say, "This is the best thing in the world," those are the kinds of things where at least I'll say, "I want to try that. I want to see what that's like."

A lot of times when I do this, I'll say, "Wow, the people who fanatically love it are right. This is wonderful. There's so much going on. You could spend a lifetime on this."

I remember once you described some Bach oratorio as chaff. I said, "Bach doesn't have any chaff." There's no piece of Bach, no oratorio I couldn't properly spend a month on.

For me, anything, especially anything where it's produced by someone who is a megalomaniac, who feels like what they're doing is fantastic . . . I think about Wagner's term for his work, the Gesamtkunstwerk, the complete artwork.

"I, Richard Wagner, have composed the music. I've done the libretto. I've done the stagings. I've done the casting, everything. This is all a reflection of me, Richard Wagner." Those are the kinds of things that pull me in.

I remember once I was just wandering past opening day for The Hunger Games, which I was not particularly a fan of. But just to see a bunch of people who are in love with something, I was happy just looking at them loving this thing in a way that when I see someone half watching a sitcom while doing something else, that's the kind of thing that depresses me.

I just want to go and shut it off. If it's worth watching, it's worth watching with 100 percent attention. If it doesn't motivate you that way, you need to find something else. Or else you might be wasting your whole aesthetic life!

I remember once I was just wandering past opening day for The Hunger Games and just to see a bunch of people who are in love with something, I was happy just looking at them loving this thing in a way that when I see someone half watching a sitcom while doing something else, that's the kind of thing that depresses me. I just want to go and shut it off. If it's worth watching, it's worth watching with 100 percent attention. If it doesn't motivate you that way, you need to find something else. Or else you might be wasting your whole aesthetic life!

COWEN: What should we infer from the fact that your sense of the comic is so segregated from the rest of your aesthetic, if it is?

CAPLAN: Yeah, that one is harder. If I were to go and try to list things that I like in comedy, a lot of them are very lowbrow. Like The Three Stooges is hilarious to me. If someone were to say, "But why is The Three Stooges better than a sitcom that you would turn your nose up at today?" I would have trouble having a really good answer.

The Three Stooges is sublimely stupid. They're taking the stupidity to a level that you or me or sitcom writers aren't capable of. Maybe you might say that it is just the extremism. Or the fact that just they take a joke and they run with the idea of a guy in a gorilla suit meeting an actual gorilla.

For me, comedy - it is much more idiosyncratic. I've said Shakespeare I love except the comedy, which just isn't very funny to me. I get the joke, but why especially is that funny?

You said comedy's more culturally specific. That does make sense to me. There is sort of a class of things that I almost certainly won't like, like whenever my dad emails me a thing of lawyer jokes. I do say, "Look, if you find it funny, good odds I won't think it's funny because anyone can understand it." But if you say, "What about The Three Stooges?" All right, that isn't really a full theory.

COWEN: But that's almost becoming hermetic these days, The Three Stooges.

CAPLAN: Hopefully.

COWEN: I was sent this question earlier this morning. I quote: "What are the most socially valuable delusions or shared erroneous beliefs?"

CAPLAN: That is a good one. Hmm. I am tempted to say something along the lines of God will punish you for bad behavior. But the problem is that's mixed in with - so many things of the bad behavior is actually good behavior and the good behavior is actually bad behavior that I'm not convinced that is all that socially useful.

Probably a better answer is the delusion that money will buy happiness. There is an enormous amount of progress that is caused by people desperately going and trying to get rich. I think the actual psychological evidence is the money won't actually lead to all that much happiness, but the things they produce are quite a bit more likely.

Probably, in terms of the most happiness-producing stuff, I would think may be actually in the arts, where so much of the stuff was produced by people where, if they just did a reasonable ex ante calculation, would have said, "This isn't worth it." But the reason why we have it is because they ignored the odds or overestimated themselves, so maybe that.

COWEN: A follow-up question from the same source, "Which mistaken shared beliefs would he like to see adopted?"

CAPLAN: [laughs] Hmm. Let's see. Probably the idea that there would be some kind of eternal, horrible punishment for holding power and not having a very high degree of epistemic rationality, especially if there were a view that God hates a politician who takes any action without calmly and studiously studying the facts, and that God will punish you in a way that voters never could.

God would punish you in a way that's far worse than the simple loss of power. If that were widely believed by people of power, I think there would be a lot more effort to actually double-check that what they're doing really makes sense. The Spiderman Principle  - with great power comes great responsibility.

If there were false beliefs in some enormous concrete sanctions for people that violated the Superman Principle, I think that would be a big gain.

COWEN: Our mutual colleague, Daniel Klein, writes to me a question: " Do direct and overall liberty ever disagree? What are the most likely or important areas of disagreement?"

CAPLAN: I was amazed that Dan would ask that. Of course direct and overall liberty disagree. If you could just go and kill baby Hitler, right? Kill baby Hitler - that's great for the freedom of the world, but he's just a baby. He hasn't done anything yet.

Or, more obviously, say in 1928, if the German government had just rounded up all the Nazis, or at least all the leading Nazis, and just executed them without trial, that would have been a big gain.

There was an incident around 1940, when the Romanian government just took all the leading brass in the Iron Guard, which was the main Romanian Fascist Movement. They had a lot of them in jail already, and without any warning at all, they just sent them out to a forest and they murdered them all.

I read that and I said, "Wow." Probably a bunch of these guys hadn't done anything yet, and yet . . . If you know how bad things were in Romania, if you know anything about the Iron Guard, I think it very likely would've been quite a bit worse.

There's a small number of power-hungry people where there's at least a moderate risk that they're eventually going to get to do what they want. Just to go and kill them preemptively, that's a tough one.

Of course, once you've got that, if we were to go and do censorship for people like that, that's another one of the more obvious ones.

On the idea trap

COWEN: You have a famous piece called " The Idea Trap." Could you outline how it might illuminate at least some parts of 2018?

CAPLAN: The motivation of the idea trap is twofold.

First of all, I had these empirical results out of public opinion that said pretty strongly and surprisingly that people who have higher income do not think more like economists, but people who either have experienced or expect higher income growth do think more like economists. So the level doesn't matter, but the change does.

Essentially, the more optimistic view seems to actually push people in this economist direction. So there is that fact in my mind.

And then there was also this big literature on non-convergence where, at least for a very long time, economists were expecting that poor countries would tend to catch up to rich countries. Then they looked at the data and weren't seeing it happening. Further, there's this literature saying at least a lot of the reason why this is happening is that countries that are poor just very persistently have bad policies.

So I took these three facts and said, "Let's come up with a little model. The model will have three variables, which we'll call growth, policy, and ideas."

The model will have the following laws of motion: Good ideas cause good policy, which is almost a tautology. Good policy causes good growth, and that's almost a tautology. And then the last thing is, how does growth affect ideas?

What I said is, there's a usual view that if you have bad growth, then people realize they're making mistakes, and then ideas get better. On the other hand, maybe if you're having good growth, people said, "We can afford to live a bit. We don't need to worry about this so much," so ideas get worse.

What I said is, there's a usual view that if you have bad growth, then people realize they're making mistakes, and then ideas get better. On the other hand, maybe if you're having good growth, people said, "We can afford to live a bit. We don't need to worry about this so much," so ideas get worse.

In that model, that actually gives you growth convergence, and basically, all countries tend to be mediocre. But I said if we tweak the models in light of that public opinion finding, where supposed good growth actually gives you good ideas, bad growth gives you bad ideas, this actually gives you a model of multiple equilibria, where you can have one equilibrium where everything is good.

You have good policy, good ideas, good growth all mutually supporting each other. Or you could have bad ideas, bad growth, bad policy all mutually supporting each other.

In terms of 2018, at least the story you might tell in a lot of countries is, there are countries that are in the bad equilibrium where, say, they've had some bad growth, which then led to bad ideas, which I generally in the paper equate with populism, leading then to populist policies.

2018 is not that great, just because the actual growth for most countries is good right now. It made more sense during the Great Recession when there was bad growth, and then there were a lot of kooky ideas coming around.

In a way, I would think of the last few years as cutting against my model because it seems like people are getting very angry and very populist when it's hard to even find what the supposed cause of it is.

COWEN: Maybe it's just your model with a 10-year lag, though. Is that possible?

CAPLAN: My general view is once you can put a 10-year lag into a model, then you really don't have much of a model. Then you really have an unfalsifiable mess.

The role that lags play in the model was to say, "Why is it the countries that have had good policy tend to keep it over longer runs, despite this?" And I said, "Well, if you have a good national intellectual organization, you probably have a higher chance of bouncing back to good ideas."

So a country like the US - if you had bad ideas in the '70s, just the fact that it has a better tradition makes it more likely that they will get back out of the bad equilibrium

Or like during the Great Depression, there's a revival of better ideas afterwards in a way that you wouldn't expect from a country that had never been any better.

COWEN: What is it that you understand about Stalin, at least possibly, that maybe most other economists would not?

CAPLAN: Wow. I think that probably the single best thing is that Stalin was, in his own way, a sincere Marxist-Leninist. The ideology is not just a rationalization for totalitarianism. It's not just a rationalization for him to loot the country or anything like that.

All the historians who know the details of Stalin's life will say he lived very modestly. He slept on a cot. He wasn't like a tin-pot despot, going and building palaces for himself. I think a lot of economists would just assume that the guy is living high.

Instead, it seems very much like it's the power, and not any kind of conventional luxury, that he cares about, and that not just the general goal but even very small policy details seem to be heavily influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Really, what you have to look for in Stalin's career are the counterexamples to this. So in The Myth of the Rational Voter, I did actually find one counterexample where it seemed like Stalin did dump the ideology, and this was on the nuclear program.

Stalin sent Beria to go and talk to one of the leading Soviet nuclear physicists. I think it was Kurchatov. He said, "So, is it true that relativity theory and quantum mechanics are idealist?" Which is something where you have to know a bunch of Marxist-Leninist philosophy to even understand the question.

The Soviet scientist says, "Well, if they're idealist, if that's bourgeois science, then nuclear weapons are bourgeois science, too." "All right, fine. Then forget philosophical objections to relativity theory and quantum mechanics. If this, the science, lets us build a nuclear bomb, I don't care what the philosophy says. We're just going to believe the science."

Occasions like that are fairly rare, and really, the more you study Stalin's career, you do see, even bizarre doctrinal things like the farmers are kind of revolutionary. It's like, "What are you talking about?"

It was like, "We have to go and set up a system based upon this, and that's very important to Stalin in a way that it's almost hard for anybody who isn't a Marxist-Leninist to really realize it."

Usually Westerners don't have such a shallow understanding of the philosophy. They don't realize how much of it is all part of this bizarre package. They think it's just about high levels of redistribution, and that's not the story.

On the Bryan Caplan production function

COWEN: We started this conversation with the Bryan Caplan production function, so we're going to close with it. We have a little bit of time left, three questions about you. First, how do you make yourself a good teacher?

CAPLAN: Let's see. For me, any class begins with writing the notes, so I write extremely detailed class notes, where I try to distill everything that's worth knowing about the subjects at the level of the students. Once I come up with a set of notes, I don't tend to change them very much, the written parts.

When I actually teach, then I do a lot of improvisation. Often, it's whatever I was thinking about yesterday works its way into the notes in terms of examples. Another big part is actually just trying to talk to the students like human beings and find anything in their experience that relates to what I'm actually talking about.

The older I've gotten, the less popular culture I have in common with the students, so it does get harder. But The Simpsons fortunately, thank God, is still watched by students, so there's that. Often, I'll start by asking them questions.

For me, a big part, one of the main things I learned from my students for The Case against Education was just saying, "All right. How many students here have a job?" At George Mason, I'd say 80, 90 percent raised their hand.

"How many of you hold a job where there is a person there that everyone agrees is incompetent?" And almost every hand stays up. I'm like, "That's pretty interesting that almost everyone is at a job where they will say there's someone who's known to be incompetent."

That actually did get me searching to what researchers actually found about this, and quite a bit.

COWEN: What is the Ideological Turing Test? And how do you use it to improve your own knowledge and understanding of things?

CAPLAN: The Ideological Turing Test - this is an idea that I came up with something like five years ago. There's the original Turing Test, which is a test. It's used in artificial intelligence, and basically, it says that if you can no longer tell the output from a computer from the output from a human being, that AI has passed the regular Turing Test.

I was saying you could actually do a similar thing for a human being. You could say, "Is it possible for you to successfully mimic the holder of a view that you disagree with?" Sort of jumping off of [John Stuart] Mill's famous line of, " He who knows only his own side of the case, knows but little of that."

The key thing about the idea is that it's a real test. It's one you can actually administer. The idea is you do it blind, and then you actually show it to people that hold a view that you don't and see whether they can tell the difference between that and the real view.

I say, "Once you can pass that test, then you have at least indicated that you understand the view that you disagree with." Now of course, in practice, it is hard to do this because of the cost.

When I am actually trying to explain a view, I do try, in my mind at least, to pass this. I will say, when I am going and checking on my references with the original authors, the one thing where I basically never contradict the author is if they say, "You misunderstood me."

That's where I say, "If the guy says I misunderstood him, then I almost certainly misunderstood him, and I need to do better."

COWEN: Last question. What are your plans for the future?

CAPLAN: I've got a queue of books. The one that is coming out next year - the plan is for September - is a nonfiction graphic novel on the ethics and science of immigration. It's going to be called All Roads Lead to Open Borders.

This is a genre many people aren't familiar with. There's the general genre of the graphic novel, which is basically a highfalutin comic book. The nonfiction graphic novel - this is one where you use the vocabulary and grammar of comic books to talk about a nonfiction subject.

This is not a story about immigration. It is actually an extended journey through what social scientists know about immigration and what philosophers said about immigration.

This is actually in collaboration with Zach Weinersmith, who was, out of all cartoonists, was my first choice in the world to be my collaborator. I didn't know him when I started the project, and I amazingly talked him into it.

Now, he's drawn 90 percent of the first draft of the pages. I'm super excited about this because this is my chance to be on the production side of a product that I have long been in love with. There's that.

Then my big word book after that, to distinguish from a graphic novel. There's going to be a book called Poverty - Who to Blame. This is going to combine social science with economic philosophy.

I want to begin with what I think of as one of the great neglected moral concepts in academic philosophy, which is the concept of blameworthiness and desert. These are concepts that almost everyone who thinks about right and wrong thinks about. Yet they are so dismissed, certainly by consequentialist philosophers, but a lot of other philosophers implicitly dismiss them by neglect.

I want to say, actually, these concepts are very important. They're morally at least as plausible as the other stuff that people are talking about, probably more so. I want to go and think about the actual social science of poverty through this lens of blameworthy, nonblameworthy, and semi-blameworthy poverty.

A lot of what I want to do in the book is to revive this old notion of the deserving versus the undeserving poor, and then take everything that social science knows about the causes of poverty to understand what are the main sources of blameworthy poverty? What are the main things that we're overrating? What are the main things we're underrating?

Really to change people's minds of, "What are the kinds of poverty that really are deeply, morally problematic and we should be thinking about all the time?" Which in my mind, things like poverty of people in the Third World who could easily come and get a job in the First World if it were legal.

People that are totally capable of solving their own problem if government would just get out of the way versus problems of, say, someone who is a chronic alcoholic, and if they would just stop drinking, they'd be doing fine. I think those are very different cases. Yet there's, of course, a lot more concern about the second problem than the first in terms of ink that's spilled over it. And I want to go and get people to rethink that.

COWEN: Bryan Caplan, thank you very much.

[applause]

Q&A
Note: this episode was recorded live for economics students at Mason.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: In your education book, you don't devote a lot of attention to the networks, the social networks that form in schools. Yet my interactions with Bryan Caplan suggest that he finds them important.

Your advice is for students to go talk to speakers, to faculty, to other students, and so on. So I was wondering if you could elaborate on how you see these networks interact with your story of signaling. Do they impact career outcomes? If they do, is it just a form of signaling, or do they actually create value by spreading beliefs and habits, connecting individuals with different characteristics, and so on?

CAPLAN: Great question. I do have one section on who you know. This is a subject where I spent a lot of time reading sociology to find out . . . they actually empirically study this quite a bit more than economists, at least, for labor markets. So definitely true that social networks are hugely important for the labor market. A pretty commonly cited factoid is that about half the people got their job because they knew somebody.

But this does not mean that the social networks that people are getting in school are very helpful because there's a couple of other key qualifiers, namely the kinds of social networks, the kinds of social ties that are very helpful. Either it's people who totally love you, like close relatives, or it's people who are in your exact field.

For a graduate student, then, I would say that social network is hugely important because, especially if you want to be a professor, then your professors have the job you want, and they know other people who have that job. Those are the kinds of social networks that are great.

Similarly, like CS at Stanford  - great social network because there you are studying with a bunch of people that you are very likely to be working with or for or be the vendor for, or they're going to know such people. Those are the really valuable social networks.

However, the problem is that most college majors are so loosely tied to any occupation, that it is phenomenally unlikely you will ever work again with someone that is a fellow student or the professor.

If you're an English major, the odds that you will ever get a job from a fellow student - very low; that you will do a startup with a fellow student - low; that you will hire someone else; that your professor can get you a job. Unless, of course, you want to be an English professor, in which case, that's great.

I would say is that social networks in general are very important. Academic ones are grossly overrated. The people who usually ask this question are Silicon Valley people, and they are seeing a narrow subset of labor market where they're right. But if you step back and just realize how nonvocational most majors are and how vast the economy is, it's too unlikely.

Then there's other exceptions. There are certain fraternities that are good at getting their brothers jobs in finance. That's where they funnel them. But these are very close ties. Remember a fraternity - it's a brotherhood. This is what really counts.

Like the Granovetter strength of weak ties stuff - this was one of the most cited papers in all of social science. When I started reading, I was like, "Wow. Essentially, no one believes the paper, but it's got 39 citations." That's the main story you might tell from why educational social networks are good, and this is wrong.

COWEN: Next question. Robin?

ROBIN HANSON: You do scholarship, and you know many other scholars, and you have opinions about the quality of their work. What are the biggest mistakes other scholars are making, from the point of view of making the kind of scholarship you wish they would make?

CAPLAN: Type III error, getting the right answer to the wrong question - that is my main view. Most work that I read that I don't like, I don't so much think it's wrong. It's that it's boring, and who cares?

That's honestly my reaction when I flip through a journal is, suppose you're completely right. Who cares? Suppose you're completely right. Who cares? That's what I say for 80, 90 percent of pieces that I read.

This does not mean that I think that you can't write a good piece on a narrow topic. But it's got to be because you convincingly argue that it really reflects something bigger than just the topic itself.

I can really enjoy reading a book about the French Wars of Religion because it's not just about the French Wars of Religion. It's about the nature of human religiosity, and about the way that dogmatics try to tear society apart, and about, is religion primarily social, or doctrinal, or what's the interrelation between them? That kind of thing.

To me, that's the main thing, is just that it's boring and who cares?

The second biggest thing is the focus on disciplinary boundaries, where people usually, if they're going to read, they only read within their field. Economists read economics. Even that is optimistic. You usually read within your subfield of economics or your sub-subfield.

What I always say is, "Look, if you really want to understand something, don't read what other people in your niche are doing or have read. Read what anyone who has thought about the issue has read, and it's quite likely you'll learn something."

Now, ultimately, I will say this: I think it does come down to academic incentives because those people in the fields that people aren't reading don't help you. They don't do stuff for you. Honestly, I think most scholars are primarily about career advancement. I don't think there is that much curiosity.

I remember, this is actually one of the things that disturbed me most when I became an assistant professor. When Tyler started telling me all about these backstories about professors. Finally I get to get behind the curtain - not anybody in our department, but other departments, others.

Finding out . . . the thought of someone who started off really curious and, in the end, they're just consumed with this pettiness over someone not citing them. Why do they care? Every citation translates into a statistical $100 a year.

This kind of mentality, it did horrify me at the time. I've gotten over it, but still this is the kind of thing when I step back . . . I think you become a scholar to go and advance human knowledge on important questions. I just don't see many people doing it or even using the methods that you would want to use, which is, step one, go and read what anyone who has really thought hard about the question already knows.

COWEN: One more question, yes?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I know you've stated that there is not a lot of crossover between psychology and economics, and you'd like to see more. For somebody who may be interested in looking at that bridge there, what is some literature that you'd be recommending for them?

CAPLAN: Just the outset, sometimes when I say that economists don't know enough about a subject, people get mad at me. They say, "You've ignored everything we've done." I haven't ignored everything you've done. I'm just saying it's not enough and there's got to be more. However much there is, I'm aware of that stuff.

Economists mostly just read one sub-area of psychology called cognitive psychology. Some other areas that are all worth reading, at least for depending upon what area you're working on, like personality psychology.

Human personality is really important. It explains a lot of things about the world. Human beings are quite different from one another.

Becker and Stigler tried to go and come up with a model of the world where you never mention differences in taste. Personality psychologists have documented very strong differences in taste between human beings.

Human beings - of everyone from someone who would kill themselves if they couldn't be a rock star with thousands of fans in front of them every night, to a librarian or a hermit - these are all human beings. This whole range of level of decider interaction is seen in the world. Realize there's everyone from me to someone who watches football all day, that whole range - just realizing that.

Even areas more narrowly . . . of course there's educational psychology. It's a big area in psychology where they answer questions that education economists should be interested in, like how do people learn, and how much can learning really explain?

One thing I noted in the book is that when I started telling economists, "How can the human capital model be right, given that most of what people learn in school, they never use on the job?" And this is what economists who would never deign to actually read educational psychology would say: "Well, it's like learning how to learn."

Yeah. And you realize that educational psychologists have been studying this for a hundred years, and they think something different. They don't care.

Then, the last, there's industrial psychology, the whole field of psychology where they do things like measure job performance. How do we measure this? What predicts it? How are firms organized? How are promotions done?

It is a mass of information and data that economists really could easily get if they would just go and take a look. Wow, they have their own journals. There's journals of industrial psychology, shockingly. How many labor economists have ever even bothered to crack open such a journal? I don't think it's very many, but shame on us.

COWEN: Thank you again, Bryan.

If you like this conversation, do subscribe to our podcast Conversations with Tyler.

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Bryan Caplan on Learning across Disciplines (Ep. 40 - Live at Mason Econ)

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"No single paper is that good", says Bryan Caplan. To really understand a topic, you need to read the entire literature in the field. And to do the kind of scholarship Bryan's work requires, you need to cover multiple fields. Only that way can you assemble a wide variety of evidence into useful knowledge.

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Larissa MacFarquhar interviewed by Tyler Cowan

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Larissa MacFarquhar interviewed by Tyler Cowan

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As a writer of profiles, Larissa MacFarquhar is granted the privilege of listening to, learning from, and sharing the stories of extraordinary thinkers like Derik Parfit, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, and Paul Krugman. And she's often drawn to write about the individual thinking behind extreme altruism, dementia care, and whether to stay in a small town. Motivating her is a desire to place readers inside someone's head: to see what they see and to think how they think.

In their dialogue, Larissa and Tyler discuss the thinking and thinkers behind her profiles, essays, and books, including notions of moral luck, exit vs voice, the prose of Kenneth Tynan, why altruistic heroes are mainly found in genre fiction, why she avoids describing physical appearances in her writing, the circumstances that push humans to live more extraordinary lives, what today has in common with the 1890s, and more.
Listen to the full conversation Read the full transcript
TYLER COWEN: I'm here today with the great Larissa MacFarquhar. She is a staff writer for the New Yorker, considered by many to write the very best and most interesting profiles of anyone in the business. She has a very well-known book called Strangers Drowning. The subtitle is Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help. It's about extreme altruists. And she's now working on a book on people's decisions whether or not to leave their hometown. Larissa, welcome.

LARISSA MACFARQUHAR: Thank you so much for having me here.

COWEN: First set of question about altruism and extreme altruists. Are very virtuous people easy to dislike?

MACFARQUHAR: Not to me, but to many others. And this was actually news to me when I embarked on the book. I went into it wanting to simply understand the drive and the motives of people who could sustain the kind of extraordinary sense of duty and altruism that some of us have some of the time, moved maybe by a poignant photograph or somebody in front of us, but can't sustain without those cues in front of us. But there are other people who can, and I wanted to know what made them tick.

But in my first foray into this field, I was writing about people who donated one of their kidneys to a stranger, and I discovered . . . I was talking to people about the people I was meeting, and they would say, "Well, those people surely are all mentally ill, right? Or they have some problem, or they are probably very, very censorious or judgmental."

It was very surprising to me. I understand, of course, that not everyone is going to be an extreme altruist, but I didn't realize the extent of the hostility and suspicion of them until I started writing about them. And I became fascinated by that. It became a major part of the book, trying to figure out where this comes from because I don't think it exists in every time and place in the same way.

COWEN: And where does it come from, the hostility toward extreme altruists? Is it people feeling envy or that they don't measure up?

MACFARQUHAR: I think it comes from many, many sources, and I tried to unravel some of them in the book. I think it comes from a sense that is trickled down from many academic disciplines, that humans are fundamentally egotistical, and therefore, insofar as they are not, it must be some kind of pathology or perversion. Psychoanalysis is especially suspicious in that regard.

But it also comes from so many areas of popular culture. For instance, one of the things that I became really intrigued by was Al-Anon. Al-Anon, as you may know, is the organization founded in the '50s by the spouses and partners and family members of alcoholics.

It was designed to help people understand that trying to help someone stop drinking, which used to be an unambiguously great thing to do - it's the thing that long-suffering virtuous spouses did - was actually not just unlikely to be helpful but was part of the same addictive behavior as drinking itself, as alcoholism itself. It was a sickness and one that needed to be gotten over.

I think this notion that trying to help people, sacrificing yourself to help people was a sickness became very widespread, especially in the '70s and '80s under the better-known term codependency. It's part of our now unconscious culture, the way we look at altruists. When we hear about them, many people think first, "Are they sick?"

COWEN: If we think of extreme altruists in terms of personality theory, are they especially high or low in neuroticism?

MACFARQUHAR: [laughs] Oh gosh, I don't know.

COWEN: Well you've met a lot of them, right? You must have an impression.

MACFARQUHAR: Well, I have met a lot of them. I think they're fantastic. Of course, there are annoying altruists just like there are annoying golfers and annoying dentists, but I wrote about people I 100 percent wholeheartedly admired.

But I'll say one thing: I read a lot of psychological and psychiatric articles about altruism, and nearly all of them, as I've suggested, pathologized altruism in some way. I became quite annoyed by this.

I read one article that described altruists in terms of parentified children. The idea here is that, if you grow up in a household where at least one of your parents is not functioning as a parent, either because they are mentally ill or they're an alcoholic or an addict - for some reason they're not functioning as a parent - obviously, in many cases, this just messes the child up.

But in some cases, the child responds by trying to fix the situation. They may take care of their parent, they may try to be a perfect student, they may take care of their younger siblings. They try to fix their family. And the idea is that this parentified child, the child who takes on the role of a parent as a young person, may grow up to have an outsized desire to fix the world, a sense of responsibility for the world in the way that they felt responsible for their family as a child.

And I thought about the people I'd met who I'd interviewed for my book, and not all of them, but lots of them had that circumstance. One of their parents was either an alcoholic or was mentally ill or was an addict of some kind. So I thought, "Okay, maybe there is something to this particular theory." However, I do want to push back on the idea that this therefore makes somebody pathological. Just because your altruistic tendencies may not be free in the sense of freely chosen, devoid of any cause from your childhood, does not mean that they are wrong.

So here's what I try to persuade people who tell me that all altruists are mentally ill. I say, think about a kid who grows up with two lovely parents who try to persuade them that taking care of other people is the right thing to do, and because of that upbringing, they also grow up to feel an outsized sense of duty and responsibility to take care of other people in the world. They are no more free than the person who came upon such a sense of duty because of their bad parents. So is one more free or worse than the other?

COWEN: Could the same person be both, say, a Rwandan killer in the 1990s and an extreme altruist? Or is that a contradiction?

MACFARQUHAR: Well, my husband actually wrote about the Rwandan genocide, and he has sometimes explained that to some of the killers, it felt like a community-building exercise. It was a way to support and cohere their own people.

No, I don't believe that they could be extreme altruists because I think that genocide is wrong, and I don't think that's a very controversial position. However, it is certainly true that people who do very terrible things can consider themselves extreme altruists. And throughout history, as we know, it's very obvious that people have sacrificed themselves as often for terrible causes as for good.

COWEN: I'm sure you know of Bernard Williams and his concept of moral luck, that how good you are may, in some cases, be a function of how lucky you become, that you make an initial investment, and you could end up as a kind of nobody with no impact. Or luck could be in your favor, and you could end up doing the world a great amount of good or, possibly, a great amount of harm. How do you see the moral luck notion as applying to extreme altruists or, for that matter, Rwandan killers?

MACFARQUHAR: I love Bernard Williams. I think he's a beautiful, beautiful writer and a very interesting thinker. His classic example in this regard was Gauguin. Here is a painter who abandons his wife and, I believe, children to go to Tahiti and paint and find his artistic muse.

Fortunately for Gauguin, he had the moral luck to be an excellent painter, so everyone forgives him. They say, "How wonderful that he did what he needed to do to make this extraordinary art." What if he had been a terrible painter? That wouldn't have made a moral difference, but it would have made a difference to how we would judge him. So in that sense, he had moral luck.

With extreme altruists, there's this sense that I think most of us have that morality should be judged by motive, and therefore it is, to some extent, divorced from luck. That's why Bernard Williams's idea of moral luck was so strange and so startling to many people. The idea is, if you try to do good, that's what counts, and whether you are able to in fact do good is a result of luck of various kinds, like your own ability, the situation in the world that you find yourself in, all kinds of things like that.

But more ancient notions of morality find this paradox less strange because they believe that you can hold someone to account for how wise they are and how able they are to judge their actions and successfully anticipate whether they will produce wrong or not.

So you can blame someone for having a terrible idea of the good. That is part of how you judge them, and therefore, even though it may be because you grow up in a society where terrible ideas of the good are predominant, and you somewhat haplessly find yourself swept along in them, you're still held to account.

COWEN: In your profile of Noam Chomsky, he seems to say that motives shouldn't matter at all for assessing political action.

MACFARQUHAR: Yeah, and I don't agree with that. He likes to judge only on the results, but I think because the world is as it is, we can never fully anticipate the consequences of our actions. The important thing is to try our best to do so and not to be feckless about ignoring likely consequences. But to ignore the difference between someone who is trying to do something that is genuinely good and someone who is doing the opposite seems to me deeply wrong.

COWEN: If you're an extreme altruist, are you too subject to manipulation by others? If you care so much about so many other people, and those people actually can be harmed pretty easily at low cost, does this mean that you, the extreme altruist, you just go through life being manipulated?

MACFARQUHAR It's funny you say that because one thing that I have noticed about the extreme altruist . . . You know what? I don't want to call them extreme altruists. I think they're people with a very strong sense of duty.

The people I met were very, very different from each other, but one thing they had in common is they really, really barely cared about what other people thought. They had to feel that way because almost everyone they met thought they were at best weirdos, and at worst dangerous megalomaniacs. So they were unconventional in their degree of duty but also in many other ways.

COWEN: They didn't care at all what people thought about anything they did like how they dressed or . . . ?

MACFARQUHAR: Things like that. I don't mean they didn't care about anything about what people thought because obviously -

COWEN: In this context they didn't care.

MACFARQUHAR: Obviously they cared about making other people's lives better. But yes, in terms of opinions of themselves, they were much less sensitive to that than most of us.

For instance, there was a couple, the Badeaus, who now live in Philadelphia, who adopted 20 special-needs kids in addition to the two biological kids that they had, and that was obviously an unconventional thing to do. But it wasn't the only one. Mr. Badeau, Hector Badeau, stayed home. He was the one who changed the diapers. He made the breakfasts, he made the lunches, he cooked the dinners for the most part.

And Sue, his wife, was the one who went out to work and earned the money to keep the household going. This was a long time ago. They started out life together - oh my gosh, it was many decades ago - I'm forgetting the exact year that they got married. And they just didn't care that other people thought they were weird because they knew that was the price of doing what they thought was right to do.

COWEN: Is Paul Bloom right to suggest that empathy is overrated?

MACFARQUHAR: [laughs] I love his book. You know what? He gave the book an especially provocative title for obvious reasons. I don't think he thinks that empathy is useless, but I do agree with him that people could do a lot more good if they didn't rely solely on impulse and emotional attachment to issues that may be there just because they've heard of them as opposed to trying to do research, trying to figure out how they really can do the most good with the resources they're willing to give.

I think organizations like GiveWell, which do research into various charities and show you which charities are more likely to succeed at their missions than others, are incredibly helpful.

COWEN: What's the best argument against what's called effective altruism?

MACFARQUHAR: Oh gosh, there are a lot.

COWEN: Everything has to become a calculation?

MACFARQUHAR: Effective altruism is essentially a utilitarian doctrine. In principle, there are far fewer objections than there are in practice. In practice, I've talked to many, many effective altruists over the years that the movement has been in existence. It was more or less founded in 2009 by the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord.

In principle, if you say effective altruists don't pay enough attention to politics, to governmental institutions, to human rights, to what people say they want, which is as often equality as material well-being, they will say, "Well, there's nothing in our philosophy that rejects those things. We're for well-being of whatever form it takes, and if you convince me that going into politics is a better thing to do than going into banking, I'd be happy to do that."

But in practice . . . They can, in principle, avoid the traps that in fact are preventing effective altruists from being as effective as they should be because in practice, it's very difficult to resist a short-term surer bet in terms of doing good.

If you can spend a small amount of money and buy deworming medicine that will cure a child of worms and enable him or her to go back to school, or if you can buy a bed net that will prevent a family from getting malaria - those are such obvious short-term immediate goods that it's hard to resist them.

It's hard to take the gambles and take the risks of investing in less certain means of promoting welfare, like lobbying for political change, like investing in institutions that are obviously extremely important and, longer term, more important than immediate material gains.

COWEN: Do you agree with Steven Pinker that in the long run, we're becoming more moral?

MACFARQUHAR: I have to confess, I have not read his most recent books, so I don't feel equipped to talk about his thesis.

COWEN: But the basic claim - people are becoming better and more altruistic over time, true or false?

MACFARQUHAR: I just don't know. What seems to be true is that in one very narrow sense of morality, we are becoming concerned about a wider circle of creatures than we were before. Whereas three centuries ago, let's say, very few people cared about the well-being of slaves, very few people cared about the well-being of animals, very few people cared about the well-being of, really, anyone outside their own community, however they defined it, maybe by their church or their village or whatever.

Now, through a combination of discussion and technology, people have learned to care about more people. Does that make us more moral? That's an incredibly complex question that I'm not equipped to answer.

COWEN: You've argued that there are quite few ambitiously good characters in fiction. Is that also true for genre fiction?

MACFARQUHAR: No. I'm so glad you asked that. I think that science fiction is full of heroic characters. So are romances. This is one of the things I concluded - that the absence of unambiguously altruistic heroic characters is almost one of the things that marks highbrow fiction as such.

Of course, there are many, many exceptions, and there are heroes in higher-brow fiction. Over the past 100 years, it has become noticeable that genre fiction is filled with far more heroism than higher culture. And it's such a noticeable pattern that it's almost as though there is something pushing against that kind of character.

When I started talking about this with people - I talked about this first with a novelist who shared a fellowship with me, so I saw him every day. I said, "What is wrong with you novelists? Why don't you write about heroic characters who are moved by a sense of moral duty?" Because I find these people fascinating, and that's one of the reasons I wrote my book, is that it was almost an advertisement to novelists: "You should write about these people. They're not simple. They're complex and fascinating."

He gave me this look of total contempt like I had asked him to write about bunnies or butterflies. And I found that this was a feeling that many fiction writers share. I talked to another friend of mine who is a novelist. He was trying to write about a heroic character, and he said it was so difficult to write a novel about someone who was unambiguously admirable. It was almost as though the form itself was resisting.

COWEN: But why do we make heroes high status in the real world and relatively low status in the world of serious fiction? What accounts for that demarcation?

MACFARQUHAR: It's as though high-status fiction, as you say, high-culture fiction is a kind of a culture of its own with its own set of values. And those values consist, among many others, of complexity and also a great privileging of the intimate, the person in front of you, the humanness of individual humans. It came to feel to me as though a love of universal humanness was something that fiction had an antipathy towards. It seemed too abstract and therefore was not appealing.

The kind of person that was always valorized - well, not always; I should not say always; as I said, there are exceptions - but tended to be valorized in novels was the person who rejected large universal abstractions about humans and valued instead the person in front of them, the person they loved, the member of their family, and was not like Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, always looking to suffering people far away.

COWEN: Dementia. If you ever succumb to dementia or Alzheimer's, would you rather live in a world of comforting fantasy or unpleasant reality where you understood your condition?

MACFARQUHAR: It's such a difficult thing because when I started thinking about this question, I thought I would be on the side of lies. I thought I would be on the side of "just be kind, tell people what they want to hear." What's the objection, both as a person potentially being related to someone with dementia and as a person with dementia myself? But as I came to talk to a lot of people about it, I came to think it was much more complicated.

First of all, there are practical problems. It's not as though, when you have dementia, your cognitive decline is predictable and smooth. It goes up and down. You may be lucid one morning and not at all the next morning. You may be lucid in the afternoon and completely bewildered in the evening.

So there are all these practical difficulties, that if someone, thinking of you as they last saw you, lies to you but you're lucid at that moment, you will see that lie, and you will realize that you cannot trust that person. What if that person is your only living relative? What if that person is your spouse? What if that person is the nurse who takes care of you every day? That is a devastation. That is an extraordinary tragedy that takes place in your life, and that's a risk you're always taking by lying.

Then I was very moved and convinced by the philosopher Sissela Bok, who wrote a book about lying several decades ago. She said the only issue is not the person in front of you . . . It's very easy when you're taking care of someone with dementia, or when you have dementia, to think that the only thing that matters is kindness, and the only thing that matters is kindness to that person whom you're taking care of.

But she said that's not the only thing that matters because if other people hear you lying, if your children hear you lying, if other people in the nursing home hear you lying, if people waiting in the doctor's office hear you lying, and lying evidently with a feeling that's the right thing to do, this will spread a sense that lying is fine, that lying can even be the better thing to do.

But once you've lost the sense that lying is rare and repellent, you've lost something essential in terms of social trust. And I think she's right. It's a very delicate thing, that if we all started lying -

COWEN: Should we stop lying to people who don't have dementia?

MACFARQUHAR: Well this is the thing - that's the whole problem, that if you're going to lie to be kind to people with dementia, why not lie to everybody? My gosh, there's always nice things you could say to someone that are completely untrue, and I'm sure we all do it on a daily basis.

But should we do it all the time? Should there not be some point at which you try to be honest rather than kind at every point? That's one of the fascinating things about this question, is, well, what is the purpose of our adherence to truth?

COWEN: Your view on how much you should be lied to if you have dementia - is that the same as what you would propose for a sibling or a child, someone you loved and knew?

MACFARQUHAR: With dementia?

COWEN: Right. Would you be consistent and apply the same standard to them that you would want for yourself?

MACFARQUHAR: Ohhh, I don't know.

COWEN: I would say don't lie to me, but, in fact, for others, I would be more willing to lie to them than I would wish to be lied to myself.

MACFARQUHAR: Well, that's why I started asking people, what about that, why couldn't people decide? They decide in other medical instances. They sign advanced directives that, in principle, should direct their care when they can no longer enunciate what they want. Why couldn't you do that with lying? Why couldn't you say, "Don't lie to me, I'm tough, I can take it." Or "I hate lies." Or "It's undignified," or whatever reason you had for rejecting them.

But the problem is that, with dementia, in many ways, once you descend past a certain level of memory and cognitive functioning, you're not really you anymore. Is it fair to impose this harsh discipline of no lies on a future you who actually has very little in common with the you sitting across from me now and who is saying, "Don't lie to me," almost certainly who does not hold that value anymore, is very vulnerable?

Do you want to really force that person to suffer from lies like, "No, sorry, your spouse is long dead. No, sorry, your child has not come to visit you in weeks," whatever truth you might want to tell them? And quite apart from future you, what about future me who is distressed by your distress? Should I be required to tell the truth to you and make you weep every single day? What if I'm your nurse in a nursing home and I am made miserable every day on the job because you insisted on truth back in 2018?

COWEN: Going back in time, has George Gilder's tech optimism been proven correct, wrong, somewhere in between? What say you?

MACFARQUHAR: I would say no. I think it's become very clear to us, especially in the last year or two, that there are many problems with the technologies that have been developed.

COWEN: What's the biggest one?

MACFARQUHAR: Oh gosh, where to start? I don't know that I have anything unobvious to add to what everyone already knows. I mean, privacy has been eviscerated.

COWEN: Do people care much about privacy? They seem to give away a lot of information for free.

MACFARQUHAR: This is true. This is true. But I think privacy has social ramifications that people don't always consider. So they give away a lot of information for free on Facebook, let's say, because they may imagine that on Facebook, they are giving their information to their friends. But it turns out they are not. They're giving their information to lots of advertisers. They're giving their information to political operatives. Their information cannot be put back into the bottle.

And we now know that Facebook - I'm just picking on Facebook because it's the lowest-hanging fruit, but there's many instances of this - we now know that Facebook's mission to "connect everybody" - it sounded like it was going to produce a much more pluralistic, diverse world where people would have communication with people they couldn't connect with physically because they lived in a different place.

But in fact, as you've noticed in Complacent Class, Facebook more often does the opposite. It unites people who are similar and convinces them that the voices in their own echo chamber are, in fact, the right ones to listen to, and they tune in less and less to other people.

It's interesting. I would like to ask you about what you consider the roots of complacency and the kind of sorting that we have both been noticing. Because in some ways, you would think that people moving around and going other places and moving house every few years, as Americans did more several decades ago, would result in exposure to more kinds of people and have a bigger sense of the world.

But in fact, it often results in people grouping amongst people who are very similar to them. Whereas if you have an old-fashioned small town, it can result in the opposite, which is to say, people going to church with, or socializing with, people who are very different in terms of age, in terms of - well, not conviction in going to church - but running into people who are a different social class, who do different things for work, that kind of stuff.

COWEN: I think a lot of people are moving just once. They figure out where they really like it, maybe through cheaper travel and also the internet. They go there, they stay there, and then there's less mixing and more sorting, and geographic mobility is down.

I see this problem as predating social media for the most part. One hopes that most people don't live in social media bubbles. I think the data actually suggest they don't so much. Social media don't seem to be enough of a cure. Their net effect seems to be to keep us at home. You have Netflix, you have Amazon packages - wonderful things, but you enjoy them at home for the most part, and they just keep you there.

MACFARQUHAR: Exactly. And that's the least mixing of all, is if you stay at home. The fracturing of our political dialog is only the most obvious of the malign effects of technology.

COWEN: Was George Gilder right about Sexual Suicide, as he titled his book? The notion that unmarried men would be less happy and maybe even headed for trouble.

MACFARQUHAR: Oh gosh. [laughs] What do you think? This is really a subject in which I am not an expert...

COWEN: The data seem to show . . . The correlations are consistent with his thesis. I doubt if we can demonstrate causality, but unmarried men earn less. They're much more likely to have social problems. Some of that is selection - well, women are good at picking successful men to marry. But it would be odd if none of it were causal. So it's long seemed to me there was something to Gilder's book, Sexual Suicide, that he doesn't usually get credit for.

MACFARQUHAR: Well, there's lots of data to show that people who are in long-term committed relationships, whether marriage or other kinds of relationships, tend to be happier. So maybe there is something about humans that prefer to be in such relationships. But whether that's more true of men than women, I don't know.

COWEN: Let me ask you a few questions about profiles and writing profiles. In your Hilary Mantel profile, you wrote, "She believes that there are no great characters without a great time; ordinary times breed ordinary people (of the sort - dull, trapped, despairing - who inhabit modern novels)." Do you agree with her?

MACFARQUHAR: Well, I've always been struck by reports of people who come back from war, and they say that while it was terrible, it was also - this is not everybody, obviously, and not all wars - but I've been struck by how many people say that there was something also great about the experience of bonding with their fellow soldiers, of living so close to death that life became more extraordinary to them and more precious.

And people sometimes return from that kind of extreme existence to find regular existence kind of dull and savorless. That may be what she's talking about, that there are times when humans are pushed by their circumstances to greater deeds. This is something that I noticed when I was writing about altruism also, that during wartime, things that seem extreme and bizarre and unreasonable in ordinary times come to seem normal.

In ordinary times, a kidney donor, for instance, somebody who donates their kidney to a stranger might seem like a weirdo, but during wartime, a soldier who sacrifices his life for that of a comrade is thought to be a hero for sure, but definitely not a weirdo. Somebody who leaves his family behind to serve in an army is, again, thought to be noble for doing so.

COWEN: So you're returning to moral luck in a sense. We live in a time where most Americans don't experience war, so they don't have this chance to be great, and that's luck, relative to their individual lives.

MACFARQUHAR: That's right. But, look, I would never advocate, I would never consider it to be lucky to be caught up in a war in any capacity. Wars are awful. But there is something about certain circumstances that push humans to live more extraordinary lives than do the kind of easy circumstances that some people find themselves in here - not everyone by any means.

The great, great William James wrote an essay about a hundred and some years ago called " The Moral Equivalent of War." He advocated a kind of - it sounds odd because of the name - but a kind of peacetime peace corps because, he said, there's no need to depend on moral luck, in effect - this is not his language - but we can engineer circumstances in which people are pushed to the same kind of self-sacrifice and heroism that they might be pushed to in war, but we can artificially engender it, and we can do it in a way that does not result in the horrible bloodshed and loss and waste of war, that results in something positive.

So he had the notion of "Let's send people to do work that is valuable but is really miserable and uncomfortable and pushes them." They could be working in coal mines, or they could be working in soup kitchens. I can't remember his examples; I read the essay a while ago. It was interesting because the reason he thought this was necessary is that he said people who are pacifists always talk about how terrible war is because it's so bloody and violent and wasteful.

What they're not getting is that people who like war - or don't dislike war - admit all that; they know that. It's very obvious, but for them, it's worth it because of the stimulation, as they see it, to human greatness. And so, he said, we pacifists, we people who think war is dreadful have to come up with some other means, some other circumstance to push humans to greatness so that war, to people who value greatness, does not seem necessary.

On profiles versus podcasts

COWEN: If we do a one-on-one podcast, there's no selective editing. Everything you say is presented to the listeners as you say it. Is that a more realistic look at a person than a profile, which is all about selective editing?

MACFARQUHAR: Yeah, possibly. When I write a profile, inevitably, it is going to be my view of the person, though I like to imagine that I am letting them speak. I realize this is an unrealistic fantasy of mine, but my fantasy in many cases is that I leave the room. I introduce the reader to the person I'm going to write about and say, "Here you are, I've introduced you. I'm going to go now, and you can talk."

I like to imagine that the piece is, in a way, written by the person themselves. Now obviously, this is not true, and the piece is very much inflected by my view of the person, but that's what I like to think about. Although, inevitably, a profile is unrealistic because it's a subjective view of the person, I like to imagine that I try to do that as little as possible.

COWEN: What do you do to put people at ease when you're interviewing them?

MACFARQUHAR: I don't have any tricks. It's funny, people will often ask me, "How do you get people to talk to you?" There's no trick involved. When I am interviewing someone, I'm interviewing them because I really want to hear what they have to say, and I'm incredibly interested in their life and how they describe it and how they came to have the ideas that they do and why they love them.

I ask them, and I think most people just like to tell the story of their life and enjoy the feeling that somebody is intensely and unfeignedly interested in what they have to say. If I'm lucky, it can be a really extraordinary experience for both of us. Obviously, I don't know the person very well. I just met them, or even if we meet multiple times, I don't know them nearly as well, in many senses, as their friends or their family. Of course, that's obvious.

But at the same time, for the most part, even people you know and love the best, you don't talk about your life as a whole. They don't say, "Well, why is it that you . . . Where did you start out when you were 10? What did you want to do when you were 10, and why did you at 20 take this path rather than that path? And why did you give up on that thing that you wanted to do desperately when you were 24 and now can barely remember it? How did that happen? How did you come to forget that thing?" Those kinds of questions.

And if you have a two-, three-, four-hour conversation, where you go with the person, prompting them over the course of their life, it can be revelatory for them too because you just don't talk about that stuff usually. You talk about what you did last weekend or what movie you've seen or what book you've read or what you had for dinner - stuff like that. You don't talk about these longer-term movements in your life.

So at its best . . . I'll give you an example. I was interviewing a woman named Heather Meyerend who is a hospice nurse in Brooklyn. I asked her why she chose hospice as a specialty, and she said what I know from interviewing other hospice nurses is a common answer.

She said, "Even though working in a hospital is more prestigious, I didn't like it because it was so fast-paced. You're constantly rushing from task to task to task. There's a lot of paperwork. You don't ever get to know a patient. You're just sticking needles in arms and doing things that need to be done but are not intimate.

Whereas, when you're a hospice nurse, you spend an hour with a person. You really get to know them. You visit them every week, sometimes for months, and it's much more." Anyway. So fair enough, totally reasonable answer.

Then we started talking about her life, and she said - I'm going to get these details wrong, but something like, "My brother died at 20, and my other brother died at 24, and my niece died at 11, and my nephew died . . ." And again, I'm maybe getting these details wrong, but there had been so much early death in her family.

And as she was telling me of one death after another after another, she said, "Oh, I wonder if that has something to do with my choice of work." It felt like such an amazing privilege to be there at that moment because it literally had not occurred to her before, this central understanding of her life.

COWEN: What led you to interview Derek Parfit?

MACFARQUHAR: What led me to? Well, I have to be honest. Although I had Reasons and Persons, his first book, on my shelf for many years, I had not read it, and I did not know - because I am not deeply part of the philosophical community - that he had a new book coming out.

So the idea came from my editor, Henry Finder, who does know a great deal about philosophy and suggested that it would be a good subject. And I was delighted because I had been meaning to read Reasons and Persons, and, as you know, it's an electrifying book.

COWEN: It's an amazing book.

MACFARQUHAR: It's so exciting, and so I was thrilled to do it.

COWEN: If during a profile, when you describe people's looks, are you worried that you are reinforcing stereotypes?

MACFARQUHAR: No. But I have -

COWEN: But isn't there a thing, looksism?

MACFARQUHAR: Well, of course.

COWEN: There's sexism, there's racism, and looksism - people who look a certain way, you should make certain inferences. Is there any way we can describe people's looks that doesn't run that danger?

MACFARQUHAR: Probably not. But I'll say two things about this.

First is, I think there is far too much emphasis on describing people's looks. Because the thing about humans is that their faces are unique, so you can describe somebody, but you're never going to be able to call up an exact picture in a reader's mind about what the person looks like. So what you're doing is not really describing what they look like - what you're doing is evoking something which, I guess, the malign form of that is looksism.

But I've started avoiding describing what people look like, not because it results in looksism - though I'm sure that's true - but because, unconsciously or not, it puts the reader in a position of being outside the person, looking at them.

But I've started avoiding describing what people look like, not because it results in looksism - though I'm sure that's true - but because, unconsciously or not, it puts the reader in a position of being outside the person, looking at them.

And what sometimes - though not always - I'm trying to do is give the reader a sense of what it's like to be inside that person's head.

And what sometimes - though not always - I'm trying to do is give the reader a sense of what it's like to be inside that person's head. And the more that you describe the physical person, the physical circumstances of the person, anything that involves being outside the person, looking at them, the less you cultivate that sense of intimacy that comes from being inside their head and looking out through their eyes.

On things under- and overrated

COWEN: In these dialogs, we often have the segment, overrated or underrated. Shall I ask you a few questions?

Kenneth Tynan, overrated or underrated?

MACFARQUHAR: Underrated!

COWEN: Why?

MACFARQUHAR: I am so glad you asked. No one seems to know who he is. He was such a figure of his time. It's very interesting. Kenneth Tynan, he was a - I should say because no one knows who he is - he was a theater critic, started as a theater critic in England in the '50s, and then in the late '60s I think, early '70s, came over to America and started writing for the New Yorker.

And a very interesting thing happened to his writing. I don't know to what extent it was a result of the New Yorker, or whether it was just him getting old, but when he was a young man, his writing was electric and baroque. The adjective-to-noun ratio was so high. Every sentence was encrusted with adjectives and adverbs, and there was no sentence that was just getting from A to B. It was so - what many would say overwritten, but I thought was so . . . It was just exciting.

COWEN: They were incredible essays.

MACFARQUHAR: So exciting. And then -

COWEN: Under-read today.

MACFARQUHAR: Yes! But an interesting thing happened, and I wonder which you prefer. Because as he got older, his writing got plainer and calmer, and it stopped jumping about, trying to arrest your attention.

COWEN: I only like the earlier Kenneth Tynan.

MACFARQUHAR: You know, I do too. But I think there is something about taste today that prefers a clearer, more limpid kind of prose. While I understand that sometimes overwriting can be annoying, sometimes it's just lazy. You read early Kenneth Tynan, and you realize people aren't trying hard enough. You can't just say "cup." You have to come up with . . . I'm not even going to try to imitate him, but suffice to say people should read him more.

COWEN: The Quentin Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs  - overrated or underrated?

MACFARQUHAR: I love that movie, but I don't really know if it's overrated or underrated because I don't know how it's rated. I think most people love it, so I would say it's been given its due. It was slightly overshadowed by Pulp Fiction, which was also a terrific movie.

COWEN: But I think most people won't watch it. So sort of "people like us -"

MACFARQUHAR: Oh, well, then, underrated.

COWEN:  - maybe all love it. So I would say it's vastly underrated.

MACFARQUHAR: Underrated then, okay.

COWEN: The DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We're going way back in time now.

MACFARQUHAR: Overrated or underrated?

MACFARQUHAR: No kidding, I can't believe you read that.

I would say - and I'm very curious what you think - I think it is underrated because people . . . There's this silly notion that what psychiatrists do is label people with diagnoses, and that that's really stigmatizing. For sure, sometimes that's what psychiatry does.

But I think that a lot of the anti-psychiatric discourse is founded on misunderstanding that the DSM is psychiatry's bible. That's what many people call it, whereas, in fact, it's more like a dictionary. What it is is a grouping. Each disorder is a grouping of symptoms that enable psychiatrists to talk to each other in consistent ways because they're using the language of psychiatry in consistent ways and without which the discipline could not function at all.

So I don't think it is as evil as people think. What do you think?

COWEN: I guess I'm more skeptical. I think of the categories as being used to define when an insurance payment should be made.

MACFARQUHAR: Yep.

COWEN: And it takes a lot of people who have very mixed traits or not things that I would call a disorder, and it labels them in a way that is stigmatizing.

MACFARQUHAR: Certainly that can happen, absolutely, but I think it's important to remember that a label and a diagnosis, while, for sure, can be stigmatizing and can be dreadfully so - the early DSM notoriously labeled homosexuality as a disorder. Obviously, that was both stigmatizing and terribly wrong.

But at the same time, in some cases, a diagnosis can be comforting. It performs many different functions. Sometimes a diagnosis means to a person, "Ah, I am not the only one. There are other people who have encountered this before. People have thought about what it means, thought about ways to alleviate the symptoms that give me pain. There's hope!"

COWEN: The older British culture of Sinophile scholars, overrated or underrated?

MACFARQUHAR: [laughs] Impossible to overrate.

COWEN: Impossible to overrate, okay.

Using tape recorders for interviews?

MACFARQUHAR: I always do that because . . . I mean, not always. If I'm just interviewing someone for information, I try not to because transcribing tapes is a very time-consuming process. But one of the things I love about interviewing people is their language, the minutiae of the way they use words, and you can't always get that when you're just in a normal conversation because you hear, to some extent, what you're expecting to hear.

When you're taking notes on what someone says, you try to do it verbatim, but sometimes you will use phrases that you expected to hear because it's the normal way to say something. But if you play a tape back, you hear that they didn't say that. They didn't say what you thought that they said. They said something a tiny bit different, and it's so exciting because they said it in a way that's a little weird. I mean, it's just their own, and I find that exciting the way some poetry is.

COWEN: What's your favorite part of China to visit?

MACFARQUHAR: I have not been to China since 1985, so I can't answer that question. I'm sure it's completely different. I'll give you a little anecdote that shows you how long ago that was. I know you've been to China many times. My father is a China scholar, and my mother was a journalist who wrote about Asia, so both of them had been to China many times.

We were at a hotel in Shanghai in '85, and we were standing in the lobby, and both of them said, "What is that?" And my brother and I, who were kids, said, "It's music, obviously. What's the big deal?" And they said, "No, no, no, we have to find where that's coming from."

They followed the sound of the music, we all four of us went to follow the sound of the music, and it was this little, tiny disco in one of the rooms in the hotel with a little disco ball rotating and multicolored lights, and they were playing Boney M, this British band from the '80s. To my brother and I this was a normal sight. My parents - their jaws were open. They couldn't believe that there was a disco in China. That's how long ago it was I went there.

COWEN: What kind of cyborg would you like to be?

MACFARQUHAR: [laughs] I would certainly like to have a far better memory than I do, and I think that could probably be arranged cyborg-wise. What about you?

COWEN: But there is note-taking software. Is it somehow not good enough?

MACFARQUHAR: I'm sorry?

COWEN: There is note-taking software now with voice recognition. Doesn't this do it for you?

MACFARQUHAR: No, because in order to make use of any kind of external memory function, be it library or a note-taking software or what have you, you have to know what you're looking for. What I want is . . . That's the problem with external memory, is that it doesn't make the weird connections that your own mind does, don't you think?

What would you like in terms of being a cyborg?

COWEN: The ability to get to more places more quickly. Really fast transportation without limit.

MACFARQUHAR: If you could have anything, that would be it?

COWEN: I think so, other than, say, living longer.

MACFARQUHAR: Wait, so the biggest problem in your life is time wasted on planes?

COWEN: Yes.

MACFARQUHAR: No!

COWEN: It's not just the time wasted. I read while I'm flying.

MACFARQUHAR: Right, exactly!

COWEN: But it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of money. Connections are very indirect. If I could just walk into a Star Trek transporter and be in Uzbekistan, we wouldn't be doing this podcast right now, perhaps.

[laughter]

MACFARQUHAR: That is fascinating. Plane delays are annoying, but I have to say, I've never considered them the biggest problem in life.

COWEN: Your next book is on why people leave American small towns and general issues of geographic mobility. Why has American cross-state mobility fallen so much since the 1980s?

MACFARQUHAR: You could probably answer that question better than I. I think a lot of the reasons are economic. It used to be that, in general, people moved to places with more jobs because they were looking for jobs, which sounds perfectly logical. Now people are often moving to places with fewer jobs because housing is cheaper, which is a sort of pessimistic and depressing fact.

But I'm glad you asked about this because I know we're both interested in this question. One of the things I want to think about in this book is how people who stay are not necessarily staying because they're stuck.

There is a dominant American mythology that the smart, ambitious, interesting people move. They leave - not just small towns, but anywhere - they leave their homes, and they go somewhere else, partly because they're restless, partly because they're curious, and partly because what they want to do is so big, it can't be done where they are. And that leaves the people who stay looking dull by comparison. But I really want to question that.

The lodestar of this project, at least so far, is the great economist Albert Hirschman's essay Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which I'm sure you know. He argued that if you're discontent with where you are or what product you're buying, discontent with something, you can do two things: You can exit, which means you can either leave a place or stop buying a product. Or you can exercise voice - you can complain, you can try to change it.

I think this is extraordinarily important when thinking about issues of mobility because if everyone left, if everyone's response to a bad job or a bad home was to leave, then nothing is fixed. It's the people who say, "No, actually, I don't want to leave. This is my home. There are many things wrong with it, but because I don't want to leave, because I feel attached to it for other reasons, I'm going to fight."

It's really striking to me that the civil rights movement was driven in its earliest days not by the African Americans who migrated north in search of jobs but by those who were still home in Alabama and many other states, who didn't want to leave.

I talked the other day to the extraordinary attorney Fred Gray. I couldn't believe he was still alive. He was the person who defended Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. in the bus boycott. The reason he is still alive is he did that when he was 25.

He went to law school in Cleveland because there were no law schools in Alabama who would accept black students at that point, and his professor there said, "Don't go back to Alabama. You won't be able to practice. There's no room for a black lawyer in Alabama. It's too racist. Just stay here, you'll have a proper and a much better career."

And he said, "No, the whole reason that I'm in law school is to go back to Montgomery and attack segregation." And it was his loyalty to Montgomery . . . If he had stayed in Cleveland and had what appeared to be a better career - of course it wouldn't have been, but sensibly might have been, reasonably expected, could have been - he would never have played a part in this extraordinary movement.

Similarly unions. If anyone who is dissatisfied with their wage - they reacted by going to the next employer, there would never be people who would stay and fight for higher wages and group together with people like them in the same position.

COWEN: If we think of all of the factors that induce or impel people to stay rather than leave, what's the underrated factor or the one people aren't focusing enough upon?

MACFARQUHAR: I've been talking to a lot of people about this, and I think one of the underrated factors is sheer stubbornness. I read this book by this guy, David Frost Jr., a man who lived almost his whole life in a little town called Eufaula, Alabama, in the southeast part of the state.

All of his siblings left the town because there was greater opportunity elsewhere. Most of them went to Cincinnati, one went to Chicago, one went to somewhere else - I forget, but somewhere else where there were jobs and opportunity. And this was not only a small town, but a small southern town. He was coming of age in the '20s and '30s. It was very difficult for a black man to get ahead in this town.

At one point, he was trying to register people to vote, and he was thrown in prison, and he heard that Judge Wallace - who, I think, was not George Wallace but George Wallace's brother, Jack Wallace - wanted him never to come back to Eufaula because he was a troublemaker, wanted him to go. And his brothers in Cincinnati were saying, "Come join us. We can get you a job tomorrow. You can earn so many times more than you can earn in Eufaula. Just come join us and have a better life."

When he heard that Judge Wallace wanted him out of Eufaula, he was like, "No! I'm going back. No one's going to push me out." It was just sheer orneriness - I mean, not only, but that was a big factor in why he was like, "No, no one's going to push me out! I'm going to stay here. This is my home."

COWEN: And extreme altruists as a group, if you have to classify them mentally, are they leavers or stayers?

MACFARQUHAR: Huh, that's an interesting question.

COWEN: And how do your two books tie together?

MACFARQUHAR: I think they're probably leavers because most of the people I talked to want to help humans generally. I don't know if there is a necessary connection between strength of sense of duty and attachment to a universalist morality, but in the people that I spoke to, they were not particularly attached to helping their own community. They wanted to help people in general, and they looked about for the best way to do that, and often, that meant either going somewhere else themselves or at the very least sending their money far away.

And this is part of the reason I wanted to write this book now, because I found in conversations with people about such altruists that there was such a resistance to that, such a resistance to the idea that the best thing you could do in your life was to donate or give or help people with whom you had no organic connection. There was such an attachment to the idea that a person ought to help their own community first, and I wanted to explore that because the altruists I was talking to, to them this made no sense.

I remember one man I spoke to, Jeff. Jeff Kaufman would say, "Why should I have more obligation to a stranger who lives two blocks away from a stranger who lives in Ethiopia?" It made no sense to him. He understood that if someone is a member of his family or a friend, he might have more obligation to them, but if someone was equally a stranger, why should place make a difference?

I've come to think that place makes a great deal of difference.

COWEN: It's sometimes suggested that people are always writing about themselves. Is that true for you? And if it is, how do you understand that?

MACFARQUHAR: It's not true for me. I tend to want to write about people I admire and don't altogether understand, and I write to understand them better.

On the Larissa MacFaruqhar production function

COWEN: As our final segment, a few questions about the Larissa MacFarquhar production function, as we call it. So many of your pieces, profiles, have philosophy in them. What's your philosophical background, formal or otherwise?

MACFARQUHAR: I have none.

COWEN: But you read philosophy; you've read Parfit. You understand philosophy at a deep level. Where does that come from?

MACFARQUHAR: I love it. I love reading philosophy. But stupidly, I didn't take philosophy classes in college. I think I had an experience that many people have had, which is they want to study philosophy because they think it's going to be about the meaning of life, and they get into a philosophy class, and it turns out to resemble something more like algebra, and they're discouraged and move onto some other discipline. That's what happened to me, but I love philosophy now.

COWEN: Could you ever imagine relaunching Lingua Franca? Could such a thing survive today? You had an early role in it, correct?

MACFARQUHAR: Yeah, I was an editor at Lingua Franca, which is a now defunct magazine about academia. Yeah, I absolutely think so.

One of the interesting things about this time of ours is that there seems to be so much appetite - it's almost like the 1890s again - there seems to be so much appetite for talks about ideas. There are all these lectures that are attended and sold out about relatively abstract, obscure subjects. The internet also has disseminated all kinds of writing about abstract ideas that people didn't know how many people would be interested in reading such things. So I think yeah, absolutely.

COWEN: What's your most unusual writing habit?

MACFARQUHAR: Oh gosh, I don't know. What about yours? Give me an idea. What kind of thing are you thinking about?

COWEN: That I write every day, no matter what.

MACFARQUHAR: You do?

COWEN: I think it's unusual. I do.

MACFARQUHAR: Well, you have a blog.

COWEN: I have a blog. But still, I have two Bloomberg columns a week. I write other things.

MACFARQUHAR: And is that important? Why do you think it's important to write every day?

COWEN: It means you're never not writing, and something gets done. A lot of it is never used or thrown out or re-edited, but it's a way of avoiding having long blocks of time where you don't get writing done, which is the bane of many a writer.

MACFARQUHAR: I guess. I don't think it's a bane. I don't think it's a bad thing if I am not writing every day. I certainly do not write every day, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's sometimes good not to be purposeful in what you are doing. If you're writing, you are distilling vague thoughts into something more organized and purposeful, and I think there's a lot of merit to allowing thoughts to just meander about in your head and make weird connections with each other before you push them onto the page.

COWEN: Final question. Let's say a very smart 22-year-old comes up to you, and they say they would like to emulate your career - not in every detail, and obviously the path you took is no longer exactly available. But what advice would you give that person overall?

MACFARQUHAR: I would say that the predictions of the death of publishing and the death of reading have been going on for decades and they should ignore them. It's not true. People will continue to read. I don't know what form they'll continue to read in. They may not read on paper; they may read only online. But if a person wants to be a writer, there is no reason not to do that.

COWEN: Larissa, thank you very much.

MACFARQUHAR: Thank you.

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Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head (Ep. 58)

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As a writer of profiles, Larissa MacFarquhar is granted the privilege of listening to, learning from, and sharing the stories of extraordinary thinkers like Derik Parfit, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, and Paul Krugman. And she's often drawn to write about the individual thinking behind extreme altruism, dementia care, and whether to stay in a small town.

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Adam Grant | Books, Podcast, TED Talks, Newsletter, Articles

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Each month I send a newsletter to over 100,000+ readers on new ideas and evidence about work and psychology. Insight on motivation, meaning, and leading a more generous and creative life.

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Welcome to another edition of the Pink newsletter, which goes out to more than 150,000 subscribers every other Tuesday and always offers 3 interesting things and 1 short Pinkcast video.

3 Things: New Year, new book, new tips

1. WHAT TO READ: WHEN is now in paperback!
To celebrate 2019, today we're releasing the paperback edition of WHEN: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. It's the same great content as the hardcover- at half the price! (Buy it at Amazon, BN.com, 8CR, or IndieBound.)

The volume and complexity of research made this a challenging book to write. I'm proud of how it turned out and equally proud that a dozen media outlets named it one of the best books of 2018.

Also, if you're in the Washington, DC, area, join me tonight (Tuesday Jan. 8) at 7pm at Politics and Prose Bookstore to kick off the paperback tour and learn how to apply the ideas in WHEN during the new year. (Remember: People who care about books support their local independent booksellers!)

2. WHAT TO HEED: The 5 most popular tips and insights from WHEN
Like most writers, I'm a feedback freak. I'm always fascinated (and occasionally frustrated) to learn which ideas people ingest and which they ignore.

Here - based on a back-of-the-envelope analysis of live audience reactions, social media posts, and email from readers - are the 5 most popular tips and insights from WHEN:

1. The recipe for greater productivity and well-being is to do analytic work during your peak, administrative work during your trough, and insight work during your recovery.

2. Breaks are not a deviation from performance; they are part of performance. And the most restorative breaks are social rather than solo, outside not inside, moving instead of stationary, and fully detached rather than semi-detached.

3. The most effective naps are extremely short - only 10 to 20 minutes long. And the most effective nap of all is to precede your brief snooze with a cup of coffee - a technique known as a nappuccino.

4. When you're delivering good news and bad news, always give the bad news first. With endings, people prefer rising sequences to declining sequences.

5. Choral singing is the new exercise. Research shows that singing in a choir elevates mood, protects against depression, boosts immune response, and makes people more likely to do good deeds.

3. WHAT TO READ: A conversation between writers and readers
Technology offers its own brand of feedback. On Kindle e-books, readers can make their highlights public. And that means writers can see which words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs grab readers' attention.

Goodreads recently asked me to annotate WHEN's most popular underlines. You can find that collection here.

PINKCAST: These are the 86 days in 2019 when you can change your behavior
The elves here at world headquarters have begun working on Season 3 of the Pinkcast. So they asked me to share with you one of the most popular episodes of Season 2. The video, drawn from WHEN and just in time for the new year, shows how to take advantage of the "fresh start effect."

You can watch the 138-second video below.

LINKS AND FURTHER READING:

Here are 86 dates that are especially effective for making a fresh start:
* The first day of the month (twelve)
* Mondays (fifty-two)
* The first day of spring, summer, fall, and winter (four)
* Your country's Independence Day or the equivalent (one)
* The day of an important religious holiday-for example,
Easter, Rosh Hashanah, Eid al-Fitr (one)
* Your birthday (one)
* A loved one's birthday (one)
* The first day of school or the first day of a semester (two)
* The first day of a new job (one)
* The day after graduation (one)
* The first day back from vacation (two)
* The anniversary of your wedding, first date, or divorce (three)
* The anniversary of the day you started your job, the day you
became a citizen, the day you adopted your dog or cat, the day
you graduated from school or university (four)
* The day you watch this Pinkcast (one)

As always, thanks for subscribing.

Cheers,
Daniel Pink

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Welcome to another edition of the Pink newsletter, which goes out to more than 150,000 subscribers every other Tuesday and always offers 3 interesting things and 1 short Pinkcast video. 1. WHAT TO READ: WHEN is now in paperback! To celebrate 2019, today we're releasing the paperback edition of WHEN: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

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Coming February 21

a self-help book for societies

Available on February 21:

ebook

Works great as an e-book, especially on color e-readers and tablets (the book has 300+ color drawings). The best ebook experience we've seen is Apple Books > iPad > sepia > vertical scroll.

audiobook

Comes along with a website with the book's most important drawings, labeled (I tell you throughout the book which drawing to go to look at). Also, I read the book myself, it was arduous.

wait but why

You can read the book right on Wait But Why. It looks and functions the best of all here, but no dark mode.

About the book

Hi, I'm Tim. I write the blog Wait But Why, where I write about all kinds of things. But in the middle of 2016, I started thinking about a new topic: why my society sucked. As technology soared ahead, it seemed like we were going backwards in wisdom. Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives. I decided to write about it, which plunged me into a rabbit hole like no other. Six years later, I emerged with this book. The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our complex political environment. With dozens of new terms and concepts and 303 drawings, it's a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds. Here's everything on all the pages:

See how much shit is in there? That took a really long time and I'm happy it's over. Anyway, stop procrastinating by reading all the way down on this page and go read the book, and then we can discuss.
The full story behind the making of this book | Wait But Why homepage

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What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Societies

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a self-help book for societies Works great as an e-book, especially on color e-readers and tablets (the book has 300+ color drawings). The best ebook experience we've seen is Apple Books > iPad > sepia > vertical scroll.

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The Brain Food Weekly Digest

Farnam Street (FS) is devoted to helping you become a better version of yourself. In contrast to the "mental fast food" invading the web, FS is a collection of knowledge that is both hearty and real.

Our Brain Food newsletter goes out every Sunday and contains multi-disciplinary reading recommendations from around the internet as well as book recommendations designed to stimulate your brain.

That's why we call it Brain Food.

The Details

Signal not noise. Think of reading our newsletter as a great way to hire us - for free. Let us scour the web and read hundreds of books a year. Let us filter out the noise, contextualize and synthesize the information, and present you with some well-thought-out tools you can add to your your mental toolbox. We're doing work you probably don't have time for.

We study failure and success. Mostly, we just want to understand the world. Really understand it. Studying hundreds and then thousands of cases of success and failure helps you build a repository of "moves" come to mind when you're faced with hard and uncertain decisions. Learning history helps us think about problems in three-dimensional ways.

It's not all hard science-y stuff. That part is important, and as you read the newsletter every week, we'll give you some of that. But we'd feel like robots if we didn't explore the age-old questions of what it means to live and what makes for a good life. Isn't that the end game here? So we include regular doses of philosophy, history, art, and human nature.

The smartest audience in the world. Readers include Fortune 10 CEOs, championship coaches (NFL, NHL, MLB, NBA), four-star generals, best-selling authors, entrepreneurs, Nobel Laureates, hedge fund managers, teachers, professors, students, venture capitalists, and everyone between. Our readers share a passion for learning and acquiring practical wisdom so they can live better lives.

Read what you're missing. We don't spam you. We never send you anything we haven't read ourselves. We are not interested in fast food for the mind. We just pass along big chunks of knowledge to help our readers think uniquely and independently so they can gain seize opportunities that others miss.

What Do Real People Say?

I have rarely read a concise synthesis of complicated topics from disparate sources that has been so well written...On par with Krugman or Jim Grant.

Bert Hancock

Shane is not only one of the most widely read people I know, but also well versed in turning his knowledge into practical insights for readers. His writing and work is a fountain of useful knowledge and worldly wisdom.

James Clear

[The FS Learning Community] has improved my quality of thinking and it is a great source knowing what to read, what to mull over apart from many other important things.

Rajat Bose

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The Farnam Street Brain Food Newsletter for Thirsty Minds

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Farnam Street (FS) is devoted to helping you become a better version of yourself. In contrast to the "mental fast food" invading the web, FS is a collection of knowledge that is both hearty and real. Our Brain Food newsletter goes out every Sunday and contains multi-disciplinary reading recommendations from around the internet as well as book recommendations designed to stimulate your brain.

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I use Pocket to bookmark articles i want to read later and the daily roundup  that Pocket emails to me always has diverse and fascinating  articles.

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Top Articles and Videos about Trending on Pocket

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Browse a list of the best all-time articles and videos about Trending from all over the web. Save them to your pocket to read them later and get interesting recommendations.

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Listen to Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) from The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish in Podcasts. 

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Listen to Winning at the Great Game (Part 1) from The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish in Podcasts. 

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https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-knowledge-project-with-shane-parrish/id990149481?mt=2&i=1000425577065

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the knowledge project with shane parrish

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"Winning at the Great Game (Part 1)" from The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish by Farnam Street on Apple Podcasts

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Author, educator, and hedge fund advisor, Adam Robinson shares powerful lessons on winning the game of life. He teaches us how to learn, how to fail, and his three secrets of happiness and success. --- For comprehensive show notes on this episode,...

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The Best Ideas of the Month, where you'll find my rundown of the month's smartest articles on becoming healthier, happier, and more productive.

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Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

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Based at UC Berkeley, Greater Good reports on groundbreaking research into the roots of compassion, happiness, and altruism.

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Their Blog is called Your Brain at Work

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Your Brain at Work is the NeuroLeadership Institute's blog for all things thought leadership.

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Discover the Center for Creative Leadership’s global, life-changing leadership development research and solutions for you, your team, and your organization.

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A way for HR to enable interactions that create value, provide a Simply Irresistible workforce experience, and shift to the Future of HR

Posted by Arthur Mazor, Jeff Mike, and Michael Stephan on April 5, 2019.

Over 2,000 guests joined our recent live discussion about Reimagining HR for the Future as part of Deloitte's Dbriefs HR Executives Series. One of the participants asked for additional insights on a "unified engagement platform."¬ Great question!

A unified engagement platform (UEP) is an essential Future of HR "enabler," integrating the array of technologies so critical to creating a Simply IrresistibleTM workforce experience. While not necessarily deployed on a single software, the UEP brings together mobile, desktop, IoT, and digital/augmented/virtual reality technologies, presenting them in a way that makes it easy for workers to engage with information, actions, and each other for increased productivity and a consumer-grade experience.

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Capital H Blog - Putting humans at the center of work

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A way for HR to enable interactions that create value, provide a Simply Irresistible workforce experience, and shift to the Future of HR Posted by Arthur Mazor, Jeff Mike, and Michael Stephan on April 5, 2019. Over 2,000 guests joined our recent live discussion about Reimagining HR for the Future as part of Deloitte's Dbriefs HR Executives Series.

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HR Technology for 2019 Slide Set - JOSH BERSIN

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Insights on Corporate Talent, Learning, Leadership, and HR Technology

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They have written seminal books on adult development theory, immunity to change and deliberately developmental organizations. i am deeply inspired and intrigued by their work

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In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for-namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people's impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company's resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.

What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone-not just select "high potentials"-could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?

An Everyone Culture dives deep into the worlds of three leading companies that embody this breakthrough approach. It reveals the design principles, concrete practices, and underlying science at the heart of DDOs-from their disciplined approach to giving feedback, to how they use meetings, to the distinctive way that managers and leaders define their roles. The authors then show readers how to build this developmental culture in their own organizations.

This book demonstrates a whole new way of being at work. It suggests that the culture you create is your strategy-and that the key to success is developing everyone.

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Immunity to Change Books, Resources & Publications | Minds at Work

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In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for-namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people's impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company's resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.

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WorkLife with Adam Grant: A TED original podcast

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Organizational psychologist Adam Grant takes you inside the minds of some of the world’s most unusual professionals to discover the keys to better work life.

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IdeoU blog

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shares the methods he has developed to find focus in daily life, opening up the opportunity to have more impact at work and at home. He shares how he started his journey toward productivity and mindfulness, lessons from his experience designing products at Google, and how by focusing on fewer things, you can actually do more as an individual and a team.

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Get started

re:Work is organized around ways you can make an impact in your workplace. Each subject contains tools and insights for addressing specific challenges.

Goal Setting
Set goals to align efforts, communicate objectives, and measure process.

Hiring
Make better hiring decisions through job descriptions, structured interviewing, hiring committees, and more.

Innovation
Learn to build the skills for innovation and make it a part of your workplace.

Learning & Development
Empower your employees to grow and develop by making learning part of everyone’s job.

Managers
Identify what makes a great manager and offer feedback and development opportunities.

People Analytics
Make informed, objective people decisions using science and data.

Teams
Examine team effectiveness and how to foster psychological safety.

Unbiasing
Reduce the influence of unconscious bias by educating, measuring, and holding everyone accountable.

Latest from the blog

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Let's Make Work Better. Research, ideas, and practices from Google and others, to put people first.

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Interview with Roger McNamee on Making Sense with Sam Harris

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Interview with Roger McNamee on Making Sense with Sam Harris

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In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Roger McNamee about his book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

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In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Roger McNamee about his book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

Roger McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for thirty-five years. He has cofounded successful venture funds including Elevation with U2's Bono. He was a former mentor to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and helped recruit COO Sheryl Sandberg to the company. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Twitter: @Moonalice

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Making Sense Podcast #152 - The Trouble with Facebook | Sam Harris

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In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Roger McNamee about his book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe . Roger McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for thirty-five years. He has cofounded successful venture funds including Elevation with U2's Bono.

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Newsletter on renegade work cultures.

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The Workplace Revolution: Happy Employees, Bosses and Clowns