Interview: Tyler Cowen, Economist & Writer
A wide-ranging discussion on renewables, climate change, India, population, pandemics, Kenya, Morocco, Canada, the Sahel, religion, books, and more!
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, and director of the Mercatus Center market economy think tank. He has hosted and contributed writing to the highly influential Marginal Revolution economics blog every day since 2003.
In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Tyler Cowen’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.
I think that given the chaos in Ukraine and Gaza and American politics and many other things, the world is missing what I think future generations will look to as the biggest story of the 2020s, which the amazing exponential rise in renewable energy, particularly solar.
Just some statistics: solar power provided 53 percent of new electricity generating capacity installed in the United States in 2023, up from 4 percent in 2010!
And all clean energy sources together are set to account for 96% of new electricity generating capacity built in 2024. The U.S. hasn’t built a new coal plant since 2013.
Even China is now building way more solar than coal, and it's looking like some of its coal plants are just going to be used as peaker plants, not baseline power plants.
My contention is that electricity production “stocks” are a lagging indicator, and all the “flows” of new capacity coming online are increasingly dominated by clean energy! Ramez Naam and the IEA and the Rocky Mountain Institute and a bunch of other folks have written great stuff about this. I think that we are in this exponential growth phase now, and before we know it, maybe as soon as the mid 2030s, developed countries, potentially even China as well, will have an overwhelmingly renewable energy-powered economy. The picture on climate change, at least on the emissions side, is brighter than most people think.
So what are your thoughts on that? That’s a long intro, but that's a major theme for my writing.
Progress has exceeded my expectations, basically for reasons you just outlined. But I do have some significant worries. I think there's one scenario where the world gets really a lot more green energy, as we're doing, but also just a lot more carbon emissions. That more countries have economic growth, more people want to eat meat, own cars.
“I think there's one scenario where the world gets really a lot more green energy, as we're doing, but also just a lot more carbon emissions.”
-Tyler Cowen
Intermittency remains a problem. And many of the poorer countries around the world, it may not be coal, but they'll use fossil fuels, which of course will become cheaper as demand from the wealthy countries declines. Maybe we're just still going to burn a lot of what's in the ground anyway, even with progress. I'm not sure what to do about that, but it probably makes me somewhat less optimistic than you are.
Well, I think that's a concern. And also, you know, part of what I do in my writing is I try to argue the optimist case because I think there's a structural bias in the internet ecosystem towards arguing the negative case. I’m almost trying to play “angel's advocate,” the reverse of devil's advocate, to take a side in the argument that not many people will take in the hope of balancing out the overall information environment a bit.
I hope genetic engineering makes cows less environmentally damaging. I hope we find ways of doing construction that are better for carbon emissions than what is currently the case. But those are fairly separate problems.
And then there's many forms of transport which maybe cannot easily be electrified in the aggregate, even though maybe any one case of them can be.
So stationary power, maybe we should be most optimistic about. But there's just a long way to go.
Yes, absolutely.
The thing is, though, I think a lot of developing countries, like in particular India, and once they start getting on a better development pathway Africa as well, are going to leapfrog the fossil fuel age more than we think. Because like you've written in your article on air pollution, fossil fuels have a lot of downsides even if you aren't paying attention to climate change. There's really immediate local downsides, like reliance on imported fuel for many countries, air pollution and particulate matter deaths, stuff like that.
I think now that China's exporting a huge wave of really cheap EVs, and now that solar panels are really, really cheap, I hope to see more renewable technologies just becoming cheaper, more and more mass produced, a higher learning rate, and just generally keep rolling on like a juggernaut. And renewables have kept outpacing even the most optimistic projections over the past five years, in stationary power and electric vehicle technology. So I'm hopeful for that.
Keep in mind, there's bad governance in most of the world. And as I'm sure you know, on net, governments still subsidize fossil fuels.
Yes, sadly.
So how this is all going to play out, I think, is far from obvious. Again, it looks to me much better than it did 10 years ago, and so I'm more hopeful.
Yes, thank you. And yes, I think it's far from obvious, too.
I'm trying to cheerlead renewable energy a bit and help people realize that we're still in the game, that there's a lot still to play for, so to speak.
And related to that, you've also written your case for why climate change isn't enough of a reason to not have kids. Could you expound on that? I agree with you, but I'd love to hear your take on it.
Well, human beings bring net positives to the world, unless, say, they're mass murderers or tyrannical leaders. They create more value than they take away. I don't want to force anyone to have kids. But overall, if people decide to have a kid and the kid lives and is healthy, that's a blessing.
“Human beings bring net positives to the world.”
-Tyler Cowen
Now, as you have a higher population, that's more potential innovators, and it's also a larger market size to sell your innovations to. So if you think we need more innovation to really get green energy, you should want a larger market size. And China, as you noted, which has made very significant progress in areas such as solar, in part, that has happened in China because China is a large market. You know, Portugal is never going to be the leader in solar. It's too small a market. So we should be rooting for more people.
It's interesting that you said Portugal, because they’re part of the European common market. One could argue that you could get larger market sizes by amalgamating existing markets instead of growing the population.
The European Union should be a bigger market than it is. For whatever odd reasons, there are these unusual and disadvantageous national barriers.
So Spain and Germany are larger countries, they've done things in solar, as you know.
But to just say, oh, a small country will do this, and they're in the EU, it will all be fine, that doesn't work that well.
And that's a shame, because environment aside, it would bring huge benefits in many areas. A lot of the smaller EU countries end up stuck because whether it's cultural, linguistic, networking, there are just too many barriers for the EU to truly act as a single market.
Interesting.
Well, moving around geographically, I've been really impressed by some of the statistics coming out of India lately. I'm sure you saw recently, India has eliminated extreme poverty. Obviously, that still leaves a whole bunch of what most Americans recognize as poverty. That's a very, very low bar. [Extreme poverty internationally is defined as living on less than $1.90 a day, with some inflation/purchasing power adjustments]. But still, that's a really impressive accomplishment!
And India also is building huge amounts of new renewable and other electricity generating capacity. They're building electric rail networks. They seem to be hitting their stride in a way that China was in about 2000 or 2005. I'm feeling optimistic about the rise of a new broadly-speaking-democratic powerful country in global markets and geopolitics.
I would add the cautionary note that hardly anyone in India cares about climate change. Now, you may think they care about correlates to climate change, such as high temperatures in Delhi in the difficult months. But it's very far from a national priority with any party that I'm aware of or any segment of the electorate. Air pollution is a major issue. But if there's a way to fix air pollution, say through natural gas, that doesn't, to a comparable degree, fix climate change, it could prove very popular in India.
So truly green energy has to be very cheap with the intermittency problem truly solved for India to make the transition, because there is not ideological momentum there at all.
The thing is, though, they don't have the ideological momentum, but they're doing it anyway. Solar and wind made up 92% of new power generation capacity coming online in India in 2022! [Non-fossil fuels account for just 44% of India’s current generation capacity, but most of the new stuff being built is renewable].
They're doing this not for ideological reasons, but just because it's cheap. And because, I think, batteries have really effectively solved the intermittency problem to a degree that's not fully understood.
I really suspect that India's rise will increasingly more and more be powered by renewable energy.
Maybe, but nominal per capita income in India is a bit over $2,000 per head. That's very, very low. It's likely to grow at a pretty decent pace, which is good news.
But their energy demands, and we're not even talking about AI and whatever else, their energy demands will be phenomenal. And whether solar plus battery really can handle that, I don't know.
It's a very large number of people growing at a rapid pace. And I wouldn't at all be surprised if they were polluting more.
I suspect their carbon emissions will continue to go up for a while, but that it will be much, much, much less than it could have been if it hadn't been for the huge growth of renewable energy we've seen recently.
That's almost certainly true but it still could be rising for quite a while. We could still end up in fairly dangerous scenarios.
And same with China. There's not really native Chinese demand to fix climate change. It's seen as some kind of Western conceit, and people there care far, far more about air pollution in the narrower sense of that term, which is, for them, a bigger problem. It kills a large number of Chinese each year.
Places such as Beijing are much better than they used to be. But still, it's not unusual in China for air pollution to make a city unwalkable for days on end. So I think that will be their priority.
See, I agree. I do not think we're going to get a huge global movement with really strong multi-country political buy-in to really focus on solving climate change, like we thought we might get in, say, 2019. But I do think that we're going to get big transitions to renewable energy nonetheless, in part because it also helps with other issues like air pollution, like fuel imports.
I agree that there's not going to be a huge ideological drive to solve climate change in China or India, but I suspect that they will be doing a lot of the stuff that would have been considered a really ambitious climate change solving program 10 years ago, nonetheless, just for other reasons. Does that make sense?
It makes sense, but keep in mind there's also going to be technological progress for fossil fuels. And there has been; fracking was a big, big increase in productivity. It could spread to more parts of the world quite easily. The energy demands of the world, over some period of time, they could go up by 3x or 4x. And to think green energy will absorb all of that and cut into the current flows, I think it's a bigger requirement than is often imagined.
Again, I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic, but I'm not optimistic either. I'm genuinely uncertain.
“I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic, but I'm not optimistic either. I'm genuinely uncertain.”
-Tyler Cowen
This could be selection bias, given that I'm interested in renewable energy, but I think that there's much more technological progress in renewable energy.
I don't know if you've been tracking Fervo Energy, the new enhanced geothermal company out west. They're building a 400 megawatt enhanced geothermal plant in Utah. They've already got a demo plant for a Google data center in Nevada. And they are actually using some of that fracking technology. They're injecting liquid down so it becomes hot so that it can then come back up and turn a turbine. That could be another huge new source of renewable baseload power.
I'm not super optimistic on the new small modular nuclear reactor designs because they seem to have over-promised a lot, they have issues with highly enriched uranium sourcing and stuff, but one of those could pan out.
I feel like there's a lot of options on the low-carbon energy front to potentially be a big new star.
Yes, but we are our own worst enemy. We've had safe nuclear power for a long time. France and Sweden have done it to a considerable degree. Most countries have turned in the other direction. So we're quite capable of making major blunders for many decades on end.
Yes, one of the things I'm really trying to do with my newsletter is to avoid the “nuclear power-ization” of renewables. There's already a little bit, often in some places directly fossil fuel industry funded. There's an attempt to split the environmental movement by saying, “oh, isn't it bad that we're building solar, that we're taking up potential farmland or desert land with solar panels?”
Nuclear Power is Better than Fossil Fuels, but Renewables are Better than Nuclear
And I'm really trying to say, “No, this is important! We really need this! It's important to prevent air pollution deaths and climate change!” So I'm trying to prevent a major blunder like that being made with renewable energy, given that it seems already, unfortunately, kind of set in the public consciousness for nuclear.
Yeah, I would say that blunder has already been made, though. I mean, look at wind power. Homeowners hate it. I think it looks beautiful, by the way.
I do too.
But you look at the UK’s legal and regulatory treatment of wind power, we're in that era now. It's not a hypothetical. And it may not lift.
Not in the UK, maybe, but China's building huge amounts of offshore wind farms. And even the in U.S., Vineyard Wind just came online. South Fork Wind just came online. Offshore wind is really going well.
And I really like offshore wind, because there's been a bunch of studies finding that offshore wind turbines also form an artificial reef, fish numbers and biodiversity are way higher around offshore wind turbines. Because the base is just another platform for life to grow on, from shellfish to kelp to a bunch of stuff.
So I agree that wind turbines have been really unnecessarily strangled on land in a lot of places, but offshore wind, I think, might be having its moment. It's overcome some of the financial difficulties of last year. New York just signed contracts for two big new offshore wind farms.
Maybe, but there's two sources of quite green energy that have been declining. Nuclear we've already mentioned, but also hydroelectric. So some things are leaving the scene. And I would just say in general, looking at history, I'm very cautious about extrapolating either positive or negative trends. There's so many efforts to do so. So in the 70s, there's this great fear of overpopulation. Right now, there's this great fear of a fertility crisis and underpopulation.
I'm not saying we shouldn't think about either one of those, but it could well be neither comes to pass. Extrapolating current trends can rather rapidly lead us astray because of the power of the exponent. But maybe the world is just messy and not all that exponential.
I suspect that renewable energy is more exponential than people think, but that the fertility crisis and population stuff is less exponential than people think. I wrote an article, “Don't Worry About Human Population Growth—or Decline.”
I suspect that the fertility crisis and overpopulation narratives are two sides of the same coin and that they are over-extrapolations of a trend. There might be huge new shifts like ectogenesis or better reproductive aid technologies that could totally change things.
I also worry about climate damage from war. If you recall, say, Saddam Hussein burning the oil fields. It seems the incidence of war is on the rise. That's overall a major negative for many things, of course, but also the environment. And countries develop very different priorities during wars, and those priorities are mostly not green energy.
On the other hand, though, I've seen a case that China actually views its ongoing investment in renewable energy as an attempt to “war-proof” itself by having a domestic decentralized clean energy supply that would be hard to choke off at the Straits of Malacca, or to target with bombing raids. And Ukraine actually has been building some more wind energy capacity lately with the explicit rationale that it's more decentralized and harder for Russians to target.
Speaking of existential risk, my prior on this is I think that AI-related things, especially the Yudkowskyan “foom” scenario, is really overweighted as a threat, compared to boring old nuclear war, bioengineered pandemics, or tail-risk really bad climate change scenarios.
What do you personally think is the biggest threat to humanity? Or the several biggest.
I'm 100% in agreement with you, I believe. I think nuclear war is by far the biggest risk. Just our own general stupidity. Bad policy reactions to different things that happen. Could be anything. Other major weapons that don't have to be nuclear to be highly destructive. But just…war.
I worry more about pandemics than most people. For a long time, I have. That said, I don't worry much about pandemics that are going to kill everyone or kill 80% of people. It just doesn't seem that happens. But to have a variety of new pandemics that kill 10, 20, 30 million people, I think we're still underrating that risk.
“I don't worry much about pandemics that are going to kill everyone or kill 80% of people...But to have a variety of new pandemics that kill 10, 20, 30 million people, I think we're still underrating that risk.”
-Tyler Cowen
I agree. I expect to live through at least one or two more COVID-level pandemics if I live a reasonable human lifespan, given the amount of human interaction with potential new virus reservoirs in different species and stuff like that. I hope that next time we'll be able to jump on the technology we built from COVID and roll out an mRNA vaccine really fast or something.
You've lived through two already! HIV/AIDS, some estimate it's killed 35 million people. I saw a new COVID deaths estimate, 17 million, with some more to come. Those are very rough, but they're big numbers.
And that's with mRNA vaccines, of course. So we got, in a sense, lucky. On average, we'll get luckier as time passes. But still, there's no guarantee things like that are going to work.
Moving from the global to the national, I really liked your article recently on the emerging potential of Kenya. I wrote about their geothermal sector a while ago. Can you tell me your case for why Kenya is a place to keep an eye on?
I've only been to Kenya once. I liked what I saw. I have the very naive impression, speaking of extrapolating, that they've been averaging 5% growth for a decade, pandemic aside. That's a pretty good performance.
So if you're looking for somewhere to be optimistic about, that's a start. It seems to me their borders and national identity, while not perfect, are not entirely screwed up, that there's some cohesion in the country, ethnically, linguistically, and otherwise.
There are many groups, but the general history is more positive than in many other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. English language is a help.
They treat foreign investment very poorly. That's one of their main problems. But if you're picking an African nation to be cheery about, maybe right now they're top of the list.
Fascinating. I would love to go to Kenya, it's one of the many places I'd love to go to and write about.
I did actually manage to go to Morocco last year, and, again, extrapolating from a single visit, I was really positively impressed. It's a huge cliche, but the trains ran on time. I was really impressed by their rail system. They built the first high speed train in Africa recently along the Atlantic coast, called Al-Boraq after the mythical flying steed of Muhammad. They're talking about building a whole bunch more solar and potentially building some long-distance transmission lines to Europe. They have lots and lots of space for solar. I've read that they’re industrializing and building a car parts industry for some European countries. What are your thoughts on Morocco?
It's a surprisingly well-run country and I have taken the train there and it was on time. And it's been more stable than many people had been expecting. It just seems removed from a lot of the other troubles of North Africa for whatever reasons. And the notion of a clan-based monarchy system, we see a few other places in the Arab world where that's been stable.
But that said, I do worry about their climb upwards. It's not entirely clear to me what they will produce that will generate a lot of new middle-class jobs. Some of that is due to automation. Much of what they do in agriculture, it's not really that high value added. I don't think they have a perfect location. They have some migration problems.
But again, I would be modestly bullish on Morocco, and I've followed it for now a few decades, and I just haven't seen really terrible things happen there, and that has to count for something too.
Morocco was not defined by European powers like many other African and Middle Eastern countries. The Alawite dynasty essentially conquered most of Morocco in the 1600s according to my understanding, and it was later under French and Spanish protectorates, but it seems to me that it is a natural nation state. It didn't have borders drawn by people across the world, like Pakistan or Syria. And that seems to me to be potentially a factor in its success.
The Spanish protectorate segregated some of those problems, but you have had civil war in that part [Western Sahara] for a long time. So the problem isn't gone, it's just been put outside of Morocco.
Kenya too has issues. Northern Kenya, it is not culturally proper Kenya, and the north has had drought and it has severe poverty. But in terms of population and GDP, it's probably not large enough to make for a really, really serious problem.
Neither Morocco nor Kenya is quite a natural nation. They're just closer to it. But in both cases, if the country, say, has a soccer team, more or less everyone roots for it. I take that as one good marker of…something.
What other nations would you highlight as potential up-and-comers, so to speak?
Countries that could really hit their development and industrialization stride in the near term? Indonesia? Maybe Egypt?
Indonesia, yes. The notion that they'll grow at 4%, which is underperforming, but still pretty good, seems to me plausible.
Egypt, I'm bearish on.
I think northern Mexico will do fantastically well. And that's largely a United States effect, but look, it's working. And I think Mexico City will do very well. Maybe Puebla also.
Different parts of Latin America, there's now a lot of rethinking and change going on. I don't think we know which ones will emerge from that with prosperity. But it felt, say, five years ago, like a backwater. And now it doesn't anymore. So I would at least keep a close watch on much of Latin America.
Interesting. While we're in the Americas, I liked your article recently on Canada.
I really like a lot of what Canada has done. I like that they're accepting now close to an equal real number of immigrants as the United States per year, despite the much smaller population. I like what they've done in creating a space where some First Nations can do some interesting industrialization projects, like the Senakw housing development in Vancouver or the Malahat battery factory in British Columbia.
And with climate change, they'll have problems. They'll have fires in the boreal forest and heat waves and stuff like everybody else. But with abundant fresh water from the Great Lakes and just the more northern latitude, plus a pro-immigration culture, they seem to be potentially well positioned for climate shocks.
What do you think about the future of Canada?
I'm quite bullish on North America more generally. And Canada has no real national security problem. There is a set of Arctic issues, but the U.S. always will take care of them. And they're in a very large and well-functioning free trade zone. And they have plenty of stuff.
I think it's very hard to be bearish on Canada. They have a productivity crisis, some of that may be a numerical figment of the imagination. Sometimes resource-intensive countries plummet to low levels of productivity. It's just because they've gotten, say, the cheapest oil out of the ground, and then it's harder. It's not that they screwed anything up. So Canada has fantastic talent and I'm very optimistic.
Excellent.
So one area that I'm really, really pessimistic about, and seems to me to be likely, due to the combination of climate, ideological issues, great power competition, and population growth, to be a source of trouble for probably the rest of my lifetime, is the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa.
I'm sure you've seen that, you know, you could now walk from the Atlantic to the Red Sea on countries where there's been a coup d'etat since 2020.
I feel like, maybe in part because it doesn't have that Persian Gulf thing of being a huge international resource choke point, people are not really paying attention to that part of Africa.
There's a lot of evidence that landlocked countries are at a big disadvantage. Not just Central Africa, but say Nepal, compared to places that have ocean access, or Bolivia, compared to its peers with ocean access. I don't see how they get around that. So, yeah, I'm also not optimistic there.
Speaking of ocean access. Ethiopia just recently signed a deal to potentially recognize Somaliland in exchange for a port city. Ethiopia the world's largest landlocked country. That's certainly, you know, out of the box thinking. Not sure what it will do to regional stability.
What would you do if you were asked by the leader of a landlocked country to say, what can I possibly do to get access to the sea or trade? What do you think is the path forward there? Just try to cultivate really, really good relationships with neighboring states?
A complicated question. That's a very important Ethiopian deal, but it's also highly controversial. Somaliland is not recognized as a country by, say, the United States and many other places. What level of credibility that deal has, I'm not sure.
I would just say if you look at it longer term, Eritrea and Ethiopia have not always been separate nations. And it's not clear what the final equilibrium of nation building looks like in that part of the world. Eritrea, in my view, is too small to do well on its own, and it's doing very poorly. I'm not suggesting conquest, but I think ideally there's some kind of rearrangement of borders so that Eritrea and Ethiopia, at least parts of those places, are united in a way that is peaceful. And that's not historically without precedent by any means.
So there's no magic wand to bring that about, but I think people should keep their eyes on that.
What other parts of the world do you think are undercovered that will become more noticeable in the next couple of decades?
Well, even though India now makes the cover of every magazine, I still think it's radically undercovered relative to its importance. So I would stress that. And a lot of my personal travel I now do to India because it's important.
“Even though India now makes the cover of every magazine, I still think it's radically undercovered relative to its importance.”
-Tyler Cowen
Japan, Korea, if they can reverse their population declines, they have enormous potential to be even a lot more important. I'm not sure they can do that. But in a funny way, they've become underrated and a bit ignored, even though they used to get so much press.
We mentioned Indonesia.
Turkey actually has more potential than it's given credit for. They get deserved bad press because they have a bad leader. But you look at their economy, per capita income, also the degree of diversification, they're just much better at a lot of things than many people think. And I don't think they've blown it yet. They might, but they're still in the running.
I very much agree with you on India.
I have a clear number one favorite place in India, and that is the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Fascinating.
It's just staggeringly beautiful. The city is reasonably well run. The food is amazing. It's very manageable and walkable. It's one of the cheaper cities in India because it's a pilgrimage site. One of the best sights of my entire life.
That really segues into another thing.
You've written that religion is underrated as a shaper of the future. The two reasons that really stuck with me from your writing were one, demography, religious people tend to have more kids, so they may have more staying power than we think. And two, that if you study any religion’s holy books, the questions that are there are still going to be relevant hundreds of years later. And that's probably not going to be true for any software manual or anything like that.
I personally am secular humanist. I'm interested in religion, but I'm not a believer. Could you expound on your theory of how religion is still or even increasingly relevant?
Well, it depends on the religion, of course. But if we take, say, the Bible, it's arguably the best and most important book ever written. It has real staying power. People still look to it for inspiration. Christianity has shown it can innovate and diversify.
I mean, like you, I'm not a religious believer, but I do feel, at least for the time being, secular philosophy is at a bit of a dead end. I don't see very important new thinkers, left wing, right wing. It doesn't feel like the 1970s where there's Rawls, there's Nozick. There's not a lot going on that's very exciting and secular. It feels like a dead end at the moment.
I think our religious ideas will re-exert their power, and we're already seeing that. I don't know that church participation will go up, but the intellectuals I meet seem to be religious at a much higher rate than, say, 10 years ago.
Interesting, very interesting.
Now, Hinduism will become more important because India is becoming more important. That's a different story, but it's a very simple one. It's almost guaranteed.
Islam, of course, is nominally over a billion individuals in many different countries.
There's, what, about 200 million Muslims in India? And how many in Indonesia? They're the two largest sites for Muslims, and both of those countries are highly likely to be more important.
Pakistan is less clear, but again, that could turn around.
I'm not sure that Buddhism will become more important, but certainly some religions I think will rise greatly in intellectual influence.
Interesting.
I'm a huge fan of reading books, and some people have famously rejected that recently. I think Sam Bankman-Fried, of infamous reputation, famously said something like “if you've written a book, it meant you failed at writing a blog post.” But I think that reading books is still awesome, and I try to read as many books as I can.
You are known for being a super voracious reader, and I really like your book reviews and flagging of valuable reads. So in the age of the internet and short form video and all these other media streams, what's your case for books?
Well, I don't know that I want to make a case. A lot of people, books won't do them any good.
Because they won't pay attention? Or because they won't have the time to finish one or engage with it?
All of that. I think well educated people, the ones I know at least, what they should be doing is spending more time with AI. Yes, reading books, but AI is the thing that's really undervalued I meet PhDs all the time who say they’ve never even played around with large language models.
Books are wonderful when they grab you, and that covers you and me. I don't feel reading books needs too much of an external justification. They have their power when you're reading them, just because they're there. Like, why look at a beautiful sunset? I'm not saying you can't give reasons, but the sunset is somehow most significant when you just feel you should look at the beautiful sunset.
Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I also just have a really strong emotional attachment to books. But I recently talked with someone else, Elle Griffin, who said that she wanted to write a book, but after doing some research on the publishing industry, she found that even a mid-level blog or internet presence would probably get her more readers and more engagement with her ideas because most books didn't sell very well.
That's true. But do both, right?
We talked about a lot of things.
What else would you like to share?
Well, I think travel is underrated for people who can do it. Obviously, there's a cost. It may conflict with family obligations, other reasons. But I see a lot of people who don't travel simply out of inertia. They're young, they have some money. There's a bit of a feeling I can always do it later on. And I would just try to nudge those people to go a few different places and pick some very different places, maybe even places you think you don't want to go, and just see what happens. I think travel is the most potent form of learning and I would vote for it when possible.
“Travel is underrated for people who can do it…I think travel is the most potent form of learning.”
-Tyler Cowen
Absolutely. I've been trying to travel as much as I can afford to in the last couple of years! I agree.
A pleasure to chat with you.
Thank you so much. And thanks for your writing! I consistently find really, really interesting stuff to read through Marginal Revolution. You introduced me to Erica Fatland's writing and Maximum City and Indigenous Continent, which I reviewed recently, and a bunch of others. So thank you for enriching my intellectual life.
My pleasure. And I have no plans to quit until they make me.
Thank you very much. Have a great day.
Really enlightening interview. Speaking of the Sahel region. There is a multi-national initiative to plant a Great Green Wall to arrest the southward moving aridification. It's a gigantic project- possibly from coast to coast
Aaron Price in his Weather with a Twist Substack discussed it at length in his April 6th or 7th issue. Geoengineering on a colossal scale!