"This is a fun book to read because you mentioned  in there what the original sources to read are.   It’s like the Harold Bloom of economics, right?  It’s a book written for smart people. Okay,   so le..."

"list again? Am I a statesman? Did I play a role at  the Treaty of Versailles or something comparable?   I don’t know. We’re in Washington. I’m sure  you talk to all the people who matter quite   a bit..."

"has most investment been selfishly irrational?  Well, Adam Smith was the first one I know to   have made this point, that projectors, I think  he called them, are overly optimistic. So people   who do..."

"than it’s selfishly good for us. That was  Reuven Brenner’s claim in some of his books   on risk. Again, I think you have to distinguish  between different parts of the distribution. So   it seems the..."

"it could be 6%. How different do you think it  is in art versus, I don’t know, entrepreneurship   versus different kinds of entrepreneurship? There  are different industries there as well, right?   I’..."

"could be a short-run speculator and in fact beat  the markets. And he believed that he did so, and   at least he did for some periods of his life. That  may have been luck, or maybe he did have specia..."

"even though there must be share price data of some  sort. At what frequency? Well, is it once a day?   Is it once a week? We don’t have the sort of data  we have now where you can just test anything y..."

"markets get more mature, more and more of equities  are held basically by passive investors, people   who don’t have a direct hand in the involvement of  the enterprise, and the share of the market th..."

"from a social point of view, maybe you can only  have too much trading or too little trading,   and you might rather have too much trading.  Explain that. Why can it only be too much or   too little? ..."

"Think of it in terms of wealth. I see. So one  way to think about it is like the management cost   as a fraction of the assets under management or  something. And that’s right. In that case, 2% is   n..."

"you busy and it helps you follow analytics,  and you read about the games online, and maybe   that’s efficient mood management, and that’s the  way to think about risk behavior. I don’t bet,   by the ..."

"some of them don’t pay off. Should we just be  looking at their top contributions and just   disregard everything else? For Hayek, I think one  of the points you have against him is that his   top thr..."

"of it’s quite interesting, but his ability to see  things from multiple perspectives, I think, was   in part stemming from the fact that he wrote a lot  about many different topics, like French histor..."

"a very good book on it. Yeah, I guess it’s similar  to our time. Right. We have certain taboos and you   can get away with. Yeah, they say whatever  on Twitter and. Other people get cancelled,   actua..."

"no matter what. And that means the Hawks would  gain in status. And those worried about fertility   and whatever technology drives the new wars, if  that is what happens. Let’s say it’s drones. It’s  ..."

"actual views, I think his career is a tremendous  white pill in the sense that he writes The Road   to Serfdom in 1944 when Nazi Germany and Soviet  Union are both prominent players. And honestly,   t..."

"say he’s been proven wrong, but a lot of the west  has had a pretty good run since then and there’s   not major evidence that he’s correct. The bad  events we’ve seen, like some war coming back,   som..."

"fundamental and harder to fix. Let’s talk about  Hayek’s arguments. So obviously he has a famous   argument about decentralization. But when we look  at companies like Amazon, Uber, these other big   ..."

"and the right. Wait. But under this argument,  it still adds to the credence of the people   who argue that basically we need the government to  control. Because if it is the case that the Soviet   Un..."

"the Soviet Union, after the revolution, which did  totally fail and were abandoned pretty quickly,   even by Lenin. Would you count the ‘50s period  in the Soviet Union as more centrally planned or   ..."

"but that at some point more or less ends as it  has. Well, it hasn’t quite ended with China, but   it’s certainly slowed down and people don’t pay  enough attention to that. I don’t know why. It now  ..."

"bureaucracy that’s terrible, doesn’t have a big  market check. But very often, governments act   through markets and have to contract or hire  consultants or hire outside parties. And it’s   more like..."

"just building a sustainable structure. And a lot  of it isn’t sustainable, like the fools who start   these new small businesses. But they do pretty  quickly disappear, and that’s part of the market  ..."

"That monopoly is when you have interesting things  happen because when there’s just competitive   equilibrium, there’s no profits to invest in  R&D or to do cool new things. Do those seem   like relat..."

"transparency, are not per se good. You want  enough of them in the right places, but you   need some kind of balance. So I think supply  chains are no longer an underanalyzed problem,   but until Covi..."

"of AI agents as they get more powerful? You have  some market between the AI agents. There’s some   sort of decentralized order as a result. What  insights would you have about that? Well, a lot   of ..."

"want property rights in a so-called imaginary  world, that’s where you would start with Bitcoin   and NFTs. So I don’t know what percent of GDP this  will be at first. It will be quite small, but it  ..."

"for dealing with humans will fall because you’ll  deal with their quote-unquote assistants, right?   So you’ll only deal with the difficult human when  you need to. And people who are very effective  ..."

"assumptions there. It could be the real advantages  are integrating it into workflows by things that   are not better GPTs at all. And once you get to  a GPT, say 5.5, I’m not sure you can just turn u..."

"they’re still going to face bottlenecks. Right.  And I don’t know how good they’ll be at overcoming   the behavioral bottlenecks of actual human beings,  the bottlenecks of the law and regulation. And..."

"single dial, I think you can argue that either  way. So people in markets, they also observe   quantities, they observe reaction speeds. There’s  a lot of dimensions to prices other than just, oh,   t..."

"aren’t ones that have been improving over time. If  you look at the biggest companies by market cap,   it’s not like this is what it takes to get there  is hundreds of years of continual refinement.  ..."

"right? Like in, you know, take China is pretty  much entirely new firms because of communism.   Japan, in particular, seems to have a lot of very  old firms. I don’t know if they’re getting better,   ..."

"Interest groups always matter. Public opinion. Ala  David Hume always matters. And it’s easy to not   do anything on a given day. Right. And that just  keeps on sliding into the. Guess. India has had ..."

"to suggest. Maybe that is a bit of a knock on some  behavioral economics, the logic of the system.   Armin Alchian wrote on this. Gary Becker wrote  on this. There were some debates on this in the   e..."

"Hayek presumably read those pieces in the. Don’t  think he ever commented on them. Interesting.   Let’s talk about Mill. Right, not James Mill, but  he was interesting, too. So his arguments about   t..."

"the greater thinker of the two. But on the topic  of children, what would Mill say, specifically? I   guess he could have talked about it if he wanted  to, but I don’t know if he was. In today’s world..."

"tutors. You talk in the book about how Mill is  very concerned about the quality and the character   development of the population. But when we think  about the fact that somebody like him was elected..."

"he publishes in 1776, The Wealth of Nations. And  basically, around that time, Gibbon publishes the   decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Yep. So  he publishes The Decline and Fall of the Roman   Em..."

"would just shock him and bowl him over. But Smith  does also emphasize different human bottlenecks   and constraints of the law. So it’s quite possible  Smith would see those bottlenecks as mattering ..."

"think about it reflects the changes. Ambiguities  when you read the contemporaries of Smith. Other   economists who were writing at the time, were  his arguments just clearly, given the evidence   of ..."

"I think. And for people who are interested, they  might enjoy the episode I did with Lars Doucet,   who, oh, I don’t know about this. He’s a Georgist.  Oh yeah. He’s a really smart guy. Basically,   h..."

"for sure. You have a fun quote in the book on  Arrow where you say his work was Nobel Prize   winning important, but not important important.  Well, some parts of it were important important   like ho..."

"it will be something AI-related. Yeah, that  sounds about right to me. But within the context   of Internet writing, obviously, there are many  disciplines there, economics being a prominent   one whe..."

"this particular sphere, not for everything. Scott  Aronson was my professor in college for a couple.   Yeah, yeah. That’s where I decided I’m not going  to go to grad school because you just see like ..."

"five-level stuff, but somebody with your sort  of polymathic understanding of different fields,   if you just extrapolate out these trends, it  seems like you might have a lot of interesting   thought..."

"principle, I would be for it if we could do it in  a proper, targeted manner. Although you had a good   argument against this in “Stubborn Attachments,”  right? That over the long term, if economic gr..."

"actually explain as a percent of the variance?  I don’t know. Let’s talk about anarchy. You   have first written about this; I hadn’t read the  last time we talked, and it’s really interesting.   So m..."

"out of the payment system. That strikes me as a  real issue. Do your arguments against anarchy,   do they apply at all to web 3.0 crypto-like stuff?  Do I think it will evolve into collusion? I don’t ..."

"everywhere. So within government, the feds, the  state governments, all the different layers of   federalism, there’s a kind of anarchy. There’s  not quite a final layer of adjudication, the   way you..."

"ineffective weapons, but they had a kind of  stability. You can’t just dismiss them and   you can debate how governmental were they? But  the ambiguity of those debates is part of the   point that eve..."

"you’d better do a good job. I mean, we should  frame our broader history more like that,   and it has implications for how you think about  x-risk. Again, I think of the x-risk people,   a bit of them..."

"when people talk about national security. I’ve  never seen the AI doomers say anything that made   sense. And I recall those early days. Remember  China issued that edict where they said, we’re   only..."

"of that pattern. How would Robert Nozick think  about different AI utopias? Well, I think he   did think about different AI utopias. Right? So  I believe whether he wrote or talked about it,   but the..."

"we should be vegetarians. That was his argument.  At least he felt he should be. I wonder if we   should honor past generations more, or at least  respect their wishes more. For if we think of the   a..."

"and then we’ll somewhat rationalize it, ex  post. Yeah. There’s an interesting book about   the ancient, ancient Greeks. What is it called?  I forgot the name. But it talks about the hearths   that th..."

"hard to explain why some of these countries, but  not others, go crazy with the printing press. And   this is maybe a broader question about different  institutions in the government where I don’t   u..."

"trade-off. Does that seem like a fair comparison?  I think that’s correct. And I would add that, say,   in the time of Smith, there was nothing you could  do rigorously. So there was no other option. ..."

"it better than you or I do, though it might, but  simply that people prefer to read what the AIs   generate for ten or 20 years. And it’s harder to  get an audience because playing with the AIs is   a..."

"is often wrong. What’s your sense on the scaling  stuff? When you look at the arguments in terms   of what’s coming, how do you react to that? Well,  your piece on that was great. I don’t feel I have ..."

"finally, it’s paying off. But I’m not sure AI  will be as revolutionary as the other AI optimists   believe. I do think it will raise productivity  growth in ways which are visible. To what extent?   ..."

"think about Jews in the 20th century, 2% of  the population or less than that, and 20% of   the Nobel Prizes, it does seem like you can have  a much bigger impact than if you’re on the very   tail if ..."

"I forget the name of the philosopher you asked  this to, but the feminist philosopher you asked   the question. Amiya Srinivasan, you asked the  question, what would have to be different for   you to ..."

"What’s the next book? I’m already writing it.  Part of it is on Jevons, but the title is The   Marginal Revolution. But not about the blog, about  the actual marginal. But it’s maybe a monograph,   li..."