Conversations with Tyler

Edwidge Danticat left Haiti when she was 12, she says, but Haiti never left her. At 14 she began writing stories about the people and culture she loved, and now is an internationally acclaimed novelist and short story writer as well a MacArthur Genius Fellow. Rather than holding herself out as an expert or sociologist on Haiti, she seeks to treat her characters and culture with nuance and show the...

Michael Kremer is best known for his academic work researching global poverty, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019 along with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee . Less known is that he is also the founder of five non-profits and in the process of creating a sixth. And Kremer doesn't see anything unusual about embodying the dual archetypes of economist and founder. "I think there's a lo...

Audrey Tang began reading classical works like the Shūjīng and Tao Te Ching at the age of 5 and learned the programming language Perl at the age of 12. Now, the autodidact and self-described "conservative anarchist" is a software engineer and the first non-binary digital minister of Taiwan. Their work focuses on how social and digital technologies can foster empathy, democracy, and human progress....

To Alex Ross, good music critics must be well-rounded and have command of neighboring cultural areas. "When you're writing about opera, you're writing about literature as well as music, you're writing about staging, theater ideas, as well as music," says the veteran music journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker . His most recent book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music , exp...

Matt Yglesias joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on his vision for a bigger, less politically polarized America outlined in his new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger . They discussed why it's easier to grow Tokyo than New York City, the governance issues of increasing urban populations, what Tyler got right about pro-immigration arguments, how to respond to declini...

Note: This conversation was recorded in January 2020. Tyler credits Jason Furman's intellectual breadth, real-world experience, and emphasis on policy for making him the best economist in the world. Furman, despite not initially being interested in public policy, ultimately served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama thanks to a call from Joe Stiglitz while still...

What might the electrification of factories teach us about how quickly we'll adapt to remote work? What gives American companies an edge over their competitors on the international stage? What value do management consultants really provide? Stanford professor Nick Bloom's research studies how management practices, productivity techniques, and uncertainty shape outcomes across companies and countri...

Nathan Nunn's work history includes automotive stores, a freight company, a paint factory, a ski hill, photography, book publishing, private tutoring, and more. Having grown up in a lower-income Canadian family, he recognizes the importance of having multiple pathways to climb the socioeconomic ladder. Now, as a development economist at Harvard, his research investigates how things like history, c...

Explaining 10 percent of something is not usually cause for celebration. And yet when it comes to economic development, where so many factors are in play—institutions, culture, geography, to name a few—it's impressive indeed. And that's just what Melissa Dell has accomplished in her pathbreaking work. From the impact of the Mexican Revolution to the different development paths of northern and sout...

For Annie Duke, the poker table is a perfect laboratory to study human decision-making — including her own. "It really exposes you to the way that you're thinking," she says, "how hard it is to avoid decision traps, even when you're perfectly well aware that those decision traps exist. And how easy it is for like your mind to slip into those traps." She's spent a lot of time studying human cogniti...

Long before becoming a legal scholar focused on police reform, Rachel Harmon studied engineering at MIT and graduate philosophy at LSE. "You could call it a random walk," she says, "or you could say that I'm really interested in the structure of things." But despite her experience and training, even she can't identify a single point of leverage that can radically reform the complicated system of p...

Ashley Mears is a former fashion model turned academic sociologist, and her book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit   is one of Tyler's favorites of the year. The book, the result of eighteen months of field research, describes how young women exchange "bodily capital" for free drinks and access to glamorous events, boosting the status of the big-spending men they...

Paul Romer makes his second appearance to discuss the failings of economics, how his mass testing plan for COVID-19 would work, what aspects of epidemiology concern him, how the FDA is slowing a better response, his ideas for reopening schools and Major League Baseball, where he agrees with Weyl's test plan, why charter cities need a new name, what went wrong with Honduras, the development traject...

Adam Tooze is best known for his highly-regarded books on the economic history of Nazi Germany, the remaking of the global economic and political order starting in World War I, and his account of how the economic effects of the 2008 financial crisis rippled across the globe for a decade to follow. Recently, he's become an influential voice on Twitter documenting the pandemic-induced strain on the...

Glen Weyl is an economist, researcher, and founder of RadicalXChange. He recently co-authored a paper that sets forth an ambitious strategy to respond to the crisis and mitigate long-term damage to the economy through a regime of testing, tracing, and supported isolation. In his estimation the benefit-cost ratio is ten to one, with costs equal to about one month of continued freeze in place. Tyler...

Accuracy is only one of the things we want from forecasters, says Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction . People also look to forecasters for ideological assurance, entertainment, and to minimize regret–such as that caused by not taking a global pandemic seriously enough. The best forecasters aren't just i...

When Tyler requested an interview with novelist Emily St. John Mandel, he didn't expect that reality would have in some ways become an eerie mirror of her latest books. And Emily didn't expect that it'd be boosting sales: "Why would anybody in their right mind want to read Station Eleven during a pandemic?" she wondered to Tyler. Her reaction was pure bafflement until she found herself renting Con...

For Ross Douthat, decadence isn't necessarily a moral judgement, but a technical label for a state that societies tend to enter—and one that is perhaps much more normal than the dynamism Americans have come to take for granted. In his new book , he outlines the cultural, economic, political, and demographic trends that threaten to leave us to wallow in a state of civilizational stagnation for year...

Tyler and Russ Roberts joined forces for a special livestreamed conversation on COVID-19, including how both are adjusting to social isolation, private versus public responses to the pandemic, the challenge of reforming scrambled organization capital, the implications for Trump's reelection, appropriate fiscal and monetary responses, bailouts, innovation prizes, and more. Read a  full transcript  ...

Who can you ask about the Great American Songbook, the finer Jell-O flavors, and peculiar languages like Saramaccan all while expecting the same kind of fast, thoughtful, and energetic response? Listeners of Lexicon Valley might hazard a guess: John McWhorter. A prominent academic linguist, he's also highly regarded for his podcast and popular writings across countless books and articles where oft...

Why is Garett Jones willing to write books about risky topics like the case for reducing democratic accountability? Is it the iconoclastic Mason econ culture? Supportive colleagues like Tyler? Those help, but what ultimately gives Garett peace of mind is that he'll never have to go hungry because he has a broad and deep knowledge of econometric tools. It's a skillset he recommends to all research...

To Tim Harford, mistakes are fascinating. "We often only understand how something works when it breaks," he says, explaining why there's such an emphasis on errors throughout his work. They also tend to make great stories, which can stoke the curiosity necessary to change minds. A former persuasive speaking champion, he was made an Officer of the O rder of the British Empire "for services to impro...

In his new book , Ezra Klein argues that polarization in America has become centered on partisan political identities, which has subsumed virtually every form of identity, be it where we live, what team we root for, the church we attend, or any other. This stacked form of polarization thus carries much more weight and is activated by a wider range of conflicts than before. But is polarization real...

When Reid Hoffman creates a handle for some new network or system, his usual choice is " Quixotic ." At an early age, his love of tabletop games inspired him to think of life as a heroic journey, where people come together in order to accomplish lofty things . This framing also prompted him to consider the rules and systems that gu ide society— and how you might improve them by identifying key poi...

This bonus episode features audio from the Holberg Debate in Bergen, Norway between Tyler and Slavoj Žižek held on December 7, 2019. They discuss the reasons Slavoj (still) considers himself a Communist, why he calls The Handmaid's Tale "nostalgia for the present," what he likes about Greta Thunberg, what Marx got right about the commodification of beliefs, his concerns about ecology and surveilla...