Checking in with a polymath............

The American Interest talks with Tyler Cowen.   Some excerpts:

And then you look around and you ask, “Well, which are the societies that deliver sustained economic growth the best?” And it turns out they are, for the most part, liberal capitalist democracies. So I think one should be pragmatic. But it’s clear to me what the better winning systems are and I’m all for them.
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And I feel I’ve always been consistent on this point, but people have swung around wildly—first for unions, then against them, now for them again, and they’re just not looking at the facts. I would just say, “Look at the research, there are some benefits, but don’t go crazy telling yourself this is going to be the next difference-maker.”
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I think addiction is an underrated issue. It’s stressed in Homer’s Odyssey and in Plato, it’s one of the classic problems of public order—yet we’ve been treating it like some little tiny annoyance, when in fact it’s a central problem for the liberal order.
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of people who decide voluntarily not to be that ambitious. And they will stay somewhere between middle and lower-middle class, and actually do fine and often be quite happy. They just won’t climb the ladders of success. There are different ways one can evaluate that normatively, but to call it an underclass, I think, is misleading.  Ambition is distributed in a funny way and not everyone is going to have it. And the people who don’t have it… There’s not some future where they’re paid like $300,000 a year, but even so, they’ll do fine. They’ll have a higher per capita income than, say, Belgium today. Is Belgium just a big underclass? I wouldn’t say that.
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. . . it seems to me that discussions about what is behind the rise of Trump are some of the worst areas for truthful, accurate commentary in the whole world right now. I would hardly believe any of it. I want to see serious work with data put up against alternative hypotheses. You should just dismiss most of what you read on that topic. It’s probably junk.