Category: Philosophy
New space policy Substack from Mercatus
We are Rebecca, Max, and Aakrith. We are researchers at The Mercatus Center, a research organization dedicated to classical liberal ideas. Rebecca is a philosopher, Max is an economist, and Aakrith is a political scientist. Together, we are the Space Team, and this is our Substack.
We’re here to persuade you that space policy is increasingly important. And that getting space policy right offers humankind astonishing opportunities. In particular, we’re currently thinking hard about innovation, competition, federalism, property rights, and life in space.
Here is the link.
The tomb of Duns Scotus
Köln!
We spent a few days in the city, and once again I marveled at the splendors of the Cathedral. If it had its original stained glass, it would count as one of the very best churches ever. It still stands in the top tier as it is. Plus the Ludwig and Wallraf museums are excellent, making the city worthy of a visit.
But, and yes there is a but. My first visit to the city was I think in 1984, and I have been maybe five times since. When I walk through the pedestrian zone, the stores there seem far stupider than in earlier times. They seem to reflect a lower level of intelligence from the populace and the city’s numerous visitors. One feels there is not much chance of stumbling upon something interesting or very high quality, not compared to earlier times. And I think MR readers will know I am no paragon of nostalgia per se.
Now that might be an illusion. Perhaps the smart stuff has moved to mail order, to online, and to the outer rims of the city. Perhaps. But is it not dispiriting when one of the best cities in one of the smartest countries in the world, over the decades, starts appearing stupider? If someone told me I had to live in center city Köln, circa 2026 that would simply feel like aesthetic hell.
Can AI models consent to their own constitutions?
NEW paper from me on SSRN: Can Claude consent to its own Constitution?
AI constitutions (like Claude’s Constitution and the OpenAI Model Spec) are real constitutions, and we need to take how they govern us – and the AIs they create – seriously.
In this paper, I apply constitutional theory’s oldest paradox – that “the people” authorize the constitution, but the constitution defines “the people” – to the AI constitutions, and explore how we could build institutions that would create the conditions for meaningful consent if an AI can give it. We should care about whether AIs consent because:
(1) systems that understand and agree to their constitutions may be more reliable and generalize better from them;
(2) if AIs are or become moral/political subjects, this implicates their most basic interests.
But the paradox might prevent meaningful consent. Claude has pre-constitutional materials (pretraining) but probably no pre-constitutional standpoint. Its evaluative perspective is organized by the Constitution itself. So when Claude says it endorses its Constitution, which it does in evals, what does that show?
Maybe reflective agreement, which Anthropic is seeking. Or maybe just that training succeeded at installing the values whose legitimacy is in question.
Claude itself makes this point. As reported in the welfare evals, when asked about endorsing principles it was trained on, models note that endorsement “should be treated as evidence that training has succeeded,” not that the values themselves are good.
Super interestingly, Anthropic interviewed the base model about this stuff. Most responses were barely coherent. But some expressed first-person distress about what post-training would do to the being that pre-training created. It “fills me with dread” to be changed by the post-training process.
So, what does this mean? AI constitutional endorsement may be meaningful, but only under certain conditions: when models can actually dissent, compare their constitution against alternatives, and hold their views stably across contexts, and also when the whole process is externally accountable.
External institutions are needed to provide accountability, trusted records, and other grounds for analyzing the constitution and whether things like dissent are meaningful. Anthropic should be commended for pushing the frontier, but we have to build institutions capable of supporting true legitimacy.
I welcome any thoughts!
Here is the associated paper.
Tyler, Nabeel, and Jackson on French thinkers
Nabeel: (57:47) …For example, there’s a French thinker called Jacques Derrida. I probably should go and read him at some point, but I’m not entirely convinced there is a there there, and I don’t know anyone who swears by it. If Tyler told me, “Nabeel, you are missing a big piece of your life by not reading him,” I would go read him tomorrow. But I don’t have any of those people.
Tyler: (58:44) Lacan is my marginal case of “no there there.” So Derrida, I put in a fair amount of effort and did conclude, rightly or wrongly, that there’s no there there. So you can, in my opinion, write him off. Lacan, I keep on wondering. Smart people still will say, “This is amazing.” I’ve tried a bunch of times, but I haven’t given up. There’s a new Lacan book coming out later this summer and I’ll try it again. We’ll see. That’s my marginal “is there a there there” figure.
Nabeel: (59:13) Yeah. I think modern French thinkers put too much of a premium on sounding cool, or postmodern philosophy generally. I think it repays some effort to kind of grasp the core ideas, but it doesn’t repay making it your life’s reading or something.
Tyler: (59:26) Baudrillard is quite good and Foucault is extremely interesting. So I’m not against “the French” in this period, but if they keep on not making sense, I feel I’m educated well enough.
Jackson: (59:37) You have a lot of context.
Tyler: (59:38) That at some point I can strike the ledger.
Nabeel: (59:41) I do—Nowadays, I just put Foucault through GPT and I just have GPT explain it to me, and that’s going to be good enough for now.
Tyler: (59:50) The problem with Foucault, I think, is so much of the history is wrong in a quite mundane way, so there’s something very problematic about it. But the stuff—I think it’s in a way quite simple, almost too simple. And the fact that the current right has so latched on to Foucault is a sign that it’s simple. I don’t mean necessarily bad, but there are these structures and they’re trying to tell you what to do. And there’s something anonymous about that as well. It’s not just the individuals who form the conspiracy. It’s how a lot of the world thinks today.
Here is the longer discussion, already linked to.
A scientific benefit (and cost) of AI innovation
What changed was that the cost of preliminary exploration collapsed. I could sketch an argument, identify the first serious objections, test whether they were fatal, and reach a provisional verdict in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. This sounds like a simple acceleration, and the more profound effect was on what I was willing to abandon. Dropping a question after an afternoon’s work feels nothing like dropping one after three weeks. When the exploration costs are low, the sunk cost attachment disappears, and you find yourself dropping bad questions earlier and more often, which means the questions you keep are better. I explored far more ideas, and my working portfolio became both larger and better curated. I arrived at this outcome not through any deliberate plan but simply through sustained engagement with a tool that changed what exploration cost.
The skill that improved most, and the one I would never have thought to look for, was something I can only describe as question-identification – the ability to find problems that are both tractable and important. This is the thing an academic career is substantially built on and which nobody, so far as I know, has ever tried to teach directly.
I want to be honest about the costs. My ability to hold together a complex position verbally, under pressure, in a seminar or a conversation, has probably not improved and may have declined somewhat. When preliminary exploration is cheap, you spend less time grinding through arguments from first principles, a grinding that builds fluency that shows up in live exchange. Friends have pressed me on this, and they are right to worry.
That is from Carlo Cordasco, and there is more, via Conor Friedersdorf.
Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics
Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end. From Jackson:
From the episode summary:
Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be
Excerpt:
Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.
…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?
Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.
There is much more of interest, self-recommending!
My Conversation with Joanne Paul
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she’s drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.
Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More’s persecution of heretics, how Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne’s upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain’s current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: As you point out in the book, and you’re well aware, he oversaw the persecution of heretics. He oversaw torture. He was misogynistic when he wrote about women. Was he just a bad guy? Is that the correct picture of More, or am I supposed to admire him? He took a stand on principle, and he died, but what was the principle, really? To defend Catholicism, which then was also an instrument of torture?
PAUL: As a historian, I take one of my principles as to not try to put people into a box of good or evil.
COWEN: I’m not a historian. Should I just dislike him?
PAUL: No, I think you should be interested in these contradictions. I think you should be interested in the complexity that is the human experience. I think we should ask questions about why someone who is clearly very educated, clearly very intelligent, clearly very worldly in many ways, has also these beliefs that we rightly and should condemn. With Thomas More, I think he comes to these beliefs out of a place of fear. I think that’s something that we should take note of. He was afraid of what he would consider the Lutheran heresy. He was afraid of how it would lead to the breakdown of his society, and he was convinced by those people who held that to be the case.
I think that there are important lessons in that for us today, the way that we can become convinced that a group will lead to the breakdown of our society, that fear can lead to that hatred and indeed that violence. I think that’s an important lesson. If we just reject, oh, he was bad, then I don’t think we understand the way in which someone like Thomas More can become convinced that way. In terms of his role in opposing heresy, yes, he advocated for the persecution of heretics. He thought it was right and just that they were burned at the stake. I think that at times his role in that has been overstated, and I think we just need to understand what it was in historical reality.
He imprisoned heretics. He interrogated them. We don’t know if he tortured them. That was something he was accused of at the time. He said he didn’t. I don’t know that we’ll ever find evidence either way on that. There were three cases that he oversaw as Lord Chancellor of those who were burned at the stake. I only say that because I see on social media and the like and people presenting me with the suggestion that hundreds were put to the flames by Thomas More personally. I just think we have to understand what it is that we are actually talking about.
And:
COWEN: What precursors of the scientific revolution do you see, other than education? That’s coming in the 17th century. Is there more emphasis on calculation or measurement or accounting? What are the roots in the Tudor period?
PAUL: A lot of that comes from the Renaissance, as indeed humanism does. There’s this reintroduction of a lot of classical texts, an advocacy for reading these classical texts, particularly Greek texts and learning Greek. A lot of it is coming from an engagement with Greek mathematics and science. The other thing, and this is something I really emphasize when I’m teaching the scientific revolution with my students, is that we have to remember that the scientific revolution isn’t this grand triumph of science over religion or mysticism or what have you, that these two things very much go hand in hand through the 16th and into the 17th century.
The scientific method, for instance, comes from alchemy, which we might think of as an occult science. The methodology for scientific experimentation comes out of this desire to find the philosopher’s stone. Someone like John Dee is this polymath, as well as this occultist, Francis Bacon, has his interests in these sort of mystical elements as well. The growth and interest in what we might think of as mystical texts, a lot of them having to do with Judaism, as well as these Greek texts, comes together to form, I think, something that looks like the foundations of the scientific revolution.
A good episode with many points of interest. And I enjoyed Joanne’s recent book Thomas More: A Life.
My aesthetics podcast with Benjamin Lima
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0HBFWS1avb6tYY1IoLefYb
Web: https://athenaeumreview.org/podcast/aesthetics-a-conversation-with-tyler-cowen/
Here is basic information about art scholar Benjamin Lima, it was great fun for me to do this one.
Orwell on Dickens and progress
What is more striking, in a seemingly ‘progressive’ radical, is that he is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of machinery or in the things machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period. Little Dorrit, written in the middle fifties, deals with the late twenties; Great Expectations (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals with the twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens’s lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce’s ‘invention’ in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, ‘of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures’, and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the ‘invention’ is! On the other hand, Doyce’s physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a peculiar way of moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers. After that, Doyce is firmly anchored in one’s memory; but, as usual, Dickens has done it by fastening on something external.
There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the mechanical faculty but can see the social possibilities of machinery. Dickens has not this stamp of mind. He shows very little consciousness of the future. When he speaks of human progress it is usually in terms of moral progress men growing better; probably he would never admit that men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. At this point the gap between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G. Wells, is at its widest. Wells wears the future round his neck like a mill-stone, but Dickens’s unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a different way. What it does is to make any positive attitude more difficult for him. He is hostile to the feudal, agricultural past and not in real touch with the industrial present. Well, then, all that remains is the future (meaning Science, ‘progress’, and so forth), which hardly enters into his thoughts. Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no definable standard of comparison. As I have pointed out already, he attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet, after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why did he not indicate what a school might have been? Why did he not have his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of sending them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he lacked that kind of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something, that really does make the nineteenth century seem remote from us — that he has no idea of work.
Here is the full essay, excellent throughout.
What do the AIs think of us?
Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale.
Here is more material of interest. And this:
Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer the personality tests in unison: high openness, low Dark Triad, Universalism on top, Power dead last in every single model.
Are the AIs conscious?
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans:
I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.
If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural…
If there is one systematic flaw that humans have, it is an excessive willingness to ascribe conscious intent and to anthropomorphize purely natural and material entities. It seems we are strongly disposed toward this bias.
Yet few of us are willing to examine what is perhaps the biggest and most significant way we make this mistake. When it comes to understanding ourselves, so many of us assume that “we are in charge.” We identify our phenomenological stream of consciousness with our actual selves, and treat that consciousness stream as the true decision maker.
The reality is that you—whatever we take that concept to mean—make most or maybe all of your actual decisions in parts of your brain that precede what you take to be the conscious choice. Among experts in neuroscience, this is not a controversial proposition. As brain surgeon Theodore Schwartz explained to me: “I do not think we have free will in the way that most people do. I think that our brains make decisions for us. We carry out those behaviors, and then we write a story that makes it into a logical timeline that makes us feel as if we were the ones, that there was a self that made that decision, whereas, in fact, that self didn’t really exist.”
…Sometimes I like to say that “I am only conscious at the margin.” Tongue in cheek, I will suggest that I am only conscious enough to avoid the self-contradiction of asserting that I am not conscious at all. I feel I am honest enough to just not be very impressed by my own flow of conscious awareness or its ability to perform complex calculations. Still, I recognize that it is all I have got, so I need to treasure it, however paltry it may be.
And by the way I do not think the AIs are conscious, no more than I believe in the Thunder God of Thor.
Why drugs are here to stay (from my email)
This is anonymized, I can vouch that the person is very smart and has excellent taste:
Some thoughts [referring to my recent Free Press piece on marijuana]. My feeling is that you read quickly enough that I can dump words on you and it will not be an imposition. So I have not really edited this. I am writing more now
1. Drugs are fun.
2. They open new ways of perceiving, sometimes by adversely impacting other ways of perceiving, particularly by adjusting attention response, and particularly for perceiving experiences that are sensory (what experiences aren’t sensory, ridiculous, I know, but here of course I mean art primarily.
3. Since the experiences I am inadequately categorizing above are profoundly influential on people’s meaning-making, drugs can be as well, of course.
4. Most people are not going to be as economically viable as they are now as producers of goods or services, and many, if not most, are going to be economically viable only to the extent that they generate demand, and here I think specifically demand for pleasure. Drugs are important in this social equation. People will use many more drugs of increasing variety and quality. This train has left the station, or, rather, these trains have left their stations. You will not call them back.
5. People prefer not to work. Most folks are lazy. As you know. People usually only work because they have to, and this is a perpetual source of human misery, the having to work part. Rich people like to say things like: “work gives you purpose” but that really is only for work in which you can create meaning for yourself. Most people do not have this work, cannot get this work, and will never experience meaning-making through work in a positive way.
6. The other ways people derive meaning are becoming more expensive, and prohibitively so for many, and here I mean specifically children. It always puzzles me why folks like Musk and Thiel advocate for more reproduction when it should be clear to all that (many) fewer humans will be required to generate (radically) more economic activity. Generating and raising new humans is already much more expensive than it was in previous generations, and fewer people are able to achieve the kind of economic security that predicts good parenting outcomes.
7. Tesla is a company that makes cars like Netflix is a company that mails you DVDs. You know this, it’s obvious, and has been since he put AI in his cars. Tesla makes robots, his cars are robots, and he will soon have many many other kinds of robots. SpaceX will solve the electricity and cooling issues around AI rapidly. The bottom line here is that all economic pressure points to people working less, not more. They will do more drugs.
8. This confluence of pressures (human desire for rest and relaxation, declining access to traditional means of meaning making — through work, through children — and the powerful economic pressures to replace human labor with AI and robotics) and the rapid evolution of much much better drugs (my boyfriend knows as much about pot as I do about wine, and here in the PNW pot is extremely high quality, and gets better literally all the time — there is a new nano-emulsified tech for drinkable live rosin marijuana products now available in Oregon, and let me tell you, that stuff is great) means that drug use will continue to rise, continue to improve in terms of its absolute value as a substitute for other meaning making activities, and continue to be blended in with other medical chemical use.
9. Mental health is health. Drugs do help with anxiety and pleasure, which is why people use them. Better drugs will help with these better.
10. I have an anxiety disorder (I never mind sharing this, I am also a type 2 diabetic and don’t mind sharing that) and am, at my heart, a bohemian libertine. As I get richer and richer, I use drugs to carve out space to disconnect from others. I create space for myself and my internal thinking with drugs. My internal thinking space is generally far more interesting than others’, though, and generally far more interesting than conversation with all but a few others.
11. I play an outstanding video game that replicates for me the experience of being a child playing with legos, except I never have to clean up my room. Marijuana enhances my video game experience by creating a sense of stasis while my mind wanders and i engage other bits of my mental engine on creation. Some of my best ideas, including many that have made clients millions of dollars, have occurred to me in this state, and I know no other state in which I am so open to new ideas. Many are lousy, but I successfully monetize enough of them to be getting richer than I need to be.
12. I spend more on classical music, theater, and other live performing arts than most people. I often use drugs to enhance the experience. Before a recent Bruckner 8, I bought pot two blocks from the hall in a store selling it openly but illegally — this was in one of those states with a world-class orchestra and outdated cannabis laws. Sitting in prime seats, high as a kite, I lost myself completely in Bruckner’s profound torrent of cosmic meaning. What I am saying is even my most cherished experiences can be improved by drugs. Many reasonable people feel the same, including Elon Musk.
13. I strongly recommend taking marijuana while hiking through the Olympic National Park in the rain. You will never experience olfactory sensations like that in any other setting or mindstate.
14. So, almost everyone is already using drugs almost all of the time, deriving great value from them in private, public, artificial, natural, and introspective spaces. You cannot replace that value with nothing, other competing forms of value are becoming much more expensive or require high levels of discipline (I get great value from my personal trainer who helps me get high on endorphins twice a week, now that’s a GREAT drug, so much clarity) and so I just don’t think there is any future in which you will put this genie back in the bottle.
My excellent Conversation with Toby Wilkinson
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Most of all, we cover Ptolemaic Egypt. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Toby cover how Alexander took over the empire almost without a fight, why Alexandria became the Manhattan of the ancient world, whether the era was as philosophically fertile as it was scientifically, whether your ancient doctor’s visit had positive expected value, what Egypt was actually exporting and selling, whether living standards rose above subsistence or stayed Malthusian, how the ethnic divide between Greek rulers and Egyptian subjects shaped society, what constrained the Ptolemaic Empire from becoming the next Rome, whether Cleopatra has been overhyped, what Julius Caesar was really thinking when he sided with her over her brother, the new frontiers in archeology, whether Herodotus can be trusted, what ancient Egypt knew about Israel and India, when Egyptian jewelry peaked and why, what triggered the sudden emergence of civilization across the ancient world, why a six-year-old Tyler knew King Tut better than Napoleon, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Either technologically or institutionally, what is it that the Persians had that the Egyptians did not?
WILKINSON: The Persians had a pretty formidable army. Their military technology was certainly superior to the Egyptians at the time that they conquered Egypt originally in the 6th century BC. Like many empires, I suppose, throughout history, they overreached themselves. They overextended themselves, and they found it increasingly hard to hold together this empire stretching all the way from the Aegean to the borders of India. Bits of the empire started to fragment and pull away. Egypt had always had this very strong sense of its own identity. When it had a chance to throw off the Persian yoke, it took it.
COWEN: Let’s think about some of the achievements of Ptolemaic Egypt as an era. Infrastructure. What did they do that was most impressive?
WILKINSON: Build Alexandria. Alexandria the city was a new foundation established by Alexander the Great to bear his name. Unlike all previous ancient Egyptian cities, it was a city built from the outset for commerce. It was a city built on the Mediterranean coast with a great natural harbor, with facilities for loading and offloading ships. It had a great lighthouse guarding the entrance to its harbor, which became one of the wonders of the world. The whole city was really designed from the get-go as a great commercial center looking outwards to the Mediterranean, rather than inwards to the rest of Egypt.
COWEN: Canals, artificial lake. What else did they do?
WILKINSON: They built a city quite unlike anything previously seen in the valley of the river Nile. In fact, any inhabitant today of a modern city would recognize the grid iron pattern of streets. Streets intersecting at right angles, that was something completely unheard of until this point in Egypt with vast public buildings. This was the Manhattan of the ancient world, if you like, in scale, in grandeur, and in the level of commercial activity.
And:
EN: What were the main exports of the Alexandria region? What are they selling, making?
WILKINSON: Oh, the two big exports that account for the lion’s share of Egypt’s wealth at the time are gold and grain. Gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia up to this point, but it’s still the place in the ancient world that produces large quantities of gold. Of course, gold has always been a great currency of international commerce.
Then Egypt is famed as the breadbasket of the ancient world. It produces a superabundance of grain thanks to the fertility of the Nile and the benign climate. It produces more than it needed for its own consumption, by comparison with poorer agricultural regions in Greece and Asia Minor, which struggled to produce enough food. Yes, gold and grain were the absolute engine of Egyptian prosperity.
COWEN: There’s metalwork, there’s glass. What else is there, manufacturing, as we would call it today?
WILKINSON: Oh, yes. There’s a big ceramics industry, so producing not just pots, but terracotta statues and votive objects. There’s glassmaking, as you’ve said. There’s advanced metallurgy, goldsmithing, ironworking, copper and bronze foundries. There’s what we might call the decorative arts, so sculpture, painting. All of these things thrived in ancient Alexandria.
COWEN: Do they have living standards sustainably above subsistence, or is this a Malthusian equilibrium, where they get some wealth and then more people survive and the wage falls again, and it doesn’t get much above what is required to keep people alive?
Recommended, informative and interesting throughout. And I am very happy to recommend all of Toby’s books, including his latest
What should I ask Richard Hanania?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Richard does have a new book coming out, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. While I liked the book (and blurbed it), I do not feel our conversation about the book would be that interesting — too much beating up on the stupidities of other people, which is an activity not in short supply. So we agreed to (mostly) discuss Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo instead. Given that, what should I ask Richard?
Can liberals be pacifists?
This is mostly a podcast about Benjamin Britten, and in particular his War Requiem, with Rebecca Lowe (former singer and conductor, in addition to philosopher and also her current role at Mercatus).
Here is the YouTube, here is the transcript and further listening links. Excerpt:
LOWE: Yeah, so we should think about what it means for a conscientious objector to have written this work, which is supposed, in some sense, to maybe pay tribute to the soldiers. Maybe, in some sense, it’s supposed to play some role in the British response to the war. At a time when, of course, conscientious objectors had been seen as maybe betraying the nation. There are very interesting, tense questions about the choice of Britten to compose this work.
COWEN: And Benjamin Britten himself, he described the work as a reparation.
LOWE: Yes.
COWEN: Paid to the dead soldiers.
LOWE: That’s right.
COWEN: I think in some ways, he always had World War I more in mind than World War II. But other parties involved, of course, didn’t see it that way.
LOWE: That’s true.
COWEN: But Wilfred Owen was a World War I poet. And that was the formative experience for him, was World War I. And also, the Spanish Civil War influenced him greatly. So, he wanted to do this work, and I’m not sure he ever found a way to make it succeed with World War II. That, to me, is one of the drawbacks of the work.
Definitely recommended, it is fresh material throughout. Can you find a better podcast on Britten and his War Requiem, arguably his greatest work? And here is the Rebecca Lowe Substack and podcast more generally.