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Infovores: Today is March 14th, 2023, and my guest is University of Utah Dean of Humanities Hollis Robbins. Hollis writes frequently on the topic of higher education, drawing from a wealth of first-hand experience as a student, professor, and administrator that spans eight states, four academic disciplines, and a diverse range of institutions both public and private. We will focus our discussion today on the American University and the state of campus life. Hollis, thank you for joining me!

Hollis Robbins: Glad to be here. Eight states, goodness gracious! I hadn't counted them up in a while, so thank you.

Infovores: Thank you for sharing your expertise today. I'm really excited to hear what you have to say.

Let's start by talking about academic freedom. Many believe it is on the decline. As someone tasked with handling a lot of the relevant policies and disputes, how do you assess the health of academic freedom at the moment and what are the biggest challenges you face personally?

Hollis Robbins: First of all, I'm really delighted to have this conversation, and one of the distinctions I'd like to make is between academic freedom and free speech. I was fortunate to participate in that Stanford Academic Freedom Conference last November, and there were some really interesting guests there, some people who have made headlines for academic freedom disputes. Jordan Peterson was there, Amy Wax was there from Penn, Greg Lukianoff from FIRE was there.

One of my critiques of the discussion is that there hadn't been a differentiation made clear between academic freedom, which is the freedom for faculty to both pursue a subject and teach it in class. And this is an important bedrock of universities across the globe. The idea that you give researchers the freedom to pursue whatever line of inquiry they think will turn into gold, turn into innovations that will allow humanity to progress. So academic freedom has been upheld at American universities, at global universities for a very long time. Free speech is a right, a first amendment right to say what you'd like, but you can't say it everywhere, and it isn't tied to universities, and much of the disputes that we've seen bubble to the surface in terms of cancellations or violations are really free speech disputes. They are not academic freedom disputes. 

And I as a dean can talk about an academic freedom dispute, which is to say, you know, I've got faculty members who want to have a textbook that costs $300. But we have policies of limiting costs, for example. That's not an academic freedom dispute. But it's more of an academic freedom dispute than a first amendment dispute. Or let's just say a faculty member might want to teach his or her own book right and accrue some profits there. And I might raise my eyebrows, but that's perfectly within the realm of academic freedom. A faculty member came to me actually this morning wanting to screen a movie that's been sort of controversial. And his right to screen this film is within his academic freedom. Now if he does this and students protest, that's their free speech to protest.

And at the Stanford Conference, there was a great deal of “deans need to step in and stop mobs.” Well, I'm not going to stop a student's right to protest something. I'm going to defend the faculty member’s right to research something or show something in class. So that's a distinction that I think should continue to be made clear.

Infovores: That's very important background to have. I know personally as someone who is not administrating this, not often getting into the nitty-gritty details, I don't always make this distinction between a general culture or kind of a feeling that people have that they are more or less free to speak or that they might not be safe bringing up certain topics and the actual letter of the law that universities are tasked with carrying out.

How much though, do you think the cultural elements that worry people might flow out of the campus environment in some way? I know that a common theory I hear is that cancel culture started on campus and then gradually kind of spread out to the rest of society. Basically there's a bit of a lag period, but any new decrease in free speech or increase in censoriousness in broader society can ultimately trace its way back to the university. Do you give any credence to that?

Hollis Robbins: Well it’s interesting, and again I think it's important to make a distinction on campus between the classroom space and everything else because if you think of the campus and if you think of schools generally as sort of this combination of educational space and social space, what does that mean? There are some spaces like the cafeteria, the dining hall, the dorm, the quad, where a certain kind of rule applies. And then there's the classroom where a different kind of rule applies. And I think one of the challenges on campuses right now, or in this kind of conversation about free speech, is that distinctions aren't made for what's allowable, or what is defendable, or what I am going to defend as dean. I'm going to defend academic freedom and the freedom to query in a classroom, but the quad is something different.

I've written about Mario Savio from the free speech movement in 1964 at Berkeley, and this free speech movement was not in the classroom at all. It was the right to pamphlet about the war, about civil rights in the plaza, right? So they were literally protesting on campus for the freedom to do political speech outside the classroom. And I think that distinction is really, really important.

Now, is there a relationship? If some young student is out in the quad and then they walk into the classroom, there isn't sort of magic dust that says you're in a different place now, but there is a difference. And part of my duty as an administrator and part of the duty of faculty members, but I also think of the larger discourse is to make that clear.

On Trauma

Infovores: One of the insightful points you made in your op-ed piece about the Stanford Conference was that a lot of free speech related grievances coming from professors can trace to expressions of someone else's free speech. One place this often plays out is on social media, where people have pretty broad rights under the first amendment to criticize you in a lot of different ways which could reduce your comfort speaking without violating any enforceable law. And it wouldn't even necessarily be desirable to enforce such a law.

Hollis Robbins: I think this discourse of comfort is so interesting. One of the things that I really enjoyed experiencing at the Stanford Conference is that the discourse of trauma and discomfort was being articulated by people there who are usually people that poke fun at a different groups of people articulating discomfort and trauma.

As a scholar of of black history and black literature, most of my scholarly work addresses African Americans who have felt like outsiders in classrooms and in certain spaces and have felt inability to speak up, discomfort, and certainly trauma. And you hear articulations of this from a host of individuals on the campus, right now of different gender, ethnicity or orientation, so to hear those same exact evocations of trauma and feeling suppressed from the right, was of real interest. It was interesting to me, because on the one hand people say “why should we assume belonging?” and then the next moment it's “I felt so traumatized I didn't belong”, so perhaps we can help all of us try to avoid traumatic experiences in the classroom. One of the things that I didn't have in my essay, but I spoke a lot about was was just kindness and civility to one another. And I think that goes a long way.

Infovores: I think that point is really well taken actually. Over the past several years, I think I've seen certain tables turn and you see—this happens all the time in politics actually, if you're paying attention—But you …

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Transcript edited for clarity, Spotify link here.

Infovores  00:03

Hello and welcome to Time Well Spent, a place where the most brilliant minds in the world take on the toughest questions in science, politics, technology, and much more. My guest today is Robin Hanson—economist, futurist, and author of the influential blog Overcoming Bias, which as of this week is available on Substack. Robin, thank you for joining me! 

Robin Hanson  00:24

Thanks for having me, I'm not sure we can live up to this most brilliant minds thing, but let's give it a try. 

Infovores  00:29

Let’s give it our best shot.

So let’s talk about the recent developments in AI. At least in my experience, I see these sorts of things emerging as a trendy set of buzzwords getting used more and more in the last 5 to 10 years. And then it really only breaks through into the mainstream, "current thing”-level status in the last few months. But you have been researching and pondering these things much longer than most people talking about AI now. What would you most like to change about the current conversation coming from that perspective?

Robin Hanson 1:04

Well, historical perspective I guess.

So we've seen similar bursts of interest and concern about AI, going back a long way. We're now maybe near the peak of the current burst, but we had another one in say, the late 1980s/1990s. We had one in the 1960s, plausibly one in the 1930s as well although they didn't call it AI, they called it automation. And even plausibly one in the 1820s with the rise of the Industrial Revolution and concern about automation there. And we've just consistently seen over this whole time, the scenario is that some new demo and technology appears, and it starts to have impact. And then people are immediately trying to envision how far this will go, how fast, and they're saying, gee, this looks unprecedented. This could soon take over all the jobs and replace humans. And that's what people have said every time over this long period. In previous things, we've had presidential commissions and big news and media coverage about the unprecedented new abilities that have just appeared. And that's what we have again. So I'd like people to know about how that's played out each time.

Typically there are some concrete developments and some actual useful applications. And then there's more investment in terms of new firms and existing firms making new projects and students going into interrelated fields. And of course usually the fears are overblown, or the expectations are too high. And what you have is a new set of technologies that diffuses out into practice, but not a revolution. And that should be placed in the context of just say, the last seven years of computer science and computer applications, where we've had relatively steady progress. But every once in a while, we have a  local breakthrough and that gets attention. But the distribution of innovation in terms of their size is almost all innovations in small things, relatively few in medium-sized things, relatively little in big things. And that's just the distribution of innovation in general, which seems to apply to most fields. But AI has this unusual potential to help people envision a much bigger impact of the thing they see in front of them. Everybody's saying that someday there's going to be machines to do everything. Could this thing I see right in front of me be the thing that I hope for or fear? And that's what's different about AI is people project these huge potential advances on the thing they see in front of them. 

Infovores  04:16

Makes sense. A lot of what you're saying I think applies really to any sort of technological fad.

Robin Hanson  04:29

Well if it inspired such big visions, right? So most technological innovations don't make people think of rampaging robots. Whereas AI does and so that's the difference here. I mean, just in terms of actuality most innovation is lots of small things, and every once in a while, a big thing. But different kinds of innovations just project different images people have about what could happen.

Infovores  04:52

So the next big breakthrough in building a better mousetrap is not going to inspire the same vision because, sure it could revolutionize the field of mouse-trapping and eliminate all mice problems completely. But it's not going to threaten anybody's sense of the world being run by robots instead of humans. The interest is especially susceptible there.

Part of the motivation for asking this question was a post you wrote a few years back about how telecommuting was a really neglected trend. I think that telecommuting was kind of the last big technology breakthrough that everyone got really excited about, and now I wonder if we compare those two things side by side, are we still sleeping on remote work to some extent?

Robin Hanson  05:48

Certainly remote work has had a much bigger impact on society in the last 10 years than AI has. That’s hands-down true. But I think I still think we haven't realized most of the potential of remote work. It's still mostly there to be realized. So I think over the next 30 years, we will see it realized, but so far, we have just seen the simple thing of people working from home instead of the office, without that much changing how things are done.

Infovores  06:21

We haven’t restructured institutions.

Robin Hanson  06:23

There's a famous story about electrification, which was that originally, people had factories with non-electric power, and then they had electricity but they basically plugged the electricity into the same sort of factories they had before. And that didn't give a very large productivity boost.

But then people spent 30 years to reorganize factories to take advantage of electricity. And the main thing was, you could have a lot smaller motors, many smaller motors instead of a few big motors which you drove power around through some big bands. And then there was huge benefits from electricity once you reorganized factories to take advantage of it, but that was what was required. And so similarly, I would say for remote work, it'll be the reorganization of work around remote work that will make the big productivity gains. 

Infovores  07:18

And what do you see as kind of the time horizon for that? I know you mentioned that you wouldn't be surprised if 30 years from now, remote work were the most important trend that people weren't really keyed into fully. Do you think that's still true? Even with AI, if we go out 30 years from now and compare them side by side, will remote work have more impact than AI? 

Robin Hanson  07:49

Possibly yeah. You have to envision…what I have in mind for remote work is… so imagine, today a plumber comes to your office, and they are human who come with their bag of tools. In the future, a plumber might be an avatar that sits downstairs in an apartment complex that anybody could use whenever they need it.

And it shows up with a standard set of tools, and then a plumber uses it from long-distance. But then each little step of the plumbing job a different person swaps into the avatar to do so we ended up with as much specialization as you might have as an automobile factory. And as you know, automobile factories are vastly more productive than independent small team of four people putting together a car, because of how much they can specialize in each particular task. And so, if there's firms of 1000 plumber specialists that each would do one little piece of a plumbing job, they can each swap in at their moment when the avatar needs to do that next thing, and they swap into the avatar, and they have to do that task. And now you're getting sort of car factory levels of specialization, in something that today is done by a generalist. That's the kind of productivity gains that I'm seeing as huge. It's the opportunity for specialization. Basically a city’s scale of specialization even in remote places.

Infovores  09:21

Gotcha… specialization and …

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Transcript edited for clarity, Spotify link here.

Infovores 0:04

Hello and welcome to Time Well Spent—a place where the most brilliant minds in the world take on the toughest questions in Science, Politics, Technology, and much more.

My guest today is visionary economist and author Dan Klein of George Mason University. Dan has written cogently on many important topics, including groupthink in academia and the tendency for innovation to outrun government regulation. He also has a YouTube channel, which offers wisdom and insights from intellectual history that listeners may appreciate. Most recently, Dan has released the book “Smithian Morals”, which will be the focus of our discussion today. Dan, thank you for joining me!

Dan Klein 0:43

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Infovores 0:46

Let's start with a classic quote from Wealth of Nations—

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self love.

Without additional context, it sounds like what really matters to Smith are financial incentives, and that cultivating personal virtue is not all that important. How would you reconcile that impression with your reading of Smith?

Dan Klein 1:12

Well, he's talking about a particular context there. When you go into 7-Eleven and buy some bread, there's not that lively feeling of benevolence between the clerk and the customer. They might say hello or something, but that's more just common decency.

And so he's looking at particular sorts of interactions there, which are impersonal commercial interactions, and talking about how that realm works. But that is by no means all that he treated. His first book spoke very little directly about commerce, and talked much more about a person in society in a community context, in a social context, where all of the virtues are explored, not just the sort of prudence that you might glean from the quote you just read.

Infovores 2:10

You made reference to his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. That book serves almost as a foundation for some of his thoughts on economics, how would you relate the two books, or where do they connect?

Dan Klein 2:23

Yes, it's broader. I sometimes speak of it as the larger umbrella under which the Wealth of Nations sits. So the Wealth of Nations is almost like an extension, I would say of TMS. The Wealth of Nations treats just sentiments in matters of commerce, trade, pursuing honest income, and of government policy, with respect to such things, and indeed government policy in general.

So he's exploring there the proper beliefs of those activities, and ideas and policies about those activities. So those are other objects for moral choice. And so he's teaching us how to be moral with respect to that part of our life and world, which is an important part of our culture. Because commercial life and earning a living is a big part of your life. And because we care about the whole of society, it's one of the things that draws us together in common interests. And we need to think about those big issues properly. So he's teaching us propriety, kind of a moral concept, in thinking of those big questions and issues.

Infovores 3:57

Thank you, that's an excellent introduction. Individual liberty is of central importance as one of the virtues in Smith's moral philosophy. Yet he also acknowledges exceptions to this principle when he writes, “those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are and ought to be restrained by the laws of all governments.” What lessons should libertarians in particular take from this insight?

Dan Klein 4:24

That the liberty principle is not an axiom. That it's defeasible, which means to say that the burden of proof can be overcome. There's a presumption, I would say in Smith toward individual liberty, just as in a courtroom we have a presumption of innocence. But that doesn't mean that everybody is innocent. It means that the burden of proof is on the prosecution. And that's in a sense what Smith is doing. Someone who's prosecuting a case for government intervention has the burden of proof to bear and Smith does make exceptions like he does there in that passage. That's about the small denomination notes restrictions that he endorsed, kind of oddly, I'd say. Sometimes his exceptions puzzle me to put it mildly. But he does make exceptions, and I endorse some of his exceptions. And I would make exceptions.

And so you get in Smith, very clearly I would say, the idea that exceptions don't destroy principlehood, if you will, like a principle is not undone because there are exceptions to it. We need to develop principles that admit of exceptions. Because if you try to do things that are 100%, without exceptions, you find you can't find very useful ones. Or you force fit certain things which aren't really sound, and then they're brittle. Because if you're claiming they're 100%, and then someone throws a sound exception at you it shatters, right?

So really your principles are more robust by allowing and acknowledging exceptions, they are presumptions. They are maxims, not axioms.

Infovores 6:22

This makes a lot of sense. And I think this is something I find really resonant in your philosophy of economics compared to either the rigid, mathematized version that you see in a lot of economic journals. And also, as you pointed out in some of your writings, Austrian economists can be very axiomatic as well. So it all makes a lot of sense, and it resonates, but sometimes in practice it's not as clear how to actually pull this off.

So I think COVID-19 is a really good example of a situation where there is this really extraordinary circumstance, and there are a lot of potential justifications for making amendments to individual liberty, at least for some amount of time. But as we saw over the course of the pandemic, there were a lot of abuses of those exceptions. How would you speak to that concern in the context of this specific example?

Dan Klein 7:23

I became very concerned about those very issues right at the onset of the pandemic, with all the news and panic about the pandemic. And I was pretty panicked frankly, I was kind of the worrywart in our little household. My daughter was going out to cheerleading practice—this was in Sweden, which was not closed down—and I was saying, “no I don't want you to go.” I was in that state for some weeks, and then I changed my thinking quite dramatically shortly thereafter.

I wrote some things during that time, I wrote a piece asking how much are we ready to compromise? One thing I said is that there are no absolute libertarians in foxholes. So I do think that the precautionary principle has some merit, that there is something sound to it, when you're puzzled and you're worried about really catastrophic possibilities, as we very much were in March of 2020. You maybe should take precautions, and what was it called The Diamond Princess, the name of that ship? Maybe if I were the mayor I wouldn't let those people off that ship. I'd be ready to make some exceptions to the liberty principle.

But I do think that the COVID case turned out to be overblown actually, and that a lot of the restrictions on individual liberty turned out to be completely unsound, counterproductive, and highly destructive. So it's an interesting lesson. In some ways, it teaches us the importance of serious presumptions, for liberty, because panics do come around, opportunism and oppression comes around. And we need these principles partly as checks on expansive intrusive government and the ratchet effect, which has clearly taken place in a dramatic way. Both sides have their moments in the unfolding of these affairs.

Infovores 10:00

So if I were to push you just a little bit further on this, we've learned all these th…

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Transcript edited for clarity, Spotify link here.

Infovores  00:04

Hello and welcome to Time Well Spent—A place where the most brilliant minds in the world take on the toughest questions in Science, Politics, Technology, and much more.

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with someone I greatly admire, economist and author Arnold Kling. Arnold writes frequently about the economics of business and tech at “In My Tribe”, often drawing on a wealth of hands-on experience he obtained outside the ivory tower. We will focus our discussion on his book “Under the Radar: Starting Your Net Business Without Venture Capital”, with an emphasis on how its advice can be adapted to the current environment. Arnold, thank you for joining me!

Arnold Kling 00:30

Thanks. So I'm also curious to see how it can be adapted to the current environment. It was written shortly after the original dot-com crash, so there have been a few changes since then.

[laughter]

Infovores 00:40

Well I just read it a few days ago, and I actually was surprised how many of my questions it answered, so I'm excited to get more of your thoughts.

So you started your business at a time when no one was really doing anything commercially online—before you corrected them, some of your early clients even assumed you had personally created the internet! Can you give a little more background on what things were like at the time, and how you came to realize you had an opportunity to build something no one had fully conceived of before?

Arnold Kling  01:33

Okay, so I think part of what sold me on the internet was the work of Hal Varian, who later became the chief economist at Google. It was fortunate that I happened to latch on to him, because he obviously had a lot of insights into where things were going. So just from a technical perspective, he distinguished between a circuit switch network and a packet switch network. The telephone system at the time was a circuit switch network, so when you made a connection it created a circuit between you and me. If we were doing this conversation on a circuit switch network, we would have a durable connection that would only drop after we shut down. With a packet switch network, little packets of data could be sent over any number of routes by these routers, and they're sort of sent from end to end. So right now I assume that what's going on is that we're sending this conversation to each other in these little packets, and then they're being reassembled where I am and where you are and somehow put in the right order. So it sort of makes it look like we have a durable connection. But we don't have a durable connection, we have this intermittent connection.

Anyway, Varian looked at the economics of that process and saw that packet switching was getting cheaper and cheaper because it was following Moore's law while circuit switching was not. And so there was a big future for packet switch networks. In fact, other people were able to sort of pinpoint the date at which telephone calls would be cheaper to send over the internet than over the old AT&T telephone network, and that prediction proved to be accurate. So for a technical reason, I was aware that things were going to move to the internet.

And then some of it was just kind of romance. I was at Freddie Mac, I always say, before it became famous. And some time in late 93, we went to a GE research site, I think it was, and we were looking into their methods of doing underwriting using computers until at some point the meeting came down to the higher ups talking to each other and I was no longer welcome in the room. So one of the engineers took me downstairs and showed me Mosaic, which was the first graphical web browser, it came out of the University of Illinois. And I just fell in love with it. I said “this is the future.” I was like this character in a book called “The Wind in the Willows” who just gets fascinated by cars.

Infovores 03:00

Was that the toad?

Arnold Kling 03:05

Yeah, I was the toad.

So I had that view, and I was in a very low point in my career at Freddie Mac. So I was willing to go off and take chances, and I rationalized to myself that “well, worst case is that I'll learn something about this internet.” I did think the internet was gonna be a big deal, so in the worst case I thought I could be some kind of internet consultant when all was said and done. So I conceived the business idea in one sleepless night of setting up a site that would have everything for people who are interested in buying a home—including home listings and mortgage opportunities—because there's so much fat in the home bank system.

There still is a lot of fat, and I've learned since then that you can't cut a lot of it out because the rent-seekers are able to hold on to their rents. But if you'd asked me in 1994 what the home buying experience was gonna look like in 1999, I would have said that we would have almost no transaction costs, consumers would have lots of knowledge about mortgages, there are not going to be real estate agents anymore. I'm not the only one who ever came up with that idea, but that was in my mind and so it took awhile for reality to set in with me.

Infovores  07:13

So it sounds like you had a tremendous amount of expertise in housing, and then you got exposed to this new technology, and basically just ran with it and said, this can be applied to something that I know a lot about.

Arnold Kling  07:27

Yeah. And fortunately I hadn't gone to business school because later that summer I talked to a couple people who had, and one of them pointed out that hardly anyone really had access to the worldwide web. He said, “you know, you really should just should use Gopher”, which was kind of a weaker protocol, less user-friendly, that no one uses anymore. And another one I talked to sort of grilled me on who could really use the internet, because ordinary civilians like you or me—including me when I was running my business—had to access it through a very low bandwidth modem. So if you were getting just one picture over the internet it could take two minutes to download. Whereas the people who really had connections that were high speed were people on universities, those were the only places that had it.

But there was one entrepreneur that I talked to about the state of the business about four or five months into it, and his eyes just lit up and he said, “This is an apartment market.” College students aren't going to buy homes, but when they graduate they go looking for apartments in new locations. So he said I should put apartment relocation service on, and that was actually the first thing that actually worked. Although it's not the most lucrative part of the real estate business by any means.

Infovores  09:27

So to make it really concrete before we move on, what were the core services that you provided? You had like a mortgage calculator on your website, you had…

Arnold Kling  09:36

Okay, so I had various articles informing people about mortgages because most people don't know much about them. And the mortgage calculator, which is now a dime a dozen, but back then it was sort of a novel thing that you could stick in an interest rate and a home price and get back what the monthly payment would be. So people thought that was cute.

We had very early on the New Homes Guide for Washington DC. There were about 24 partly independent, but sort of mutually linked New Homes Guides for different cities. Washington and Philadelphia were the ones that were most interesting to me. There was a guy from Philadelphia who said he wouldn't bother putting his New Homes Guide on there because he said it's an apartment market. But people liked to look at the DC New Homes Guide, they could browse through the the pages of the New Homes Guide and look at homes for sale, and they could sort by various criteria. And even though it was very little certainly by today's standards, it was very popular with people because there wasn't much o…

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Infovores  00:04

Hello and welcome to Time Well Spent—a place where the most brilliant minds in the world take on the toughest questions in science, politics, technology, and much more.

My guest today often appears under the heading “The Wisdom of Garett Jones” and he is one of the very best people to follow on Twitter for insight into public choice and macroeconomics. Garett is the author of three excellent books, all of which address the biggest question in economics—why some nations are rich, while others are poor. Today we will focus our discussion on his latest release—“The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left”. Garett, thank you for joining me!

Garett Jones 00:35

Thanks for having me, great to be here.

Infovores 00:40

A central claim in your book is that populations have “deep roots”, a cultural heritage that continues to meaningfully influence attitudes and behaviors long after migrants relocate. To make things concrete for the audience, what kinds of attitudes are we talking about here? And why are they so important for national prosperity?

Garett Jones  01:39

Well, the attitudes that have been best measured by economists would be attitudes toward trust, towards savings rates and frugality, and attitudes toward the proper role of government in life. Those are three big areas that have big economic implications where economists know from theory and other research that these traits matter a lot.

And they've been able to find, not just for the US, but for countries in Western Europe, Australia, and Canada that for these traits migrants from the second through fourth generation seem to carry maybe half or a little bit less than that of their attitudes from their old country to their new country. So Italian Americans are in terms of attitudes a lot like Italians in Italy, German Americans are a lot like Germans in Germany. This is economically important, and it's underappreciated. It's been sitting in the academic journals for a long time. And I decided it was time to write a book that brings these well documented facts to the masses.

Infovores  02:13

So a lot of times when I tune into these debates, it seems like even people who are maybe a little bit skeptical of the open borders position mostly emphasize that “well, it would be great to have lots of immigration, really open borders, but you're going to have nativist backlash.” The problem is not so much the attitudes that the immigrants bring themselves, it's the reaction to those attitudes.

How much is that a part of the story or are you kind of diverging from that and emphasizing that really it's the cultural attitudes themselves that matter?

Garett Jones  02:56

Well I'm a big believer that the nativist backlash is important, and it's a huge negative we can't ignore. I wrote an essay about this for the Independent Institute a few years ago. And so Donald Trump should be counted as one of the costs of a migration of American migration policy, unfortunately. We probably have to count Brexit as a cost of EU migration policy.

Indirect effects are still effects. This is something that economists are trained on. Effects are not moral choices, they're not morality. They are effects that people should be taking account of when they're deciding what policy path to go down. But that's not the whole story. I do think that ethnic diversity is associated with conflict in rich countries, poor countries, middle income countries. We all know about wars that have been caused by ethnic conflicts. It's just a routine, horrifying finding of international politics and domestic politics.

But I'm saying something beyond that. I'm saying that basically the fact that migrants carry cultural attitudes from their home country to the new country and make the places they come from a lot like the place they left means that if you're an Effective Altruist, if you're a long-termist, you should be thinking about the long-run effects of your migration policy. “Past is prologue”, or past is at least half of the prologue. And so migration policies that focus on having migrants come from countries that are more successful than your own is a good idea. That's why I kick off the book by saying that poor and middle income countries should really consider a long-run pro-Chinese immigration policy.

Infovores  04:42

Gotcha. So speaking of long-term consequences, one of the things you point out is just how dependent the world really is on the innovation of just seven major innovating countries and you say that because these countries are so important, there's a really strong case to be made for being extra careful about immigrating a lot of people with attitudes who might disrupt that climate in the long-run.

But I wonder if given fertility rates in these nations, whether we pretty much have to find some way to make substantial immigration work. Otherwise, these places will become depopulated and it'll be bad anyway.

Garett Jones  05:14

Oh, this is an interesting point worth thinking about right? So there's seven countries, I call them the I-7, and they're the most innovative seven countries in the world. They tend to create the vast majority of patentable ideas and scientific research. They do the vast majority of the world's R&D. And so I argue for a kind of conservatism is sort of cautiousness about choosing migration policies that would really hurt the institutional quality there.

But you're right, if they shrink enough that's a huge cost of the world. But that at least means we need to think through that trade-off. I'm open to the idea that basically, taking some risks with the most innovative countries in order to keep their populations from going to zero is a risk worth taking. But quantifying that risk is well worth thinking about. Really what I want to do here is start a debate by getting people to realize that there's a huge globally important factor that the whole world should be thinking about when it comes to migration policy to the rich countries. And if we lose these geese that are laying golden eggs for the whole planet, that'd be a real loss for everyone.

The whole world has an interest in America's migration policy, and the whole world has an interest in Japanese migration policy. And changing that debate helps us get away from these sterile debates about whether pre-existing Americans are helped or hurt by low-skilled migration to the US. That's an issue that's been debated a lot, and I tend to think they're not hurt very much in the short-run at all. But the whole world will lose if the I-7 substantially lose their level of innovation.

Infovores  07:23

So let's focus in on America specifically for a second. They're one of the seven most innovative nations, probably they're either first or second depending on how you measure it. And yet America is a nation of immigrants. It's an extremely diverse place. When people have tried to measure the contribution to American innovation from various groups, a lot of it comes from immigrants, either directly or indirectly through spillover effects.

Is America just a huge outlier here? Or does that push against your theory at all?

Garett Jones  08:37

America has been a huge outlier in a lot of ways, right?

So in the old days for instance, a lot of progressives used to tell this story where you couldn't compare America to Europe when it comes to say, tax policy. You couldn’t say America has a smaller welfare state, and they're richer, so maybe the smaller welfare state is causing it. They just would say, America is just kind of exogenously richer. We're not going to explain why. But it just seems like it's just exogenously richer. And so America is a big outlier.

But I'll stick to a quote that I have from Barack Obama where he says something to the effect of “America is running this experiment in having an ethnically diverse democracy, and we don't really know if that's going to w…

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Daniel Ek is the cofounder and CEO of Spotify, one of the most dominant music streaming and music discovery platforms in the world today, with 400 million active users worldwide. Daniel was named the most powerful person in the music industry in 2017 by billboard, which I think is a pretty apt description. Previously Daniel held a senior position at Tradera (acquired by Ebay), was the founder of Advertigo (acquired by TradeDoubler), and was CEO of µTorrent (acquired by BitTorrent). Daniel is singularly responsible for saving the music industry and anyone who has a different opinion here is simply wrong, and more importantly he’s also just an overall great guy and this becomes immediately clear the second you hear him express his ideas. To keep up with Daniel, follow him on Twitter here. 

(Edited for clarity) The structure for today will be a traditional rapid fire back and forth Q&A. The questions will come fast, and I'll jump into the first one now: Spotify saved the music industry (which lost half of its revenue between the turn of the century and 2015) by making on demand music streaming more persuasive to listeners than piracy, and from this fact alone it's easy to decide that the future of music has finally arrived. But what might music distribution and consumption look like in 100 or 1000 years? And how does Spotify see its role in shaping that future with tools like discovery? There has really never been more potential for user centric innovation in music than right now. And my first instinct is to imagine that Spotify’s slogan, the soundtrack to your life, may become increasingly literal. Will algorithms collate user data and curate music according to life events? Will Spotify integrate with one of the many excellent facial recognition platforms today and become a melodic mood ring? What data does Spotify have now that may tell us what listeners in 2121 might want?

I don’t think anyone has ever asked me what things might look like in 100 or 1000 years. I think the longest time-frame I’ve been asked about has probably been only a decade or two, but that's a fun and engaging topic to talk about. To start I want to first think about the basics of music. It's something that's been present with us really throughout the entire existence of humanity, right? Music used to be how we shared knowledge back in the day; our elders and tribes-folk used to share wisdom and stories through music. And so I’d like to believe that in the next 100 or 1000 years music will still be a very important part of our society and how we express culture and belonging. But as you said, I think the real fascinating thing is that music is becoming more and more omnipresent. It's become easier than ever for today’s creators to express themselves, and it's becoming easier than ever for anyone in the world to enjoy and be inspired by that. 

I think there are two ways things may change over the next 100 or 1,000 years, both of which are sort of the most fascinating things I can imagine. The first has to do with the fact that the bar of creation will continue to drop lower. A few hundred years back, if you wanted to write a symphony you basically had to be a genius. You had to hear all the notes in your head of every instrument, and if you wanted a live sample of your ideas you’d of course be restricted to playing one instrument at a time despite needing to hear them all in concert. And the greatest of that era never heard their music being played in full up until the very moments prior to a performance at an opera, there’d be only a few rehearsals before a concert event and so time also limited the ability to actually make changes to the work. The sequence of music creation then was from 1) hearing an entire piece in your head (which is pretty insane), 2) then writing it down on a piece of paper and hardly ever hearing it, 3) and then performing.

Fast forward to the 1950s, or even a bit earlier with jazz in the 20s and 30s, where it was the age of instrumentalism, a time similar to the classical era where you basically had to be a virtuoso at the instrument you were playing in order to express yourself (except with the added benefit that you could more freely play with other people and freelance and freebase a musical response). And then again if you fast forward and contrast all of this with today, you can see that many of the greatest musicians that we have now don't know how to play a single instrument. But what they do know is that they're almost like computer programmers, they're expressing their vision with software and are able to bend sound and bend our reality.

And so I like to believe that with respect to overall creativity, in the next 100 years it will be even easier to express yourself than ever before. The barrier to be creative is just going to become lower so that more people can become creatives or musicians, but that’s not to say that the bar isn’t still high. Of course you have to learn the software, you have to learn all the plugins, the notes you have to use, composing, and stretching, and beat. And that's something that takes a lot of time for people to learn today even though there's a lot of knowledge on how to do it. And I think that's a huge barrier for people creating today. But I like to believe that even that's going to get lower. 

The second aspect to the changes I imagine involve just the consumption side of music itself. To start I like to describe where music consumption is now. It's quite obvious to avid music consumers that you can create a better playlist yourself than could an algorithm. If you really wanted to sit down to create that perfect playlist for your day, you'd probably be able to do a pretty good job by yourself doing it. Spotify will do an okay job at it, but it's pretty clear that you, with just 20-30 minutes of work, can do a much better job. For now Spotify is like your friend who knows music in general, but we don’t understand you that well. In the next decade or so Spotify will become that friend that really knows you and also knows music. You might still be able to do a slightly better job yourself in expressing what you want in that moment, but given more time I'm not so sure you will be able to do a better job than we can. It's very possible that Spotify will be able to create a much better Soundtrack To Your Life than you could potentially even imagine doing yourself. And this is kind of a crazy thought for people.

Next I think a good comparative example for potential changes I see in music is video conferencing. I love going back in time to 10 or 15 years ago when we were first talking about remote conferencing, and I remember using an early service which was insanely expensive and difficult to use. You had to have a separate ISDN connection, you had to put in the IP address of whoever you were calling, and they had to have a similar, very expensive, very difficult system. It wasn't a great experience. And so people then said, well, it's pretty clear that physical meetings that humans organize are always going to be superior to digital ones, but now in 2021 we can have these video conferences on whatever equipment we want, wherever we are in the world, and communicate easily.

I don't have to know your IP address, you don't have to know mine, we're just communicating and we can interact with 50 or 100+ people at the same time. But we still think somehow that meeting virtually can’t be as good as meeting physically, but I actually believe that the virtual meeting might even supersede the physical meeting in the future and we will have even better experiences virtually than we are having physically, which is kind of insane to think. But if you believe this is all possible, then it's not a stretch to imagine that future musicians will create songs that can do things like alter based on who you are.

So there'd be a song and the general structure of it, but it would adjust and adapt based on you to become something perfect. I had…

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