Intro (00:02): 

Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels. 

Mitch Daniels (00:18): 

Greetings, friends of freedom, and welcome to the latest edition of The Future of Liberty, a series in which we invite guests that talk with us about the future of human freedom, dignity, autonomy, things. The Liberty Fund our sponsor holds dear today is we’ve had some very interesting and impressive guests. This is the first time I’m going to use the word daunting. Our guest today is eclectic is not a big enough word to encompass the interests knowledge base, the insights that he has and Dr. Tyler Cowen has been, while the chairman of the Mercatus Center, one of the most respected such institutions, certainly by me anywhere, range the world intellectually and physically knowledgeable about economics, yes, but literature, art, and a host of other topics. It occurred to me last night, this is a little like pitching to the young babe Ruth, who was both the best hitter and the best pitcher of his early baseball career. Dr. Cowen, you’re a seasoned host of podcasts as well as a frequent guest on ’em. Thank you for sharing some time with us this morning. 

Tyler Cowen (01:39): 

Happy to be here and I’m a longstanding affiliate and friend of Liberty Fund. I should add, 

Mitch Daniels (01:45): 

Yes, I watched, I think your most recent visit with Russ Roberts, I believe said it was the 19th time you’ve graced that program. So you’ve been more than kind and we thank you for being so today I feel a little guilty this morning you reputed to read four to five books a day, and now you’re going to spend this time with us. Maybe it’ll limit you to four today. How in the world do you even choose that many books, let alone get through them? 

Tyler Cowen (02:19): 

Well, not all of it is my choice. Some of it is the review copies that come in the mail. Some of it is which books are new into the local public library. Some are what I spend my money on. I’ve been reading more and more history as I get older, but I would say very recently I’m spending a lot of time reading and studying the outputs of large language models. So I’ve actually been reading fewer books in the last year. I’ll read one book and keep on asking the AI about the book and the topics in the book. 

Mitch Daniels (02:51): 

Well, I’d like to come to the topic of AI after a while, but on our way there, lemme start by asking about one of your many books. It was titled The Great Forgetting, and in that book you question why so many well-learned lessons seem to have to be retaught again. You mentioned rent control, the destructive nature of unchecked crime and so forth. Isn’t conservatism as we’ve known it largely about holding society or holding up to society a truth so they’re not forgotten. Why do you think this continues to be a problem? 

Tyler Cowen (03:41): 

It may just be a matter of memory and what you grew up with. So there’s an economist named Ika, mom and dear, and she has some excellent papers. But if say you came of age during a great depression or a stock market crash, you carry that memory with you for a long time. So when we get to 2007, 2008, we have another financial crash. We hadn’t had a really big one actually since the Great Depression. So people think this can’t happen. We’re in the great moderation. It won’t happen again. Of course they turn out to be wrong. But when it comes to government interventions, whether it’s central planning or price controls or rent control, farm subsidies, we see the same things. There’s just a forgetting because over time the very bad features of these policies, they drift away in the collective memory. 

Mitch Daniels (04:34): 

One of the, I think, verities that some of our great scholars have reminded us of over and over is the importance in economics of culture. So I think of the work of Thomas. So and one of our recent guests, Charles Murray, among your, let’s see, is poly an adjective? If it is it applies to you. Knowledge basis is I’m told a Haitian art to which confess about which I confess I know zero, but it’s sometimes been an interesting question to me that Haiti occupying the same island as the Dominican Republic as well. Those two countries have wound up in such different places. Is that a cultural phenomenon or is something else? Explain it. 

Tyler Cowen (05:37): 

While it’s correct to say it is largely cultural, I’m not sure that’s an explanation. It may just be pushing the matter back some bit. So in the post World War II era, the Dominican Republic, it is wealthier than Haiti, but not by that much compared to what has happened. So there’s a big divergence, I would say starting in the 1970s or eighties. So if it were only culture, you would think it would’ve been very longstanding. Dominican Republic is now one of the two or three richest countries in Latin America. It’s fairly well developed. They did special enterprise zones. It’s pretty nice place. I’ve been there fairly recently, and Haiti gets worse and worse and worse. It may not even be a viable nation state. So there’s something about the path dependence of the relative dictatorships they each had in the sixties and seventies where the Dominican situation could evolve into something stable. They created better interest groups and the Haitian situation for whatever reason could not. It may be that the Diwali did so much to destroy Haitian civil society that the only paths before them were those of gang rule and ultimate collapse, and then they had the big earthquake. So yes, it’s cultural, but there’s also something about the political evolution that multiplies with the cultural factors and it’s just led to this big, big difference. 

Mitch Daniels (07:04): 

You’re an economist, I guess first and foremost, and you’ve written about the importance of economic growth and the various threats to it. Mercatus again is I think of as the nation’s premier center of scholarship on the hazards of excessive government control and so forth in the context of freedom, how worried should we be about the future growth trajectory of the United States and its effect on freedom, growth has and the promise of a better life and so forth has always been, I think, an important mainstay of American harmony and unity and the sense of morale in the country. So talk a little bit about our economic prospects and their implications if you see any for our political institutions. 

Tyler Cowen (08:10): 

Well, I’m very worried about this question. I think you and I would largely or maybe completely agree, we’re an aging society which can limit growth and productivity growth. We’re in a rather dire or fiscal situation where we’re spending far more than we’re willing to pay taxes for. So at some point we need a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes. I would prefer to do that on the spending side, but no matter what mix we choose, that can slow growth in the short run because the economy in the moment is somewhat addicted to debt and government spending and in general and not getting rid of many regulations. Doge has not gone especially well in that regard. So there’s a lot of different forces that could lead to lower growth through the United States. There’s now at least possibly protectionism from President Trump. We’ll see what the final court rulings will be. At the very least, there’s high uncertainty as a kind of tax on investment, so we need to get our act together. There’s a lot of forces operating against us. There’s some in our favor. We’re cutting back it seems on high skilled immigration and letting very good students and graduate students into this country from abroad. So we’re making many, many mistakes. I wish you were in charge. I said this to you before we started. I feel we’d be in a much better growth position. 

Mitch Daniels (09:31): 

Oh, I think the country has enough problems as you just detailed them, but thanks for the sentiment. Yeah, the overhang of debt, which has been a preoccupation of mine a very long time, gets worse and worse and it’s hard to imagine that it won’t crowd out, is not already crowding out the investment that could make us wealthier over time. How long do you think we can sustain the sort of debt and the debt trajectory that we’re on before we pay a price? Both economic and as I say, maybe political? 

Tyler Cowen (10:12): 

Well, I think we’re paying a price right now. Real interest rates are considerably higher than they were say a year ago. It depends what you mean by the word sustain. I don’t think America is headed to be the next Greece where we are literally bankrupt and in hand looking for some kind of bailout or defaulting on our debt. But does it mean that this mix of higher taxes, possibly financial repression, more government control, tightening our belts, leads to slower growth and really much, much lower living standards for future generations? I mean, we’re living that now, so we need to reverse course in some big way. This is not an if or a when. This is a now and we’re not doing much about it, we’re making it worse. 

Mitch Daniels (11:00): 

And back to the work and leadership of Mercatus, some of us think that the most positive thing that may have been done in this question of growth for over the last few years may not have been tax improvements, although I think those were on balance well advised, talking about the Trump cuts, which are now back on the table, but rather the lifting the dead hand of regulation off so much of the economy and there’s evidence that that’s going to happen at least for the next couple three years again. Are there areas in particular in which you think sensible deregulation could liberate faster growth most effectively? 

Tyler Cowen (11:51): 

Well, at the level of the states seen a great deal of regulatory reform. I don’t need to tell you this, and the states that have partially deregulated have indeed grown much more quickly. The most visible examples because they’re large states are Texas and Florida, but your own state, Idaho, there’s numerous examples of this working. I see very little progress at the federal level. I think a significant part of the Trump administration wants to do this, which I’m sympathetic toward, but they don’t have Congress on board. They’re not good at getting Democrats to work with them. They often don’t understand the system other than on we’re speaking in May, 2025, other than nuclear power and permitting reform and getting rid of DEI don’t think they’ve made nearly as much progress as they could have. No, I’m happy they’ve done those few things, but there’s a lot more they could do and I’m worried that they’ll drop the ball. 

Mitch Daniels (12:49): 

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I would add to that the recent voiding of the California air standards or carbon standards that threatened to become a national rule de facto, but I agree that’s an exception. 

Tyler Cowen (13:12): 

AI policy has been good so far. I would add that I’m sure if we thought about it, we’d think of a few more things, but I’m worried they’ll do less than a fifth of what they might be able to do. 

Mitch Daniels (13:22): 

Yeah, well there’s certainly are big obstacles. I was just going to begin asking you about ai, a subject in which you are recognized expert. I’ve been fascinated as soon as we learned about the incredible electricity demands both of crypto, but now especially artificial intelligence, it began to appear to me that to use the term, I don’t want to confuse anyone with this, was going to Trump environmental and other concerns that had been in the way of energy growth. Do you see that happening? I think I do, but maybe I’m just looking for it. 

Tyler Cowen (14:12): 

Absolutely. I think we need to relax our NIMBY based constraints on solar and wind power and significantly build out our nuclear and make it much easier to build a nuclear power plant in less than 10 years, ideally three to five years, which we know is possible. Learn some lessons from say South Korea and learn how to do it more cheaply. That’s a lot of work embodied in that when you look at every detail, every level, and again, we’re not close to doing it. The Trump administration has made some good first steps, but we’re not yet in the position to build a nuclear power plant, say in five or six years the way we should be. 

Mitch Daniels (14:53): 

It is not purely regulatory matter or not purely nuclear. Regulatory matter doesn’t seem to me it costs more to build everything here. I think of the struggles, even though there’s consensus about building semiconductor fabs and other facilities here, they cost so much more simply by virtue of overall cost of living factors here. Sometimes preferential laws with regard to unions and so forth, 

Tyler Cowen (15:27): 

And there’s so many layers of regulatory review. So it’s not just the final cost on paper, it’s the uncertainty along the way. It’s a big deterrent 

Mitch Daniels (15:38): 

With regard to artificial intelligence. You were early on identifying its mnt arrival. You’ve been I think a strong proponent of it and pretty much if I read you correctly, in a go mode as opposed to a cautionary, a caution more cautious approach that so many people have urged, are you still in a go mode? You still see the upsides more than justifying the potential risks 

Tyler Cowen (16:14): 

Still in the go mode. One point I would make is you learn nothing by sitting around waiting, whatever risks you may think there are and one can debate that you have to actually confront how the thing is working and interacting with your actual institutions. And the six month pause was absurd. We just would’ve had all the same issues six months later. The other reason to be in the go mode is simply we don’t want China or other nations to beat us and get there first. That would be very bad for our national security. A third argument, which is maybe less definite, is simply, I think it will be fine. That does not convince everyone. I think the first two arguments are, you could say stronger and more universal. 

Mitch Daniels (16:58): 

The people have been long before AI actually emerged and as it has in just in the last few years, people were raising alarms about this, the so-called singularity and so forth. Some of us have been reading about that for 15 years or more. Can we be cavalier about even some of the things we’ve seen so far unless they’re misreported? We may have seen the first, at least it was in a trial, I understand mode, but the first attempt by a machine to blackmail its operator out of shutting it down, the first signs of code rewriting itself to avoid shutdowns are these not the sort of things Stanley Kubrick was warning us about a long time ago. 

Tyler Cowen (17:49): 

I don’t think we should be cavalier about any safety issue. Consider airplanes, right? You’re very careful about getting on a plane that you regard to be safe. But that said, the notion that it’s going to kill us all or in the world, I don’t see realistic support for that in any kind of data or peer, peer-reviewed science. I would make this general point, AI is a big, big change over time and any big change is going to bring a lot of problems. It’s naive or misleading or just wrong to assert those problems do not exist. Typically, we don’t know what form those problems will take. I would say I would rather deal with problems with more intelligence on our side rather than less. If we can’t handle a dose of more intelligence, I would say we’re not going to do very well anyway. But it is one of the major challenges facing our civilization and we need to be up to it. We need to know what’s coming. We all need to learn more about how it works. I sometimes say there are no experts on ai. I’m not an expert. I’m a person who uses it a lot in it’s powerful form. It’s too new for us to really have true experts. 

Mitch Daniels (19:03): 

Let’s stipulate that it’s not going to kill us all or kick homo sapiens to the curb. But one thing it’s already doing and it’s certain to do is change our economic system, our modes of production, the goods that and the way we and services, the way we produce them and each time we have such a new technology or a new era, people worry about the end of work and people not having enough jobs to go around and what that might mean. So first question, do you think this is just the next chapter of the economy responding and creating new jobs to replace the old or will this time be different and we really will idle millions of people. 

Tyler Cowen (19:57): 

We will create new jobs to replace the old so many of the jobs we have, including I’m sure that the jobs you’ve had, they also involve interfacing with the physical world and AI doesn’t do that at all. So you will use AI as your aid, your assistant. It will be very powerful. The real threat to jobs is someone else who knows how to use the AI better than you do not the AI itself. Now there are various self-contained systems. Programming would be one of them. Graphic design you could say in the world of chess where AI can just replace humans flat out and we’ll see some of that, but that’s a pretty small part of our economy and overall we’re going to see a lot more new projects, new ideas, advances in biomedical science, advances in materials, and that’s just going to create a lot more new jobs. But of course people will have to adjust. People don’t like adjusting. We shouldn’t trivialize those adjustments, but the alternative is to do nothing and just stay where we are with our debt and our lower rate of economic growth. How well is that going to go? 

Mitch Daniels (21:06): 

So does that mean that now the recurring conversations about fashioning some sort of universal income and so forth for those people who would be left behind, is that a moot question or is it back on the table? 

Tyler Cowen (21:24): 

Well, I don’t think we will do it and I don’t think we should do it and I don’t think we can afford it. There was a recent randomized control trial that was actually funded in part by Sam Altman that looked at guaranteed income on a limited basis and people didn’t end up better off. Giving people free money when they need a safety net is absolutely the correct thing to do, but in terms of your overall life trajectory, it is not how you make people better off 

Mitch Daniels (21:55): 

The related topic of cryptocurrency, very topical in the week that you and I are having this conversation, but I think I’m sure it’s going to remain that way. So I’m interested in your views about that. What is your take on the current state of crypto? It began, some of us understood it at least as a way to free and protect people against the fiat currency inflation that comes from it. Is that still its future? It seems to be to have branched off into new range, new realms such as just some would say speculative investment. 

Tyler Cowen (22:45): 

I see crypto is quite useful, but I don’t think it’s a useful hedge against dollar collapse. What we see in the data is crypto is typically quite pro-cyclical. That is, it does well when other things do well. If anything, it seems to be a compliment with the dollar based system. The form of crypto that’s taking off as we’re speaking is stable coins, which are ways of participating in dollar based systems, but avoiding some of the regulation and we’re seeing great mainstream interest in stable coins, whether it be from Stripe or MasterCard. And I think that will cement dollar hegemony around the world and will be a pretty useful thing. It will mean I can send remittances to Mexico, which I do regularly, much more cheaply. 

Mitch Daniels (23:32): 

If initial appeal or the initial appeal of cryptocurrency was again to insulate people’s assets and their activities from a government, what should people think? What should people, friends of freedom think about state sponsored digital currency? 

Tyler Cowen (23:58): 

It’s going to depend on the government. If you are Singapore or Sweden, you’re a small country, a high trust society, your currency otherwise is not that important and you issue a digital asset that may go perfectly fine. I’m not opposed to that. Of course it’s up to those countries, but I worry if the United States did it and we are of course the major player that in essence we would drain funds from the private banking system and in the longer run end up nationalizing or quasi nationalizing, a lot more investment in lending decisions. So I don’t want to do that 

Mitch Daniels (24:35): 

In 2024 with a few months yet to go before the election year, quite correctly forecast that the change was coming, you said the vibes had changed and you were right as you customarily are. I want to ask you now, looking back whether particularly with regard to an issue, let’s pick the issue of immigration. You tend to remind us of the value, high value of immigration to the country. Are we better off or worse now that essentially open border has become essentially closed and there are other limits being proposed? 

Tyler Cowen (25:22): 

My sense was in the last two years of the Biden administration, we did not do nearly enough to have a secure and predictable border policy that was politically unstable. From an economic point of view, I actually have been fine with those individuals crossing over. I think they’re a net contribution to our economy. But nonetheless, a nation is based on laws and some sense of cultural continuity and a lot of Americans didn’t like that and I understand that and I just think you need to enforce the law at some point. That said, there’s been a spreading of the anti-immigrant mood against students who are immigrants, high skilled immigration and that’s a big negative for our country. So we run the risk of losing our position as the number one place to do science in the world, in part because we’re cracking down on immigration in many different ways. 

Mitch Daniels (26:16): 

Some of us have hoped for a very long time that closing the border or reestablishing control at the border would be sort of earnest money payment, a necessary prerequisite to building public support for more open immigration policy, particularly with regard to skilled immigrants. I think we see evidence that the public is open to that. This administration may not be, but I’m hoping that the American people would welcome it if someone would just simply advance that. 

Tyler Cowen (26:59): 

The prediction I made a while ago is that if we start talking negatively about low-skilled immigration or illegal immigration, that the word people here is immigration and the negative sentiment spreads more generally. So I’m afraid we’re getting into a situation where immigration is just somewhat politically toxic even for Democrats and you see a lot of Latino voters who are really not on board with just more and more immigration no matter at what level. And I think we’re headed toward an error where we cracked down on immigration more than had been the case and that we do it across the board. It was my hope that we would be more liberal on high skilled immigration, but I think it’s gone the other way. 

Mitch Daniels (27:44): 

Well, one can hope for that as pendulum swing and one can hope that this one will. Lemme ask you another set of questions. A few words are more pejorative these days than elite. And clearly there have been, and not just politicians but other factors, technology and the changes in way people communicate and receive their information that have undermined the authority of institutions of all kinds. But one thing your fans of whom I am a charter member of the club like about you is that you’re contrarian in many ways. You’ve said some positive things about elites. What do you say today? 

Tyler Cowen (28:36): 

Well, I would draw a big distinction between elites in government and elites in the sense of who are the smartest people on a topic. So elites in government has screwed up a lot, whether it’s COVID or Biden being too old or the list goes on and on and on. We don’t have to go through it. But on a given question, if you want the right answer, the best thing to do is to ask the actual elites. They’re not always correct, but they have the greatest expertise and they’ve acquired a bad name because they’re being confused with elites in government or I would say some of our elites are far too left-leaning or self-righteous or have other problems. They’re too woke. Again, you could go on with the list and that turns off the American people. That’s a lot of common sense on the part of the American people, but don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Scientists still know a lot of useful things and we need to be listening. 

Mitch Daniels (29:29): 

I did want to ask you about the pandemic, at least at the time. You wrote that the lockdowns made sense that the Barrington Declaration Great Barrington Declaration was an error. Have you changed your thoughts about that? I mean, we have some more facts than we had at the time. 

Tyler Cowen (29:52): 

Well, I would be more specific about what I actually said. So the US did not have lockdowns in the sense that say England did, we did have many things closed. So the NBA stopped its season. You could not go to a game that was at first a private activity, but over time different levels of government in essence mandated that such things couldn’t happen. In my opinion, those were the right decisions. But once we got vaccines, which was basically January of 2021, things should have been reopened rather promptly, and they were not by beef with the great Barrington people. And you see this now with Jay Charia, but it was evident from the other two. They’ve been anti-vaccine from the beginning. Jay is anti mRNA vaccines. You can see the tape on YouTube. And those were our greatest protection. The vaccine saved millions of lives worldwide and they said nothing about the vaccines and encouraging uptake and running the vaccine program well, did not endorse operation warp speed. So I feel they were grossly irresponsible and actually anti-science. So on all four vaccines, I do think we should have ended the closures we had in very early 2021. Some states did faster than others, but a lot of them did not. And those were big mistakes. 

Mitch Daniels (31:13): 

Wanted to ask you about another of your books. I should always wave these around, not that you need any help selling books, but here was one that is still several years later being handed around. Are we still the complacent society you saw then and what are the principle problems that causes 

Tyler Cowen (31:37): 

That book? I think it was 2018, give or take, and that was a time when mobility was at low levels. Things were very static. There was not a lot of technological progress. And I predicted in the book that this era would end and another book, I called it the Great Stagnation. And I think that prediction has come true a bit more quickly than I would’ve expected. So AI is the single biggest change, but we’ve had a lot of advances in biomedical science and the world is now in this very rapid flux in a way that’s quite disorienting. So it’s very different picture from what I painted in the book, the complacent class and the change came quicker than I thought. I thought it would take, oh, 10 years or so before it would flip. And it’s happened already. I would think right now we’re a bit the terrified class, not the complacent class. I think it will work out, but we’re seeing so much change now, so quickly. 

Mitch Daniels (32:34): 

So we’ve been jolted out of our complacency as opposed to worked ourselves out of it 

Tyler Cowen (32:39): 

And we’d like to have quite a bit of it back again. It’s understandable, right? 

Mitch Daniels (32:43): 

Yeah. So I may be conflating to thoughts that aut be, and if so, you’ll correct me. But another of today’s high high-tech leaders, this is Mr. Karp who has written a recent book, Alex Karp, I guess he faults Silicon Valley to use the generality for concentrating on consumerism, which I think was part of the complacency you wrote about and has suggested that other folks there ought to follow the lead of Palantir and a couple other companies in committing more of their genius and their assets to the national interest. Is that something that Libertarians should salute and applaud? 

Tyler Cowen (33:44): 

Well, Palantir and Andel, they’ve been very impressive. They made great achievements. If you look at Catherine Boyle who runs the American Dynamism Program at Andreessen Horowitz, they’re trying to fund many more companies like that. That’s all to the better. My biggest worry, and I don’t blame the companies at all, I don’t really blame anyone, is we do not have control over our own supply chains for making quality drones. I’m also changing that, but I don’t know actually how to do it. When you look at the cost differentials, a few tariff subsidies, whatever is not nearly enough. So that to me is a major problem and we’re still looking for good solutions. 

Mitch Daniels (34:26): 

There are multiple schools that thought that believe that our society is headed for some sort of cataclysmic corner here a few years from now. Some see it in the political fishers that we have. Some see it just the economic economically driven. Many of, I’ll have to say us think that it could be occasioned by an inability to pay our debts at some point or a collapse of confidence that we can pay our debts. How likely do you think one of these occasional historic crises is and what’s the most likely cause and what do you see on the backside of it? 

Tyler Cowen (35:10): 

Americans love to consume and we’re irresponsible as voters, so we fund too many things with debt. I think that’s the fundamental problem on the fiscal side. My best guess is we’ll use a mix of inflation and tax hikes to avoid defaulting. Now is that a crisis? I think it will be more like the late 1970s, which was very bad. But you wouldn’t say it was a crisis in the sense of a pending default. I just think we’ll have much lower living standards because of our own foolishness. 

Mitch Daniels (35:42): 

Well, there are a lot more zeroes involved than there were back then. And the inflation that might be necessary to forestall more responsible fiscal policy could be a crisis of its own. 

Tyler Cowen (35:57): 

Oh, it’ll be very bad. But we had, as you know, high inflation right after COVID. It was very bad for living standards. People hated it. They should have hated it, but it wasn’t a financial crisis. It was just a bad situation where the dollar doesn’t go as further and people have to stint. And I just think we’ll see more of that. 

Mitch Daniels (36:16): 

Yeah, well, unless it’s hyperinflation of a kind that we haven’t seen and our German friends would remind us is still possible. 

Tyler Cowen (36:27): 

I don’t think we’ll get that though. It would so raise the borrowing rates on our debt that it would be counterproductive to have a few years of eight to 10% inflation and some series of tax hikes, which again, I’m opposed to all that, but I think it’s what will happen 

Mitch Daniels (36:43): 

Next. The last question, rather stray one, but recently we’ve seen something I never expected to see actual calls for tyranny or an American Caesar. There’s a fellow running around getting himself interviewed and writing named Jarvin. And my question to you is, is this a car act or is this likely to be, or we’d like to hear more of this, or will there be actually louder cries for a new authoritarian system in the country? 

Tyler Cowen (37:27): 

My hope is that the trend has peaked. People are seeing that life under Trump is not in every way. So wonderful. When the courts strike down his measures, a lot of people are relieved. I think Congress over time will get much more involved in constraining Trump and we will return to somewhat of a sane or path. But I don’t feel I’m in a good position to predict our intellectual future. It wouldn’t shock me if we started seeing left-wing versions of courtesy Arvin calling for a kind of left-wing tyranny. I don’t think that’s going to win elections, but just when it’s out there, if say 10 to 15% of your people believe it, that’s a very bad place to be. And we are in danger of that. And arguably we have it already. 

Mitch Daniels (38:12): 

Yeah, well, we’ll be in less danger if more people, as I will certainly encourage them to read your work and follow your thought. Really want to thank you for joining us today. I’d like to close with these, with the same question, so I’ll ask you, looking forward, do you expect the United States to be a more or less free society in the year 2050? 

Tyler Cowen (38:42): 

20 50, 25 years from now? I think we will be less free. I see too many basic problems that we are not succeeding and addressing or even confronting. So I’m sorry that that is my report, but I do think we’ll be wealthier. We’ll have more opportunities in some ways we’ll live longer lives. There’ll be a lot of advances in biomedical science and it won’t in every way be this terrible set of options. We’ll have many good things too. 

Mitch Daniels (39:11): 

Well, this was a great opportunity for me and for our audience. We thank you for joining us. Please continue to on our series, the Future of Liberty. 

Intro (39:22): 

The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.