Apologies about not writing yesterday, but life has been pretty busy in myriad ways.

Today’s post is a bit of a cop-out, in the sense that I’m simply putting up a list of questions that I got to ask Tyler Cowen today. The call lasted for an hour, and it was every bit as fantastic as I’d hoped it would be.

I haven’t edited the list of questions at all, and the reason I’m putting them up here is because:

1. Most (but not all) of the questions were related to blogposts he has written, and you may want to read them
2. Help me learn how the questions could have been better, and what else I could have asked
3. Hopefully, some of you get inspired to ask better questions!

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On Philosophy and Economics and Opportunity Costs (16 minutes)

1. What has been the opportunity cost to the field of philosophy for you having chosen to study and teach, but especially specialize in, economics?
   1. If one agrees with the central thesis of Stubborn Attachments, should more people be asking themselves this question? And if yes, is it better to ask this question early on in life, or later?
      
2. If economics is the study of how to get the most out of life, how should individuals think about what most means to them? Is that a useful way to start thinking about philosophy if you’re an undergrad econ student?
   
3. In your ideal university, “Teachers would be compensated on the basis of how many students they could attract, in a manner suggested long ago by Adam Smith, who himself lived under such a system in 18th-century Scotland.” My question is related to another recent blog post of yours: how did Adam Smith and his students think about the elasticity of demand? If we were to implement a system like this today (and god knows I would love to), how should we be thinking about the elasticity of demand?
   
4. What has Songdo taught you about urbanization, and what has George Mason’s presence in Songdo taught you about the internationalization of American education?
   1. Which is the model that excites you the most in American education today: Minerva, Harvard or Arizona State University? 
   2. What should other countries be learning from whichever model you picked?
      
5. Tim Ferriss famously  rejected an MBA and used that money to learn by investing in start-ups after moving to San Franscisco. David Perell is notably against the kind of education that we deliver in universities, and schools today. David and Seth Godin have working models of what alternative methods of delivering learning might look like. Will the future be more a case of universities looking more like these models, to some extent, or these models looking more like universities?
   1. What would you want to add to David’s liberal arts essay? 
      1. Some cross-subsidization of the non-liberal-arts education by the liberal arts students, intra or inter-personal?
   2. You’d mentioned in a blogpost in 2006 that “there is something about having the person right in front of your face that triggers your biological “pay attention” alert mechanisms”, and that you weren’t in favor of online learning. What, specifically, were the social and technological changes that led you to change your mind?
   3. What technological changes are next when it comes to improving education, and what are the thresholds, in your mind, that need to be reached before you’ll change your mind again?
      
6. Deirdre McCloskey has a famous essay on how it is all but impossible to get an undergrad student to do economics. Would you agree with that claim?

On Tyler Cowen and His Work/Worldview (16 minutes)

1. Our field remains unsure of what principles of differentiation rule how “culture” and “economics” will be related in a particular problem. How should this influence how principles of economics ought to be taught to undergraduates – or indeed, anybody learning economics for the first time?
   
2. What should be taught less in a first year graduate sequence, or maybe just taught less, period?
   1. I cannot remember where I read this, but I think the story goes something like this: Alex Tabarrok suggested starting a blog, and you responded by saying let’s write a textbook first. What are the strongest arguments that make Twitter, on balance, a positive force for the world? (I had this backward! Turns out Alex Tabbarok suggested writing a textbook, and Tyler Cowen said they should start a blog first)
   2. You had a post in 2007 about how to study economics in one’s spare time. How would you update your answer today? MRU (or its substitutes), but how should a noob think about what to learn more of, less of – and why?
      
3. Are vouchers a bad idea for American education, or more generally speaking? How should we in India be thinking about developing a voucher system, or should we abandon the idea altogether?
   
4. Calculus, statistics, programming, Shakespeare and the Bible were your picks when it came to the question of what, at the minimum, one should take away from schooling. The audience we’re speaking in front of today is about the same age as Yana was back when you wrote this post, only a little older. We’ll generalize/localize the Bible, but has your choice changed 17 years down the line?
   
5. You had a post on teaching with blogs in 2005. It contained this line: “we are programmed to remember interpersonal exchanges better than written or spoken drones.” One,  your own Bowie moment, so congratulations, but also a question: at the undergrad level, what is the ideal mix of drones versus interpersonal exchanges, and how should we be thinking about it?

On Travel, Arts and Culture (16 minutes)

1. Is a culture that values honorifics less likely to be a culture of excellence? 
   1. How should one square this with the fact that at least some street food in practically every Indian city is excellent (as opposed to the Philippines).
      
2. How does one get better at asking stupid questions while traveling, and how does one maintain the quality of stupid questions as one’s travel increases?
   
3. Choices choices: I give you two options, you must choose one, and I must guess which one you’ll choose. You must also explain the reasoning behind your choice. As with your game, so also with this one: feel free to pass on any or all.
   1. Pakistan or Bangladesh, the more exciting growth story from South Asia
   2. Re: pretty much any situation, Alex Tabarrok’s intuition or a really good model, and you cannot give the Samuelsonian response!
   3. A food trip to a part of India you’ve not been to yet (Orissa, perhaps?), or a food trip to a part of China you’ve not been to yet.
      1. On a related note, who in your opinion is India’s answer to Fuschia Dunlop?
   4. For any major city in the world, you get to visit it, but must give up one of the following: the food from that city, or museum visits while in that city. (Paris, if I must pick the city.
   5. Overrated vs. underrated or choices/choices, which game is more fun to play?
      
4. If you had to recommend places to travel to within India for an Indian undergrad students, which places would you recommend? What mental model would you recommend they adopt to choose the destination, and what to do at the destination?
   
5. Your next book is about recruiting better. What advice do you have for students about getting recruited better?

Questions from students/etc (12 minutes)

1. Would you prefer a version of The Book of Disquiet in which the thoughts were lexically ordered? It would obviously render the Disquiet part almost wrongly placed, but wouldn’t then would he be able to communicate more thoroughly?
2. How would you define/what would constitute Social Mobility in a stratified society, especially like India?
3. Can what we know of economics be taught to aliens? Is there a role for human values in economic thinking?