Lindsey: Okay, that’s a good answer. In your new book, GOAT, which we’ll talk about more later, one of the criteria you use for judging great economists is that they can’t have been too wrong about too many things. What’s an important thing that you now think you were dead wrong about?
Cowen: Well, there’s so many things. It’s hard to know where to start. But for instance, in 2007, early part of 2008, I definitely thought the banking system was solvent. That was wrong. I then thought it was the result of a real estate bubble. Everyone leapt on that bandwagon. I now think that was wrong. I was wrong big time twice in a row. Given the way home prices have evolved, I don’t think it was much of a bubble. It was maybe a little ahead of its time, but those prices seem to have been validated. So here’s this event that I paid very close attention to and I’m already wrong twice in a row, and maybe I’m shooting for three times in a row wrong. So I don’t know. There are so many judgments of history that unfold slowly. I think it’s really hard to be sure that you are right about something.
Like when shock therapy came for Poland, I thought, “Well, this is clearly the right thing to do.” I think it’s enough years. You can say it definitely worked for Poland. Has it worked everywhere? The places where it didn’t work, was it really tried? Was it possible in those places for it to be really tried? They’re very complicated questions, but I think I would have or not would have but did underrate the Chinese model at the time. But from 2023, there’s a point of view that says, well the Chinese model seemed great for 25 years but now they’re stuck with a dictator and all this terrible statism, and it might still blow up in their faces or cause a world war. So I think I’m wrong there but I could actually turn out to be right
(source: https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/interview-with-tyler-cowen)
Ok, I was going to say that’s a good one.
But this line ruins it for me:
Thank you for searching and finding it though!! Do you think other public intellectuals might have more/less examples?