What's the Most Important Idea You've Taken From Religion?

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The most important idea i've taken from religion, and it may even be protestantism, is in how we lead our lives. I once had a conversation with anan older man who just thought about life in a very different way than i did. And surely that's got to be the most important thing people take away from it. What will you do next? Well, my next project, i think, is going to be one on which i recently read one of your papers. The challenges to our society, to our politics, to our way of moral thinking are going to come from automation. An a i it's a tough challenge. I've started, but i haven't made...

Benjamin Friedman has been a leading macroeconomist since the 1970s, whose accomplishments include writing 150 papers, producing more than dozen books, and teaching Tyler Cowen graduate macroeconomics at Harvard in 1985. In his latest book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Ben argues that contrary to the popular belief that Western economic ideas are a secular product of the Enlightenment, instead they are the result of hotly debated theological questions within the English-speaking Protestant world of thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume.

Ben joined Tyler to discuss the connection between religious belief and support for markets, what drives varying cultural commitments to capitalism, why the rate of growth is key to sustaining liberal values, why Paul Volcker is underrated, how coming from Kentucky influences his thinking, why annuities don’t work better, America’s debt and fiscal sustainability, his critiques of nominal GDP targeting, why he wouldn’t change the governance of the Fed, how he maintains his motivation to keep learning, his next big project on artificial intelligence, and more.

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Recorded December 4th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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