Tyler Cowen

But he was sort of on paper a great candidate.

Hoover on paper was a great candidate and was an extremely impressive guy.

I think he made one very bad set of decisions relating to deflation and letting nominal GDP fall.

But my goodness, like there's a reason they called it the Hoover Institution after Hoover.

I don't think I have like a good macro explanation of that whole trend, but I would say a few things.

That's right after the period where the world is changing the most.

And I think when you get big new technologies, and this is relevant for AI, you get a lot of new arms races.

And sometimes the bad people win those arms races.

So at least for quite a while, you had Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany winning some arms races.

And they're not democratic systems.

Later you have China with Mao being not a democratic system.

And then you have a mix of bad luck.

Like Stalin and Mao, just draw the urn.

You could have gotten less crazy people than what you got.

And I agree with Hayek, the worst get to the top under autocracy.

But like, they're that bad?

Like that was just some bad luck too.

There's other things you could say, but I think we had a highly disoriented civilization, you see it in aesthetics approaching beginnings of World War I, art and music radically changing, people feel very disoriented, there's a lot up for grabs, imperialism, colonialism start to be factors, just there wasn't like a stable world order, and then you had some bad luck tossed into that, and all of a sudden these super destructive weapon systems compared to what we had had, and it was awful.

I'm not pretending that's some kind of full explanation, but that would be like a partial start.

I don't think I have a general theory.