Tyler Cowen

I've been there.

As far as I can tell, they're doing a great job running the country.

There are things they do that are nasty and unpleasant.

I would be delighted if they could evolve into a democracy.

But the worst people are not running UAE.

This I'm quite sure of.

So it's a tendency.

There are other forces.

But culture really matters.

Hayek is writing about a very specific place and time.

I would say it really surprised me.

There are these family-based Gulf monarchies with very large clannish interest groups of thousands of people that have proven more stable and more meritocratic than I ever would have dreamed, say, in 1980.

And I know I don't understand it, but I just see it in the data.

It's not just UAE.

There's a bunch of countries over there

that have outperformed my expectations.

And they all have this broadly common system.

Well, the audience here is so, so different.

Like you're the outlier place of America.

And then where I normally am outside of Washington, D.C., that's like the other outlier place.