Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is April 49, 2025, and my guest is psychologist Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto.

His substack is called Small Potatoes.

This is Paul's seventh appearance on the program.

It was last year in April of 2024, talking about seeking immortality.

Paul, welcome back to Econ Talk. It's always great to talk to you,

Russ. In a recent essay on your substack, small potatoes that will link to, you asked Claude,

what do you think of the question, is it nature or is it nurture? And Claude responded,

the nature versus nurture question is one of those deceptively simple dichotomies that doesn't hold up well under scrutiny.

It's like asking whether a rectangle's area is determined by its length or its width.

And then Claude goes on to say, it's all complicated.

These two things are always both in play.

And you responded in your essay, not to Claude. Clawed has provided an

accurate distillation of the consensus in my field. It probably assumed I would agree with this

consensus. I don't. Before we get to why you don't, let's talk about the intellectual battle lines that are

drawn in this debate, the nativists versus the empiricists. What are they about?

So traditionally, there's been this great intellectual battle, maybe the great intellectual

...