My guest today is Tyler Cohen, who I'm pleased to have on the show for a second time.

Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

He blogs at Marginal Revolution, hosts the Conversations with Tyler podcast, is a regular contributor at Bloomberg View, and is the author of a number of books, including The Great Stagnation, Average is Over, The Complacing Class,

and most recently, Stubborn Attachments, a vision for a society of free, prosperous, and

responsible individuals. No, I've never been disappointed by any of Tyler's books, and I recommend

them without reservation, but to me, stubborn attachments is his best one yet. And so I'm

really excited to have the opportunity to talk with him about it today. Thank you.

Hello, welcome to the show. Welcome back. I'm happy to be here. So, you know, in a post earlier this

year that you're at a marginal revolution, said, one good reason to write a book

is when you have the feeling you cannot do anything else without getting the book out of your

system. In that sense, you can think of the lust to write books as a kind of disability.

And so I had to ask you to open. Is that the sort of disability that led you to write stubborn

attachments? Well, I've had this disability my whole life, but this is the book I've worked on

for the longest. For about 20 years, I don't mean that I worked on at full steam, but every year

I would put a month or so in, and this is my most philosophical book, and I thought it was one where

the ideas needed to germinate for many years.

It's basically my defense of a free society, and how an economist thinks about the questions

of what kind of world is actually justifiable, is better than some other kind of world.

Yeah, you know, that was my sense as well.

It seemed much more philosophical.

And as such, I was wondering if writing it was different,

maybe more challenging than many of your other books?

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