Brad DeLong on Intellectual and Technical Progress | Conversations with Tyler

[@kreek22]

This is not a conversation. It's a Q & A. The interviewer rarely engages in follow up questions or comments in response to the interviewee's answers.

[@patricksullivan4329]

"The interviewer rarely engages in follow up questions or comments in response to the interviewee's answers." That's because they've known each other for decades. Cowen is well aware of DeLong's idiosyncrasies, and doesn't want them to get in the way of candid answers.

[@kreek22]

@@patricksullivan4329 You may be right, but it largely defeats the purpose of the form. Cowen doesn't need to be there at all.

[@kmisiunas]

> why did the german universities flourished at the 19th century? Prussian leadership restricted positions of government to their nobility. Whereas university positions were strictly non-political. In turn, ambitious people outside Prussian nobility could make names for themselves by working at the universities. Perhaps this made provided unparalleled talent supply? From book: The shortest history of germany by James Hawes. Paraphrased.

[@kreek22]

The English aristocrats were perhaps too well represented in its universities, which had an effect of favoring gentlemanly amateurism. This approach had worked in the early generations of the scientific revolution, but the progress it generated was slow. The Germans in the early nineteenth century decided to professionalize academic work. It was men of mainly bourgeois background who created this revolution. One way of thinking about the change is that universities were transformed from retrospectors of ancient knowledge and maintainers of current knowledge--fundamentally conservative in their orientation--to prospectors and frontiersmen of knowledge. This transformation into research institutions was the second great step they took in their escape from their medieval origins as theological training grounds. It wasn't obvious that the teachers and the researchers ought to be the same people. It seems to have arisen organically within the academy by means of professorial status competition. Also, this did not start in the natural sciences. Rather, ironically, it began in philology, which was once a high status field. It attracted men who were both intelligent and keen on high status, leading to this new type of status competition. I take most of this from Peter Watson's excellent, rather lengthy book "The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century."

[@kmisiunas]

@@kreek22 Thank you for the summary and the book recommendation!