By James Pethokoukis and Tyler
Cowen

IQ,
grit, and well-roundedness are just a few of the terms that get thrown around
in conversations about talent. But what really makes people successful? And how
can we get better at identifying and cultivating talent in others? My
friend and economist Tyler Cowen has spent a lot of time reflecting on those
questions, and now he joins me to share what he has learned about talent.

Tyler
holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University.
He’s a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion and co-writes the popular economics
blog, Marginal Revolution. A prolific author, his previous
books include Stubborn
Attachments, The
Complacent Class, Average is
Over,
and The New York Times bestseller The Great
Stagnation.
Tyler’s new book, co-written with Daniel Gross is Talent: How
to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis:
In the book, you define talent as a person’s “creative spark.” But don’t you
need strengths other than creativity and outside-the-box thinking to run a
successful organization?

Cowen: I co-authored the book with a
venture capitalist who funds people doing startups, and those are people with a
creative spark. I’ve hired academics, public intellectuals, media types. Those
are also people with creative spark. So that’s what the two of us know best. It
is surprising to me how many people in fact have, or can have, a creative
spark. If you think about hiring your own assistant, which is someone maybe not
so high in the hierarchy, but they have to know how to manage you. You hope
they come to you with new ideas.

A lot
of creative spark actually is thinking very well inside the box, or just seeing
what the box is, or choosing the right box. There are brilliant people who play
chess, but unless you’re, say, in the world’s top 10, your career is probably a
big mistake. You might have creative chess moves, but you’re focused on the
wrong box. So a lot of what we talk about in the book is, how do you find
people who understand what the box is?

Is talent innate, or can it be
developed? And how important is intelligence?

A
great deal of talent can be developed. Look at how many talented individuals
are coming right now from India and South Asia. Far, far more than was the case
40 years ago. It’s the same basic set of people, right? But they have better
education systems, better nutrition, more internet access, and so on. So being
in the right small groups of people and having the right mentors are two things
we can do for people to develop their own talent.

Energy
is extremely important. Persistence, the ability to work together with other
people, the ability to look at a complex social structure and figure out how it
operates: All those factors are at least as important as intelligence.

Is there a quantitative or Moneyball kind of way of looking at talent where you can run the numbers in some fashion?

For
some jobs, that is significant. For instance, in sports you actually have data.
But for most actual jobs where you’re hiring, if anything I think there’s too
much emphasis on data. So if you’re hiring a young writer, you’re looking for
potential. You’re looking for the people who are going to be better in five
years than right now. So just ask them a question like, “What is it you do
to practice every day?” If they don’t do anything to practice every day,
maybe you’re not going to be that much better. If they have a convincing,
detail-oriented answer about their practice habits, now you’re onto something.

Look
at the Philadelphia 76ers, one of the most quantitative teams in the NBA. Well,
they stuck with Ben Simmons for too long. They got rid of Jimmy Butler, who’s
just been phenomenal since he left. The difference in determination and
sticking with it has made all the difference between Jimmy Butler and Ben
Simmons. So that’s another case where the numbers don’t tell you everything. On
net, we end up steering people away from the numbers.

Do we have any idea what better
talent acquisition and talent allocation would mean both for companies and for
the economy in general?

Well,
for the economy in general, I would like to see much higher levels of
immigration into the United States. I know people like to say more high-skilled
immigration. That’s fine, but I would just stress the best way to get more
high-skilled people is to let in what are called both high-skilled and
low-skilled people. The history of US immigration has been that we don’t have a
skills-based requirement for general immigration, and we end up taking in a lot
of highly ambitious, often less educated people who do wonderful things. So at
the national level, that’s what I’d like to see.

At
the institutional level, I think we are far too credentialist. We are far too
bureaucratized. We don’t give young people enough chances. If you go back to
the middle of the 20th century, the University of Chicago president, I think,
was 28 years old. He did a great job. That is just impossible to happen today.
But we know 28-year-olds can run great companies, not that most of them can. So
we should have a world where it is possible for a brilliant 28-year-old to be
president of the university. That is not the world we live in.

What will the typical hiring
manager get out of reading your book? What about jobseekers?

Hiring
managers will get a framework that will cause them to think about their own
decision-making processes for the rest of their lives. Daniel and I do not
pretend to have the answers for every sector, every job, every kind of company.
But we do have a generalized framework for thinking about intelligence,
personality, energy, durability, and many other features of human beings. And that
I think will stick with people.

Jobseekers
will understand their own talents better, first of all, but they’re also
looking for talent in other people. If you’re choosing a boss, you want a
talented boss. You don’t want a crummy boss. So everyone’s in the market for
talent, whether you’re hiring or being hired. If anything, it’s more important
for the younger people being hired.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Tyler Cowen holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University. His new book, co-written with Daniel Gross, is Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World.

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