Tyler Cowen, the economist and Marginal Revolution co-founder, has published a new conversation with the writer and commentator Richard Hanania on Conversations with Tyler, his long-running interview series, built around an extended discussion of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, the 1904 novel of politics, silver, and foreign capital set in the fictional South American republic of Costaguana. The video, audio, and full transcript are available online.

According to the episode summary, the first half of the conversation stays close to the text of Conrad's Nostromo. Cowen and Hanania cover the novel's political backdrop, its deliberately scrambled timeline, the near-total absence of religion in Conrad's fictional universe, Nostromo's own vanity and his treatment of women, a close reading of the “folly and murder” passage, and the claim associated with the American literary critic Fredric Jameson that no Latin American author could have written the book. The two also compare their very different research methods for preparing.

The discussion then opens outward, moving through why Latin America has unusually high crime despite not being especially poor, Panama's surprising success story, Shakespeare's objective greatness, the state of media criticism after the AI boom, which writers on the populist right are actually worth reading, why conservative women hug and liberal women shake hands, and what Hanania wants to write and learn next.

The published excerpt captures the heart of the exchange on Nostromo, where Cowen argues that the novel also functions as a critique of classical liberalism and Hanania pushes back:

Tyler Cowen: Here's one thing that struck me, and I'm not sure you'll agree. Early in the novel, there's all this talk about the Italians and Garibaldi and liberty, and the extent to which I think this book is also a critique of classical liberalism is what surprised me reading it for the second time. The first time was probably, I'd guess, 30 years ago, that Conrad is not against the classical liberal prescription, really, but he views it as another pathology inserted into a hopeless situation. It just morphs into some form of corruption and interest groups. It's replaced by the autocrats, but it turns out to not really matter more. There's, again, this dead hand of history. The indigenous groups, their customs, their norms are really what rule the area. The foreigners come and go, and they may steal or extract wealth, but at the end of the day, the talk of liberty and democracy, for him, it's a kind of fraud. I think it's also a recognition that imperialism was not going to do the job.

Richard Hanania: Don't you think that the Occidental Province had a higher GDP per capita than the rest of the country? It wasn't just they made money. It seems like there was real wealth. Getting to the end, to the spoilers, the miners actually march on the city because they're so loyal to Gould. They like what's going on. There is actual improvement in people's lives. It's not that nihilistic, right?

Cowen: It may be higher GDP, but keep in mind GNP may be what counts. I don't think Conrad thought in those terms. I don't read him as a consequentialist, though I'm mostly one myself. For him, progress is about moral progress. He doesn't see a lot of moral progress in this setting. The point that that's not happening is, for him, at least more important than, oh, living standards went up a bit or, well, isn't this better than the even poorer societies they had earlier on? I think he grew up in what we now call Poland, but then was ruled by Russia. The idea of foreign rule is something he had such a strong instinctive dislike of. And you see it in his other books as well that he's a cynic about foreign presence, though I don't think he's saying things were better before.

Hanania: No, I don't think I agree.

Cowen: I didn't think you would agree. That's why I said that.

Hanania: There is a noble savage idea. There's one part where he goes into the rant when Sotillo, the general, is torturing Hirsch. I think he goes into a rant about how primitive man did not devise as much sadistic torture, which I don't think is probably true, but that's Conrad's idea. Basically, there's a kind of innocence there. I look at the Hernandez and the robbers and the people who are living in the countryside. Those people are purest case of noble savage. There is part of that. You're right. Conrad is into honor. This is a book about love and men caring about women. There's Monygham, the doctor's loyalty to Mrs. Gould, and then Decoud's loyalty to Antonia. His other books are about this. Yes, he's a romantic. He's not a romantic in politics. He thinks politics is a dirty—

Cowen: Agreed.

Hanania: —unromantic world. If he thinks socialism and populism on a scale of one to 10 are like a one and classical liberalism is a four, to me, he's a classical liberal, even though he's not an eight or a nine on classical liberalism.

Cowen: I think I read him as believing in contingency as the most important truth of politics and a geographic relativism. I don't think he has much Rousseau in him of idealizing the noble savages, but he sees the noble savages are not noble. They're terrible, but what's terrible in them gets recreated in us at higher levels of wealth and power. That, for him, is the most fundamental truth of politics.

Concluding the post, Cowen describes the exchange as interesting throughout and recommends the episode, directing readers to Hanania's recent book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, which he calls prescient. For readers new to the novel, Nostromo — long regarded as one of the major political novels in English — is the natural companion text, staging the same clash between material improvement and moral progress that Cowen and Hanania pursue in the excerpt above.

This article is based on “My very good Conversation with Richard Hanania”, published on Marginal Revolution on November 5, 2026.