Tyler Cowen wrote a book on talent

here he says their idea of talent is heideggerian “Nervous energy and obsessiveness are markers of talent, for Cowen and Gross; for Heidegger, we might say, they are signs of anxiety in the ontological sense. Those who know their ownmost nothingness are likely to react by leaping towards their ownmost sense of possibility at every turn. Those who do not know the sting of death are happier to be complacent, just steering along, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich.”

I stumble upon a Joel Mokyr interview where he says economic growth is led by the 2%, the 3% “

You said the question was controversial, so will my answer be, but I don’t care. Here is the point. Economic growth and economic progress is not driven by the masses. It is not driven by the population at large. It is driven by a small minority of people who economists refer to in their funny language as upper-tail people, meaning if you think of the world following some kind of bell-shaped or normal distribution, it’s the elite, it’s the people who are educated—not necessarily intellectuals. They could be engineers, they could be mechanics, they could be applied mathematicians.

…I don’t care if 95 percent of people are not willing to question traditional knowledge, or anything like that. I care about the other 5 percent.

Sounds like the people Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross talk about in Talent. Sounds like Elon. I could have excerpted other parts of the transcript. Strongly recommended.

the ITW https://www.city-journal.org/the-future-economy-with-joel-mokyr?utm_source=substack&wallit_nosession=1