Tyler Cowen

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It)
by Elizabeth S. Anderson
Published 22 May 2017

. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction vii Stephen Macedo Author’s Preface xix 1 When the Market Was “Left” 1 2 Private Government 37 Comments 3 Learning from the Levellers? 75 Ann Hughes 4 Market Rationalization 89 David Bromwich 5 Help Wanted: Subordinates 99 Niko Kolodny 6 Work Isn’t So Bad after All 108 Tyler Cowen Response 7 Reply to Commentators 119 Elizabeth Anderson Notes 145 Contributors 183 Index 185 Introduction Stephen Macedo The two lectures that are the centerpiece of this volume call for a radical rethinking of the relationship between private enterprise and the freedom and dignity of workers.

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And, finally, workplace governance is ultimately subject to political rule, and so, “controlled from a standpoint of [democratic] equality.” In the end, therefore, how troubled should we be that “our rights as employees are not like our rights as citizens?” Kolodny does not hazard an answer but underlines these questions’ importance. Finally, Tyler Cowen, an economist and a public commentator, advances a broad critique of Anderson’s claims about the extent of worker domination in today’s workplaces. He denies—on both theoretical and empirical grounds—the accuracy of describing private business firms as “communist dictatorships in our midst.” He doubts that the costs of worker exit are as high as Anderson claims, and further doubts that individual firms enjoy much “monopsony” power over the workers they employ.

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I wish to thank Princeton University for inviting me to deliver the Tanner Lectures on Human Values in 2015, and the Tanner Lectures corporation for supporting my work. Don Herzog read the first draft of my lectures and provided very helpful comments that enabled me to polish my lectures for delivery. My commentators David Bromwich, Tyler Cowen, Ann Hughes, and Niko Kolodny, along with two anonymous reviewers for Princeton University Press, supplied splendid comments that enabled me to sharpen my ideas and clarify them for a broader readership. Alex Gourevitch, Stephen Macedo, and my editor, Rob Tempio, also made helpful suggestions. I thank them all for being such wonderful interlocutors.

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Published 25 May 2010

—Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures “The modern world bombards us with data just begging to be organized, from iPod playlists to digital vacation photos. Tyler Cowen offers an entertaining guided tour of our unprecedented information age, pondering implications for how creative we are, how long our attention span is, how our politics work, and the future of our economy.” —Samuel R. Sommers, assistant professor of psychology, Tufts University ALSO BY TYLER COWEN Discover Your Inner Economist THE AGE OF THE INFOVORE SUCCEEDING IN THE INFORMATION ECONOMY Tyler Cowen Previously published as Create Your Own Economy A PLUME BOOK PLUME Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition as Create Your Own Economy. First Plume Printing, July 2010 Copyright © Tyler Cowen, 2009 All rights reserved REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows: Cowen, Tyler. Create your own economy: the path to prosperity in a disordered world / Tyler Cowen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-101-43299-0 1. Economics—Psychological aspects. 2. Creative thinking. I. Title. HB74.P8C68 2009 330.01’9—dc22 2009006935 Original hardcover design by Daniel Lagin Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A PLUME BOOK THE AGE OF THE INFOVORE TYLER COWEN, a professor of economics at George Mason University, writes regularly for the New York Times and Money, and has contributed to numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Slate.com. Praise for The Age of the Infovore “Engaging, creative, and every page makes you think differently about the world. The book quickly surprised me. I read Tyler every day and didn’t anticipate the turn it took on page one. It was so surprising—and the surprise is a pleasant one—that I don’t feel I should say more. Except: Recommended.”

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Tyler Cowen
Published 15 Oct 2018

Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to sustain our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us. So, how do we proceed? Tyler Cowen, in a culmination of twenty years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. In this new book, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, Cowen argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society.

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Special thanks go to my agent, Teresa Hartnett, to Brianna Wolfson for her work on the publishing side, to Tyler Thompson and Kevin Wong for the design of the book, to Rebecca Hiscott for editing, and to Patrick Collison for his interest in publishing this book with Stripe. Biography Tyler Cowen is a Holbert L. Harris Professor at George Mason University and Director of the Mercatus Center. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. His book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better was a New York Times best seller.

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He also cowrites a blog at marginalrevolution.com, runs a podcast series called “Conversations with Tyler,” and has cofounded an online economics education project, mruniversity.com. His most recently published book was The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals © 2018 Tyler Cowen All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by Stripe Press / Stripe Matter Inc.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

Indeed, the upheaval and distress caused by technological change eventually contributed to the case for the welfare state, perhaps the most radical invention of the twentieth century. None of what has been said about displaced workers eventually finding new jobs feels like cause for celebration. To paraphrase the economist Tyler Cowen, perhaps the future will be like the past—and that is why we ought not to be optimistic about the future of work.24 Figure 1.2: The Unemployment Rate in Britain, 1760–190023 Nor is it the case, at a quick glance, that those who worried there might actually be less work in the future were completely wrong.

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In rich corners of cities like London and New York it is possible to find odd economic ecosystems full of strange but reasonably well-paid roles that rely almost entirely on the patronage of the most prosperous in society: bespoke spoon carvers and children’s playdate consultants, elite personal trainers and star yoga instructors, craft chocolatiers and artisanal cheesemakers. The economist Tyler Cowen put it well when he imagined that “making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future.”41 What is emerging is not just an economic division, where some earn much more than others, but a status division as well, between those who are rich and those who serve them.

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Yet after only a day of self-training, it was able to achieve unparalleled performance, beating the best existing chess-playing computer in a hundred-game match—without losing a single game.6 After that trouncing, it is hard to see what role human players might have alongside a machine like this. As Tyler Cowen put it, “the human now adds absolutely nothing to man-machine chess-playing teams.”7 There is a deeper lesson here. Kasparov’s experiences in chess led him to declare that “human plus machine” partnerships are the winning formula not only in chess, but across the entire economy.8 This is a view held by many others as well.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

America’s per-capita rate of triadic patent applications – those that are filed in the US, Europe and Japan, which screens out the frivolous ones – has fallen by a quarter since 2000.25 The fastest-growing units in the big Western companies are the legal and public relations departments. Big companies devote the bulk of their earnings to buying back shares and boosting dividend payments. They no longer invest anything like what they used to in research and development. The future loses out. Tyler Cowen, who is perhaps the most lateral-thinking economist I know, talks of the rise of America’s ‘complacent classes’ – the creep of a risk-averse and conformist mindset. In a supposed age of hyper-individualism, eccentricity is penalised. Software screens out job applicants before they have a chance to show their faces.

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The number of unoccupied apartments in New York rose by almost three-quarters at the turn of the century to thirty-four thousand in 2011.49 London has witnessed similar growth. The new residents then lock in their gains by restricting land use, which keeps values high. Richard Florida calls them the ‘new urban Luddites’, who exploit an ‘enormous and complex thicket of zoning laws and other land use regulations’ to keep the others out. Tyler Cowen has coined a new acronym to replace Nimbys (Not in My Backyard): Bananas (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).50 Such risk aversion breeds its own failure. So deeply rooted is gentrification that Richard Florida has now modified his widely acclaimed thesis about the rise of the creative classes.

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The future is not what it used to be, he says. The peak age of high growth and disruptive technology is behind us. Forget the power of the iPhone. Stop exulting about Google’s driverless car. Such wonders pale beside the changes felt by earlier generations. They are unlikely to be matched by our age. Gordon’s thesis is not entirely new. Tyler Cowen made a similar argument with his sparkling monograph The Great Stagnation (ironically first published as an ebook). Nor is it as counterintuitive as it sounds to our app-crowded, WiFi-saturated twenty-first-century brains. Gordon points out that for most of history, growth was absent. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages there was basically none.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Sep 2013

ALSO BY TYLER COWEN An Economist Gets Lunch The Great Stagnation The Age of the Infovore Discover Your Inner Economist DUTTON Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com. Copyright © 2013 by Tyler Cowen All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

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Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Cowen, Tyler. Average is over : powering America beyond the age of the great stagnation / Tyler Cowen. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-698-13816-2 1. Economic forecasting—United States. 2. United States—Economic conditions—2009- 3. United States—Economic policy—2009- I. Title. HC106.84.C69 2013 330.973—dc23 2013016255 While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication.

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I owe a debt of gratitude to their work and thinking on this very important subject. I also recommend to the reader Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s Race Against the Machine, a book that came out while I was doing the research and writing on this one. I have benefited considerably from reading their work and from conversations with them. Contents Also by Tyler Cowen Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph PART I Welcome to the Hyper-Meritocracy 1 Work and Wages in iWorld 2 The Big Earners and the Big Losers 3 Why Are So Many People Out of Work? PART II What Games Are Teaching Us 4 New Work, Old Game 5 Our Freestyle Future 6 Why Intuition Isn’t Helping You Get a Job 7 The New Office: Regular, Stupid, and Frustrating 8 Why the Turing Game Doesn’t Matter Part III The New World of Work 9 The New Geography 10 Relearning Education 11 The End of Average Science 12 A New Social Contract?

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

FIXING OUR CHANGED ECONOMY     119 4    “The Progress of Science and Useful Arts”: Reforming Public Investment and Intellectual Property     121 5    Financial Architecture: Finance and Monetary Policy in an Intangibles-Rich Economy     148 6    Making Cities Work Better     183 7    Reducing Dysfunctional Competition     211 Conclusion: Restarting the Future     240 Notes     263 References     279 Index     297 FIGURES AND TABLES Figures   1.1  Output per Capita Relative to Prefinancial Crisis Trends   1.2  Tobin’s Q in the United States   1.3  Growth by Income Group in the World, 1980–2016   1.4  Performance Gaps   1.5  Average Global Markup, 2000–2015   1.6  Interest Rates since 1980, Advanced Countries   1.7  Growth in the Frontier Economies since 1300   1.8  Estimated Markups Excluding Cost of Goods Sold (United States, Firms in Compustat)   1.9  US Investment Rates, 1977–2017 1.10  Tangible and Intangible Investment, Major Developed Economies 1.11  Intangible Investment: Actual Growth versus Trend Growth (Trend from 1997–2007) 1.12  Capital Service Growth Trends   2.1  TFP and Intangible Capital Services Growth   2.2  Rates of Return in the United States with and without Intangibles   2.3  Evolution of Concentration (Share of Top Eight Firms) by Intangible Intensity   2.4  Evolution of Productivity Dispersion by Intangible Intensity   3.1  Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Governance on Siena and Its Territory, Public Palace, Siena   4.1  The Tabarrok Curve   5.1  Yields on Safe Assets and Capital, 1995–2015   5.2  Intangible Intensity and the Return on Capital Spread   6.1  Percentage Intending to Use Increased Home Working as a Permanent Business Model   6.2  Net Percentage Expecting Increased Home Working as Permanent versus Net Percentage Reporting Increased Productivity from Home Working   7.1  Top Eight Industry Concentration since 2002: Share of Top Eight Firms in Industry Sales in Thirteen Developed Countries   7.2  Profit Shares Inside and Outside the United States   C.1  Providing Centralised Goods: The Constraint   C.2  How Intangibles Affect the Trade-Off Tables   1.1  Sources of per Capita Growth in the Euro Area, the United Kingdom, and the United States   3.1  Conditions Needed for Exchange and Types of Institutions That Support Them   3.2  Exchange and Types of Institutions PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has its origins in the thought-provoking conversations we had after the publication of Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy in 2017. We are very grateful for the insightful and generous comments we received from Martin Brassell, Stephen Cecchetti, Tyler Cowen, Diane Coyle, Chris Dillow, Daniel Finkelstein, Martin Fleming, Rana Foroohar, Bill Gates, John Harris, Constance Hunter, Richard Jones, John Kay, William Kerr, Saul Klein, Arnold Kling, Baruch Lev, Yuval Levin, Ehsan Masood, George Molloan, Ataman Ozyilidirim, Robert Peston, Reihan Salam, Michael Saunders, Dan Sichel, David Smith, Tom Sutcliffe, Bart Van Ark, Callum Williams, Martin Wolf, and many others.

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In addition, in recent years economists have documented an increase in the markup between prices and marginal costs that firms appear to be earning (figure 1.5).13 This work is nicely summarised in an excellent book, The Great Reversal, by the economist Thomas Philippon.14 At the level of individual workers, the data show signs of declining dynamism. Contrary to popular myths about job-hopping millennials, younger workers change employers significantly less frequently than previous generations did. They are also less likely to move from one city to another for work. Economist Tyler Cowen describes these tendencies as symptoms of an emerging “complacent class” that is “working harder than ever to postpone change.”15 FIGURE 1.5: Average Global Markup, 2000–2015. Source: Diez, Fan, and Villegas-Sanchez 2019. But there’s something incongruous here. If you present the average worker or manager with evidence that markets are becoming less competitive and workers more complacent, they will respond with something ranging from surprise to disbelief.

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But it also taps into the much older human story of a Lost Golden Age when ease and prosperity reigned, and which has given way through bad luck or bad conduct to a modern age of toil and scarcity. Once the gods favoured us, but their favour has now been withdrawn, and we find it difficult to restore the golden age of prosperity. Some economic explanations for the current productivity downturn pin the blame on exogenous events. The influential narratives of growth slowdown by Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth) fit into this time-honoured tradition.23 Both argue that a range of headwinds meant that growth, both from technological progress and from human factors such as improvements in education, had slowed down; Gordon in particular remains pessimistic that it will speed up again in the future.

Tyler Cowen-Discover Your Inner Economist Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist-Plume (2008)
by Unknown
Published 20 Sep 2008

.); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First printing, August 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I Copyright © 2007 by Tyler Cowen All rights reserved I REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Cowen, Tyler. Discover your inner economist: use incentives to fall in love, survive your next meeting, and motivate your dentist / Tyler Cowen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-525-95025-7 (hardcover) I. Economics-Psychological aspects. 2. Incentive (Psychology) I. Title. HB74.P8C69 2007 330.01'9-dc22 2007016161 Printed in the United States of America Set in Fairfield Designed by Vicky Hartman Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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DISCOVER YOUR INNER ECONOMIST Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist TYLER COWEN I DUTTON DUTION Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, II Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-I 10 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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To check up on this hunch, the researchers looked at economics faculty at different institutions. Who uses titles such as "Dr." and "Professor" in voicemail greetings and on course syllabi? Their study considered twentysix different economics curricula, and counted the eight with doctoral programs as of higher status. The results do not surprise Mr. Tyler Cowen. The authors, Harbaugh and To, tell us: "For voice-mail greetings, the use of a title is far less common at doctoral universities. Less than 4 percent of faculty use a title at doctoral universit,ies while about 27 percent use a title at non-doctoral universities. A similar pattern holds in course syllabi.

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less
by Garett Jones
Published 4 Feb 2020

Wittman, The Myth of Democratic Failure: Why Political Institutions Are Efficient (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 8. Donald Wittman, “Why Democracies Produce Efficient Results,” Journal of Political Economy 97, no. 6 (1989): 1395–1424. 9. Tyler Cowen, “The Wisdom of Garett Jones, a Continuing Series,” Marginal Revolution, January 26, 2010, https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/the-wisdom-of-garett-jones-a-continuing-series.html. 10. Tyler Cowen, “Congress Needs to Bring Back Earmarks,” Bloomberg Opinion, January 9, 2018. 11. Cowen, “Congress Needs to Bring Back Earmarks.” 12. Rauch, Political Realism, 7. 13. Rauch, Political Realism, 11. 14.

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Congress, with the decline of earmarks, the biggest games left in town are ideological outrage, social media grandstanding, and other behaviors that make individual politicians more willing to stand up to party leaders. Earmarks and other targeted goodies that the late University of Maryland economist Mancur Olson called “selective benefits” are important for cutting everyday political deals—for giving politicians something to work for beyond another viral appearance on social media. My colleague Tyler Cowen and I have discussed earmarks off and on since 2010; he wrote a column in 2018 on the still-underappreciated merits of earmarks. Here’s what he had to say: “Most of all, I think of earmarks as recognizing that compromise and messiness are bound to remain essential features of American government, and that, whether we like it or not, there is something inherently transactional [emphasis added] about being governed.”¹¹ And in order to stick, these transactions need some distance from the voters.

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Back-scratching and logrolling are signs of a healthy political system, not a corrupt one. Transactional [emphasis added] politics is not always appropriate or effective, but a political system which is not reliably capable of it is a system in a state of critical failure.¹² You’ll see that I italicized the word transactional both here and in Tyler Cowen’s quote above. Both scholars think that real-world political success depends on insiders cutting deals, deals that outsiders—regular voters like you and me—might be appalled by. Rauch offers one particular reason why transactional politics tends to enlarge the pie: because often, the political machine—which might include both a formal party apparatus as well as an informal back-scratching operation that spans the world of lobbying, campaign donations, and legislation—has an interest in the long run.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019

(Their answer is principally through aggressive tax avoidance, playing off multiple tax havens against one another to get an acceptable deal.) Once enough wealthy people have become sovereign individuals, coerced redistribution will have to end. At this point, governments will have no choice but to dismantle the welfare state. Tyler Cowen, Economics Professor at George Mason University, set out his vision of a free market ‘hyper-meritocracy’ in which poor people will be forced to move to low-cost housing and to accept vastly reduced support, pacified by computer games and digital media: The American polity [political system] is unlikely to collapse, but we’ll all look back on the immediate post-war era as a very special time.

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Yet it will be an oddly peaceful time with the general ageing of American society and the proliferation of many sources of cheap fun. We might even look ahead to a time when the cheap or free fun is so plentiful that it will feel a bit like Karl Marx’s Communist utopia, albeit brought on by capitalism. That is the real light at the end of the tunnel.14 Of course, we are not there yet. We have not yet attained Tyler Cowen’s utopia. But already, the work of creating a hostile environment for the less well-off is underway. In the UK, for example, benefits for working people have been ‘frozen’ since 201515 – that means that they have been falling in real terms, and they will continue to do so – and the government plans to roll-out Universal Credit, a so-called reform of the benefits system, despite the evidence that it causes enormous hardship to the most vulnerable and has forced many to turn to food banks to survive.16 The Conservative MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg commented that this growth in food banks was rather uplifting: [The State] provides a basic level of welfare, but on some occasions that will not work and to have charitable support given by people voluntarily to support their fellow citizens I think is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are.17 And there is a growing movement to criminalize homelessness: Despite updated Home Office guidance at the start of the year, which instructs councils not to target people for being homeless and sleeping rough, the Guardian has found over fifty local authorities with public space protection orders (PSPOs) in place.

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Taken together, and pursued to their logical conclusion, these ideas lead to a world like that of Chapter 1. There is power behind these ideas Some of my friends, on reading this, commented, ‘But nobody serious thinks like that.’ Unfortunately, they are wrong. There is a considerable free-market literature, from Hayek and Ayn Rand through Milton Friedman and Davidson and Rees-Mogg to Tyler Cowen. Distinguished followers of these writers include some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet:20 Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple; the Koch brothers, one the chairman and the other the EVP of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the US21; Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp; Politicians Donald Trump,22 Rex Tillerson, Ron and Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan in the US, and Daniel Hannan and Sajid Javid in the UK; Pay-Pal co-founder, Peter Thiel and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016

In the realm of logistics: Steven Rosenbush and Laura Stevens, “At UPS, the Algorithm Is the Driver,” The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/at-ups-the-Algorithm-is-the-driver-1424136536. On the blog Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok refers to this kind of intelligence as “opaque intelligence.” http://marginalrevolution.com/marginal revolution/2015/02/opaque-intelligence.html. the economist Tyler Cowen noted: Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 72. “both praised and panned”: Feng-Hsiung Hsu, Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). “slow, tortuous reading”: Flood and Goodenough, “Contract as Automaton.”

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And in chess, a realm where computers are more powerful than humans and are able to win via pathways that the human mind can’t always see, the machines’ characteristic game choices are known as “computer moves”—the moves that a human would rarely make, the ones that are ugly but still get results. As the economist Tyler Cowen noted in his book Average Is Over, these types of moves often seem wrong, but they are very effective. When IBM’s Deep Blue was playing Garry Kasparov, it made a move so strange that it “was both praised and panned by different commentators,” according to one of Deep Blue’s builders. In fact, this highly odd but potentially brilliant move was eventually found to be due to a bug.

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This play—tweaking a simulation of technological failure and seeing how it responds—can provide a greater comfort with large and unwieldy systems and can help us as we move forward through this world of increasingly complicated technology. We also need interpreters of what’s going on in these systems, a bit like TV meteorologists. Near the end of Average Is Over, the economist Tyler Cowen speculates about this new breed of future interpreters. He says they “will hone their skills of seeking out, absorbing, and evaluating this information. . . . They will be translators of the truths coming out of our networks of machines. . . . At least for a while, they will be the only people left who will have a clear notion of what is going on.”

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

Appendix: What Is a Firm, Anyway, and Why Do So Many Workers End Up So Frustrated? Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index Also By Tyler Cowen About the Author Copyright BIG BUSINESS. Copyright © 2019 by Tyler Cowen. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.stmartins.com Cover photograph of city © Predrag Vuckovic / Getty Images The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Names: Cowen, Tyler, author. Title: Big business: a love letter to an American anti-hero / Tyler Cowen. Description: New York: St. Martin’s Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Treasury See also T-bills venture capital American innovation and Verizon Vietnam War voice recording Volkswagen wages Walgreens Walmart Warren, Elizabeth Waze wealth management Wells Fargo WhatsApp whistleblowers Wi-Fi-enabled technology WikiLeaks Williamson, Oliver Wilson, David work altruism and economic oppression exploitation flow and human relationships and non-pay-related benefits potential burden of satisfaction of sexual harassment and stress and studies “work as a safe haven” effect work hours workplace freedom WolframAlpha World Bank World Trade Organization World Values Survey World War I World War II X-rays Yahoo YouTube Zak, Paul J. Zawadzki, Matthew J. Zingales, Luigi zombie banks Zuckerberg, Mark See also Facebook ALSO BY TYLER COWEN The Complacent Class Average Is Over The Great Stagnation An Economist Gets Lunch The Age of the Infovore Discover Your Inner Economist ABOUT THE AUTHOR TYLER COWEN, Ph.D., holds the Holbert L. Harris Chair in Economics at George Mason University. He is the author of a number of explanatory books and textbooks, including The Complacent Class, as well as the most-read economics blog worldwide, marginalrevolution.com.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT most popular stories: As of December 21, 2023; Nate Silver, “Fine, I’ll Run a Regression Analysis. But It Won’t Make You Happy,” Silver Bulletin (blog), October 1, 2023, natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Even public figures: Peter Hartree, “Tyler Cowen on Effective Altruism,” EA Forum, January 13, 2023, forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NdZPQxc74zNdg8Mvm/tyler-cowen-on-effective-altruism-december-2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT is more radical: The Yuskowdsky-Hanson stream is also quite radical, but in ways that are more self-evident, with people and ideas that are often unapologetically weird.

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For example, Alexander encouraged me to speak with Habryka, even though he knew Habryka would be critical of the movement he’d spent time defending. It’s rare to have a source recommend another source who he knows will contradict his narrative. Whereas EAs sometimes pull their punches. In an interview with the economist Tyler Cowen, for instance, MacAskill said he didn’t think EAs should be anti-abortion. I was bothered by this, but not because of my personal views—I’m pro-choice myself. Rather, it’s because it seems like a complicated question from a utilitarian standpoint. If you’re going to ask people to consider the utility of hypothetical future unborn beings, as MacAskill’s book does, then what about a fetus?

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I got lucky that the news came out well before my deadline hit. But this is a book with about two hundred sources, many of whom push boundaries in various ways. For EAs, by contrast, Bankman-Fried was a singular figure—the most publicly visible explicitly EA person in the world and the movement’s most important source of funding. As Tyler Cowen has pointed out, a failure of FTX represented a potential existential risk to EA, and it’s a risk they didn’t predict very well. *21 Aella isn’t a screen name or pseudonym—it’s just her name, she said. “Everyone calls me that, except for my mom and dad.” *22 Another good example of an effective hedonist is Perkins, whose book Die with Zero is about EV maximizing your life in a data-driven way.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

“Leeds Woollen Workers Petition, 1786,” Modern History Sourcebook. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1786machines.asp 33. Quoted in: Robert Skidelsky, “Death to Machines?” Project Syndicate (February 21, 2014). http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/robert-skidelsky-revisits-the-luddites--claim-that-automation-depresses-real-wages 34. Tyler Cowen, Average is Over. Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (2013), p. 23. 35. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation, p. 172. 36. Quoted in: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail. The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (2012), p. 226. 37. Thomas Piketty, “Save capitalism from the capitalists by taxing wealth,” The Financial Times (March 28, 2014). http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/decdd76e-b50e-11e3-a746-00144feabdc0.html-axzz44qTtjlZN 5 The End of Poverty 1.

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Inequality will continue to increase and everybody who hasn’t managed to learn a skill that machines cannot or will not be able to master will be sidelined. “Making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future,” writes the American economist Tyler Cowen.34 Though the lower classes might have access to new amenities like cheap solar power and free Wi-Fi, the gap between them and the ultra-rich will be wider than ever. Beyond that, the rich and well-educated will continue to close ranks even as peripheral villages and towns grow more impoverished.

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Heidi Shierholz, “Immigration and Wages: Methodological advancements confirm modest gains for native workers,” Economic Policy Institute (February 4, 2010). http://epi.3cdn.net/7de74e-e0cd834d87d4_a3m6ba9j0.pdf Also see: Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, “Rethinking the Effect of Immigration on Wages.” http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497 39. Frederic Docquiera, Caglar Ozden, and Giovanni Peri, “The Wage Effects of Immigration and Emigration,” OECD (December 20, 2010). http://www.oecd.org/els/47326474.pdf 40. Tyler Cowen, Average is Over (2013) p. 169. 41. Corrado Giulietti, Martin Guzi, Martin Kahanec, and Klaus F. Zimmermann, “Unemployment Benefits and Immigration: Evidence from the EU,” Institute for the Study of Labor (October 2011). http://ftp.iza.org/dp6075.pdf On the U.S., see: Leighton Ku and Brian Bruen, “The Use of Public Assistance Benefits by Citizens and Non-citizen Immigrants in the United States,” Cato Institute (February 19, 2013). http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/workingpaper-13_1.pdf 42.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

He advocates forecasting by means of prediction markets, where people place bets on particular economic or policy outcomes, like the level of unemployment at some future date. He argues that prediction markets give us a financial stake in being accurate when we make forecasts, rather than just trying to look good to our peers. Tyler Cowen A professor at George Mason University and co-author of an extremely popular blog, Tyler Cowen was New Jersey's youngest ever chess champion. He is a man with prodigiously broad knowledge and interests, and although he proposes some key ideas forcefully, there is always some nuance, and he dislikes simplistic and modish solutions. In two recent books, “the Great Stagnation” (2011) and “Average is Over” (2014), he paints a picture of America's future which is slightly depressing, but not apocalyptic.

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Humans can undermine the game of a computer by throwing in some surprise moves which don't make much sense in the short term, or by deploying an intuitive strategy. Matches between humans working with computers are called advanced chess, or centaur chess. Kasparov himself initiated the first high-level centaur chess competition in Leon, in Spain, in 1998, and competitions have been held there regularly ever since. Tyler Cowen (one of the sceptics about machine automation that we met in chapter 3.3) explores this form of chess extensively in his book, “Average is Over”. Some people believe this phenomenon of humans teaming up with computers to form centaurs is a metaphor for how we can avoid most jobs being automated by machine intelligence.

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They think that capitalism should be defended and retained, but they sound less confident about what will happen in the medium term. They argue for an overhaul of the US education system, but they don’t sound convinced that will be enough, and they speculate that a negative income tax may eventually become necessary. Tyler Cowen, whom we encountered in chapter 3.3 as the author of “Average is Over”, is certainly not breezy in his assessment of the outlook, nor is he tentative. He is confident that UBI will not be needed, and he does not expect riots. But his prognosis is lugubrious. He foresees 10-15% of the population being extremely wealthy, and the rest getting by on incomes which are stagnant at best, but putting up with it because many of them are too old to riot, and they are pacified by the excellent cheap entertainment that technology provides.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

If innovation is the primary driver of prosperity, then perhaps stagnant incomes imply that the problem is the rate at which new inventions and ideas are being generated, rather than the impact of technology on the working and middle classes. Maybe computers aren’t really all that important, and the slow rate of progress on a broader front is what matters most. Several economists have made this case. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, proposed in his 2011 book The Great Stagnation that the US economy has run into a temporary plateau after consuming all the low-hanging fruit of accessible innovation, free land, and underutilized human talent. Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University is even more pessimistic, arguing in a 2012 paper that economic growth in the United States, hampered by a slow pace of innovation and a number of “headwinds”—including excessive debt, an aging population, and shortfalls in our educational system—may essentially be over.1 In order to gain some insight into the factors that influence the pace of innovation, we may find it useful to think in terms of the historical path that nearly all technologies follow.

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Again, this scenario is nothing new. And, more importantly, it doesn’t really involve any new people. The individuals that businesses are likely to hire and then couple with the best available technology are the same people who are largely immune to unemployment today. It is a small population of elite workers. Economist Tyler Cowen’s 2013 book Average Is Over quotes one freestyle chess insider who says that the very best players are “genetic freaks.”54 That hardly makes the machine collaboration idea sound like a systemic solution for masses of people pushed out of routine jobs. And, as we have just seen, there is also the problem of offshoring.

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As we’ve seen, visual recognition (of types of garbage, in this case) remains a daunting challenge for computers, so people are employed to perform this task. The very fact that this service is economically viable should give you some idea of the wage level for this kind of work. * In Average Is Over, Tyler Cowen estimates that perhaps 10–15 percent of the American workforce will be well equipped for machine collaboration jobs. I think that in the long run, even that estimate might be optimistic, especially when you consider the impact of offshoring. How many machine collaboration jobs will also be anchored locally?

The Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 24 Jan 2011

.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First printing, February 2011 Copyright © 2010 by Tyler Cowen All rights reserved <Dutton logo> REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA eISBN : 978-1-101-50225-9 Chart on page 14 reprinted from Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Vol 72/Issue 8, Jonathan Huebner, “A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation,” Copyright (October, 2005), with permission from Elsevier.

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On job creation and the iPod, see Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick, and Kenneth L. Kraemer, “Innovation and Job Creation in a Global Economy: The Case of Apple’s iPod,” 2008, available at http://pcic.merage.uci.edu/papers/2009/InnovationAndJobCreation.pdf. Chapter 4 The Government of Low-Hanging Fruit On who pays how much of the tax burden, see Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles: Macroeconomics, New York: Worth Publishers, 2009, ch. 16, p. 340. The historian S. E. Finer first suggested that technology was behind the rise of big government, though he did not consider this claim in the context of public-choice issues. See S. E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
by Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 23 Jan 2012

What America has been experiencing since 2007, in short, is another case of the business cycle in action, albeit a particularly painful one. A second explanation for current hard times sees stagnation, not cyclicality, in action. Stagnation in this context means a long-term decline in America’s ability to innovate and increase productivity. Economist Tyler Cowen articulates this view in his 2010 book, The Great Stagnation: We are failing to understand why we are failing. All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. … Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there.

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On balance, the official productivity data likely underestimate the true improvements of our living standards over time. Stagnant Median Income In contrast to labor productivity, median family income has risen only slowly since the 1970s (Figure 3.2) once the effects of inflation are taken into account. As discussed in Chapter 1, Tyler Cowen and others point to this fact as evidence of economy-wide stagnation. In some ways, Cowen understates his case. If you zoom in on the past decade and focus on working-age households, real median income has actually fallen from $60,746 to $55,821. This is the first decade to see declining median income since the figures were first compiled.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
Published 27 Feb 2017

See also crime wages and collectibles and gender and living standards and matching and mobility and outsourcing and productivity Wang, Ben Wang Wenyin War on Drugs Warner, Michael Washington, DC Watts riots Weather Underground Wikipedia YouTube. See also social media Zuckerberg, Mark ALSO BY TYLER COWEN Average Is Over The Great Stagnation An Economist Gets Lunch The Age of the Infovore Discover Your Inner Economist ABOUT THE AUTHOR TYLER COWEN (Ph.D.) holds the Holbert C. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University. He is the author of a number of textbooks and other thought-provoking works and writes the most-read economics blog worldwide, marginalrevolution.com.

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Why Americans Stopped Rioting and Legalized Marijuana 7. How a Dynamic Society Looks and Feels 8. Political Stagnation, the Dwindling of True Democracy, and Alexis de Tocqueville as Prophet of Our Time 9. The Return of Chaos, and Why the Complacent Class Cannot Hold Notes References Index Also by Tyler Cowen About the Author Copyright THE COMPLACENT CLASS. Copyright © 2017 by Tyler Cowen. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.stmartins.com Cover photographs: American flag © Photoline/Shutterstock; deflated ballon © Jeff Wasserman/Shutterstock.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

Bradford DeLong has suggested that the more central a role information technology plays in traditionally skillful professions like law or medicine, the fewer jobs there might be.75 Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, two economists from the University of Chicago’s business school, have found that since the mid-1970s, the relative amount of income going to workers has been in decline around the world.76 Meanwhile the research of three Canadian economists, Paul Beaudry, David Green, and Benjamin Sand, found a similarly steep decline of midlevel jobs—a depressing development that MIT’s David Autor, Northeastern University’s Andrew Sum, and the president of the Economic Policy Institute, Larry Mishel, have also discovered with their research.77 Many others share this concern about the destructive impact of technology on the “golden age” of labor. The George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, in his 2013 book, Average Is Over, concurs, arguing that today’s big economic “divide” is between those whose skills “complement the computer” and those whose don’t. Cowan underlines the “stunning truth” that wages for men, over the last forty years, have fallen by 28%.78 He describes the divide in what he calls this new “hyper-meritocracy” as being between “billionaires” like the Battery member Sean Parker and the homeless “beggars” on the streets of San Francisco, and sees an economy in which “10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.”79 Supporting many of Frank and Cook’s theses in their Winner-Take-All Society, Cowen suggests that the network lends itself to a superstar economy of “charismatic” teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other “prodigies” who will have feudal retinues of followers working for them.80 But, Cowen reassures us, there will be lots of jobs for “maids, chauffeurs and gardeners” who can “serve” wealthy entrepreneurs like his fellow chess enthusiast Peter Thiel.

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In our digital age, the personal is the economic. And there’s nothing liberating about it at all. Just as the Kodak tragedy decimated the economic heart of Rochester, so the Internet is destroying our old industrial economy—transforming what was once a relatively egalitarian system into a winner-take-all economy of what Tyler Cowen calls “billionaires and beggars.” Rather than just a city, it’s a whole economy that is losing its center. For all Silicon Valley’s claims that the Internet has created more equal opportunity and distribution of wealth, the new economy actually resembles a donut—with a gaping hole in the middle where, in the old industrial system, millions of workers were once paid to manufacture valuable products.

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Keith recommended me to Paul Carr and Jon Orlin at TechCrunchTV, and my show Keen On . . . was the first program on the network, running for four years and including over two hundred interviews with leading Internet thinkers and critics. In particular, I’d like to thank Kurt Andersen, John Borthwick, Stewart Brand, Po Bronson, Erik Brynjolfsson, Nicholas Carr, Clayton Christensen, Ron Conway, Tyler Cowen, Kenneth Cukier, Larry Downes, Tim Draper, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Walter Isaacson, Tim Ferriss, Michael Fertik, Ze Frank, David Frigstad, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Peter Hirshberg, Reid Hoffman, Ryan Holiday, Brad Horowitz, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Kelly, David Kirkpatrick, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Robert Levine, Steven Levy, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew McAfee, Gavin Newsom, George Packer, Eli Pariser, Andrew Rasiej, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Schroeder, Tiffany Shlain, Robert Scoble, Dov Seidman, Gary Shapiro, Clay Shirky, Micah Sifry, Martin Sorrell, Tom Standage, Bruce Sterling, Brad Stone, Clive Thompson, Sherry Turkle, Fred Turner, Yossi Vardi, Hans Vestberg, Vivek Wadhwa, and Steve Wozniak for appearing on Keen On . . . and sharing their valuable ideas with me.

How to Fix Copyright
by William Patry
Published 3 Jan 2012

In addition, Taylor’s methods of using stop watches and other forms of quantification led to laborers producing more in less time for less pay. Some opulence. See Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures 14–16 (Princeton University Press, 2002), for a discussion of the different ways the term diversity is used. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/walt_whitman/quotes. “If I had gone directly to the people, read my poems, faced the crowds, got into immediate touch with Tom, Dick, and Harry instead of waiting to be interpreted, I’d have had my audience at once,” quoted in David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography 339 (1995,Vintage Books). Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures 3 (Princeton University Press, 2002).

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See The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity 8–9 ( James Kaufman and Robert Sternberg editors, 2010, Cambridge University Press). 7. See Ruth Towse, Creativity, Incentive and Reward: An Economic Analysis of Copyright and Culture in the Information Age 6 (2001, Edward Elgar). Even those with talent need to learn their craft, a process that can take a lifetime. 8. But see Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000, Harvard University Press). 9. Ruth Towse, A Textbook of Cultural Economics 363 (2010, Cambridge University Press). 10. See Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules 390 (1999, Harvard Business School Press). 11. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i4ad94ea6265fac02d4c813c0b6a93ca2.

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Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures 3 (Princeton University Press, 2002). Professor Cowen’s book is devoted to refuting de Tocqueville’s and similar theories. See also his In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000, Harvard University Press). Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Culture 103 (2002, Princeton University). Id. at 129. Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India 64 (1993, University of Chicago Press). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jab_We_Met. Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, India Chapter. See Larry Rohter, Gilberto Gil and the politics of music.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity
by Currid
Published 9 Nov 2010

And herein lies the paradox of the democratic star: While it ostensibly seems much easier to get one’s foot in the door, keeping oneself in the limelight is much harder. Hollywood is difficult to break into, but Hollywood stardom has a longer life span. If everyone has a chance to attain celebrity through democratic stardom, keeping people interested over time becomes that much harder. As the economist Tyler Cowen remarked, “It’s never a secure position, precisely because entry is easy.”23 In its early stages (before agents are hired and Perez Hilton is blogging about you), democratic celebrity is different in how it is maintained. Hollywood, sports, and political celebrity have their own built-in vetting processes.

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Vivian is a doctoral student at USC, and her attention to detail, intelligence, and ability to work under pressure are impressive and bode well for her own future career as a scholar. My scholarly colleagues and mentors Harvey Molotch, Susan Fainstein, Richard Florida, Lance Freeman, David Galenson, Tyler Cowen, Michael Storper, Allen Scott, and Dalton Conley were thoughtful and generous in the time they gave me to talk about my ideas for this book. I am fortunate to have Leo Braudy as my colleague at USC. His The Frenzy of Renown is the original treatise on the topic of fame, and his insights into my own work have been essential.

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So a very interesting way to capture where celebrity emerges is to look at who gets written about. Sure enough, merit-driven industries are less likely on the whole to have a preponderance of biographies. Barring the truly exceptional, most biographies are written about individuals in ambiguously measured industries. As the economist Tyler Cowen has pointed out in What Price Fame? there has been a massive transformation of biographies from being serious treatises on the life and times of people of obvious merit, such as philosophers or political leaders, to books on entertainment figures and those with spectacular personal lives. Cowen notes that in the early 1900s, 46 percent of all biographies published in the United States were of political leaders.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

Some of this can be laid to historical timing: world-changing breakthroughs are a lot harder to come by these days in part because the easy ones have already been made. In times past, we were able to get massive increases in productivity by eliminating large and obvious inefficiencies—moving from animal-powered farming to mechanization, for instance, or switching from manure to synthetic fertilizers. But as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has argued, most of that “low-hanging fruit” has all been picked and eaten, and today it’s simply much harder, and more costly, to achieve similarly epoch-defining breakthroughs. But it’s not just that innovation has gotten harder. One can also make the case that, under the financialized business models that emerged with the Impulse Society, the way we pursue innovation has gotten weaker.

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The other, larger wing of the legal profession will be a sort of mass-production, Walmart model that digitally processes hundreds of thousands of simple cases, like uncontested divorce or mortgage contracts. This two-tier market is the pattern that some economists foresee for the entire job market. The scenario is most graphically laid out by Tyler Cowen, the economist, in his recent book Average Is Over. In Cowen’s version of the future, the top 15 percent of the workforce will be made up of what he calls “hyperproductives”—individuals who are extremely bright and who either know how to use the latest technologies or know how to manage other hyperproductives, and for whom each new generation of corporate efficiencies will mean an ever-larger slice of the pie.

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Given the huge development costs these medical technologies will require, and the industry’s ever-more-intense need for prompt returns, it’s not so hard to imagine a medical future that looks an awful lot like the medical present—that is, where more and more of the truly life-altering benefits of innovation flow to the part of the market that can most afford them. Even if we managed to enact a single-payer system, we’d still be looking at a health culture very much along the lines of Tyler Cowen’s bifurcated, end-of-average society, where the wealthy get not only better health care but also more access to the sorts of innovations that are likely to dramatically extend life spans. What will society look like in thirty years, when Cowen’s hyperproductives are not only wealthier than everyone else, but living much longer?

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

All that remained after 1970 were second-round improvements, such as developing short-haul regional jets, extending the original interstate highway network with suburban ring roads, and converting residential America from window unit air conditioners to central air conditioning.5 Gordon is far from alone in this view. In his 2011 book The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen is definitive about the source of America’s economic woes: We are failing to understand why we are failing. All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. . . . Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there.

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Those benefits start small while the technology is immature and not widely used, grow to be quite big as the GPT improves and propagates, then taper off as the improvement—and especially the propagation—die down. When multiple GPTs appear at the same time, or in a steady sequence, we sustain high rates of growth over a long period. But if there’s a big gap between major innovations, economic growth will eventually peter out. We’ll call this the ‘innovation-as-fruit’ view of things, in honor of Tyler Cowen’s imagery of all the low-hanging fruit being picked. In this perspective, coming up with an innovation is like growing fruit, and exploiting an innovation is like eating the fruit over time. Another school of thought, though, holds that the true work of innovation is not coming up with something big and new, but instead recombining things that already exist.

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The general story is about our research to understand the nature of progress with digital technologies, and its economic and societal consequences. As part of this work, we talked to two main types of geek (a label which, to us, is the highest praise): those who study economics and other social sciences, and those who build technologies. In the former group Susan Athey, David Autor, Zoe Baird, Nick Bloom, Tyler Cowen, Charles Fadel, Chrystia Freeland, Robert Gordon, Tom Kalil, Larry Katz, Tom Kochan, Frank Levy, James Manyika, Richard Murnane, Robert Putnam, Paul Romer, Scott Stern, Larry Summers, and Hal Varian have helped our thinking enormously. In the latter category are Chris Anderson, Rod Brooks, Peter Diamandis, Ephraim Heller, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Howard, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, John Leonard, Tod Loofbourrow, Hilary Mason, Tim O’Reilly, Sandy Pentland, Brad Templeton, and Vivek Wadhwa.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Apr 2012

First printing, April 2012 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © 2012 by Tyler Cowen All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Cowen, Tyler. An economist gets lunch : new rules for everyday foodies / Tyler Cowen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-101-56166-9 1.

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AN ECONOMIST GETS LUNCH ALSO BY TYLER COWEN The Great Stagnation The Age of the Infovore Discover Your Inner Economist T Y L E R C O W E N A N E C O N O M I S T G E T S L U N C H New Rules for Everyday Foodies DUTTON DUTTON Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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New Mexico foods are more likely to use fresh green chilies and green tomatillo sauces. Pork is the preferred meat, not beef. Mexican food from California uses more produce, as befits the diversified agriculture of the state. Avocados, sour cream, and Spanish olives are especially common. See Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2002, chapter four, for information on the differential spread of television across the United States and Europe. For the figures on working women, see Martha Hahn Sugar, When Mothers Work, Who Pays?

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
by M. Nolan Gray
Published 20 Jun 2022

On the contrary, as part II argues, despite its seemingly limited scope, zoning has had a destructive effect on cities, which is why we should abolish it. Acknowledgments Like any work worthy of your time, this book is the result of many minds—I simply have the honor of putting my name on the cover. In late 2019, I sent Tyler Cowen a grant proposal setting out my plan to spend 2020 cranking out blog posts and writing research papers. Since I knew he was interested in moonshot ideas, I tacked on one or two lines about a peculiar little book critiquing an obscure area of policy. Within forty-eight hours, I was on the phone with Tyler sketching out the contours of the book you now hold in your hands.

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Of course, as Alan Mallach points out in The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), this wealth is not always spread equally, but policymakers in growing cities are better positioned to correct these inequities than in stagnant or declining cities. 17. Emily Badger, “Covid Didn’t Kill Cities. Why Was That Prophecy So Alluring?” New York Times, July 12, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/upshot/covid-cities-predictions-wrong.html. 18. For a comprehensive treatment of the issue of US economic stagnation, the reader is encouraged to see Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (Boston: Dutton, 2011). Real wage growth data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For more on the productivity slowdown, see Robert J. Godon, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?

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Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga, “Urban Growth and Its Aggregate Implications,” NBER Working Paper Series (December 2019), https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26591/w26591.pdf. 25. Peter Ganong and Daniel W. Shoag, “Why Has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined?” NBER Working Paper Series (July 2017), https://www.nber.org/papers/w23609. 26. For a robust defense of growth, see Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2018). CHAPTER 5: APARTHEID BY ANOTHER NAME 1. Larry Buchanan, Quotrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. 2.

The Gated City (Kindle Single)
by Ryan Avent
Published 30 Aug 2011

This adjustment process takes a while. And while it continues, incomes for many American workers will stagnate, prices for many basic resources will rise, and growth may slow. Ultimately everyone will be better off, but during the transition period some people will be made worse off. - The low-hanging fruit is gone. Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the rich world rode a wave of low-hanging fruit to prosperity in the years between the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the chaotic 1970s. Lots of empty land was put to use. Uneducated populations became highly educated. And centuries of revolutionary technological innovations were exploited to their fullest.

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Wolff, Edward, “Spillovers, Linkages, and Productivity Growth in the US Economy, 1958 to 2007”, NBER Working Paper No. 16864, March 2011. Wright, Gavin, “The Economic Revolution in the American South”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 1, Issue 1, Summer 1987. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have done this alone. I am indebted to Zanny Minton-Beddoes for her patience, encouragement, and insight. Tyler Cowen has been a constant source of inspiration and an indispensible resource. I offer sincere thanks to Matthew Yglesias for being a kindred intellectual spirit and a partner in competitive cooperation. I am grateful to Rachel Horwood for her indefatigable research efforts. And I would like to thank and dedicate this book to my wife, Lisa, without whom it, and much else besides, would not have been possible

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan
Published 16 Jan 2018

Further thanks to my editor Peter Dougherty, anonymous referees for Princeton University Press, research assistants Caleb Fuller, Zac Gochenour, Colin Harris, and Julia Norgaard, and my loyal corps of volunteer spreadsheet checkers: Matthew Baker, David Balan, Nathaniel Bechhofer, Zac Gochenour, Garett Jones, Jim Pagels, and Fabio Rojas. My apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten. My deepest gratitude, though, goes to Nathaniel Bechhofer, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and Alex Tabarrok for sharing my intellectual journey, day by day. Whatever they think about education as it really is, these dear friends exemplify education as it ought to be. The Case against Education Introduction Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity.

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With a job at stake, even a slacker will work like a dog. The same holds when Fred finishes one year of college. A lazy rebel will toil and conform for two semesters if the wage is right. To signal you’re the real deal, a hardworking team player must outlast the posers and wannabes. As my colleague Tyler Cowen, ordinarily a signaling skeptic, once admitted: It does not suffice to give everyone a test and hire people with the highest scores. . . . Doing well on a test is no guarantee of perseverance. The signal must be costly and grueling, otherwise it fails to sort out the best job candidates.32 Contrary to critics, then, the sheer duration of education doesn’t refute signaling.

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You want relevant contacts.105 Friends in your narrowly defined occupation are quite lucrative.106 So are older male relatives (father, uncle, grandfather) who know the boss or vouch for you.107 When researchers estimate the average benefit of “contacts” or “social networks,” though, some find a positive effect on employment and wages, some no effect, and others a negative effect.108 If this seems implausible, bear in mind: even if your cousin or college roommate plainly “got you your job,” you might have swiftly found as good or better a job on your own. Who does meet useful contacts in school? If you want a job in education, school is the ideal place to network. Once I resolved to become an economics professor, I strove to meet other economics professors. One, Tyler Cowen, got me my job. (I also met many philosophy, history, and law professors. Career payoff so far: zero.) If you’re earning a professional degree in law or medicine, or majoring in more vocational subjects like engineering, you and your classmates will plausibly trade career favors down the line. Stanford’s computer science program could be your passport to Silicon Valley.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

Relocating is a significant life change—moving away from friends and family requires significant courage, adaptability, and optimism. Imagine living somewhere where your best people always leave, where the purpose of excelling seems to be to head off to greener pastures. Over time it would be easy to develop a negative outlook. You might double down on pride and insularity. The economist Tyler Cowen observed that since 1970 the difference between the most and least educated U.S. cities has doubled in terms of average level of education—that is, more and more educated people are congregating in the same cities and leaving others. Business dynamism is now vastly unevenly distributed. Fifty-nine percent of American counties saw more businesses close than open between 2010 and 2014.

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The Annual Time Use survey in 2014 indicated high levels of time spent “attending gambling establishments,” “tobacco and drug use,” “listening to the radio,” and “arts and crafts as a hobby,” with over 8 hours per day spent on “socializing, relaxing and leisure.” The same surveys showed lower likelihood of volunteering or attending religious services than for men in the workforce, despite having considerably more time. “Every society has a ‘bad men’ problem,” says Tyler Cowen, the economist and author of Average Is Over. He projects a future where a relative handful of high-productivity individuals create most of the value, while low-skilled people become preoccupied with cheap digital entertainment to stay happy and organize their lives. Games have come a long way since I was a kid, and they’re about to take yet another leap forward.

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…“a major metropolitan area run by armed teenagers with no access to jobs or healthy food”…: Matt Taibbi, “Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch from America’s Most Desperate Town,” Rolling Stone, December 11, 2013. … since 1970 the difference between the most and least educated U.S. cities has doubled…: Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), pp. 172–173. Fifty-nine percent of American counties saw more businesses close than open…: “Dynamism in Retreat: Consequences for Regions, Markets and Workers,” Economic Innovation Group, February 2017.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough
by Peter Barnes
Published 31 Jul 2014

IN THE PAST, EACH GENERATION of Americans believed it would live better than the one that came before it. That’s what we meant by “progress.” But though we continue to advance in technological ways, we’re no longer progressing in intergenerational betterment. That part of the American dream has died. Perhaps it can’t be saved, and we should just accept that fact. That’s what economist Tyler Cowen argues in his 2013 book, Average Is Over. Twenty-first-century America will be “much more unfair and much less equal,” he says. About ten percent of Americans will be wealthy while the rest grow increasingly poor. Aid from government will be inadequate, and millions will live in shantytowns like those in Mexico and Brazil.

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Joseph Hanlon, Armando Barrientos, and David Hulme, Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South (Sterling, VA: Kumerian Press, 2010). 21. Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 22. Nicholas Lemann, “When the earth moved: What happened to the environmental movement?” New Yorker, April 15, 2013. 23. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 229—30 (Kindle Edition). Appendix: The Dividend Potential of Co-owned Wealth 1. Assumes 95 percent of US residents are eligible for Social Security and a 2013 population of 316 million; http://www.census.gov/population/foreign/data/acs2003.html. 2.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

From quantum biology, nanotechnology and exoplanet astronomy to nudge unit governance, blockchain and virtual worlds, surely this is a uniquely fecund moment when the frontier is expanding at a record and still accelerating pace. Mounting evidence suggests the opposite. A lively debate is calling into question these dominant assumptions about our place in history and the default nature of progress. As much as anyone, the economist Tyler Cowen rang the alarm when he called the present, particularly in the West, the Great Stagnation. So let's call it the Great Stagnation Debate. Nicholas Negroponte believes we exist amid a ‘Big Idea Famine’. Others see not so much an innovation machine as an ‘Innovation Illusion’. The economist Robert Gordon talks about the ‘fall of growth’, while the physicist Lee Smolin talks about a science no longer capable of revolutionary thought.

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Productivity growth has been much slower over the 3IR than before. Since 1970, Total Factor Productivity (TFP), the key measure of how technology boosts growth, has grown at only a third of the pace achieved between 1920 and 1970, leaving us fully 73 per cent behind the postwar trend.17 In the words of Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood: ‘TFP growth probably is the best contender for how to measure scientific progress. And overall TFP measures do show declines in the rate of innovativeness, expressed as a percentage of GDP.’ 18 In short, it appears that recent ideas have failed to have the same impact as those of the earlier generation.

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But it provides stark evidence that a fraught environment now exists for big thinking. And Jones and his colleagues aren't alone among economists. Evidence is mounting from across the field. * Economists are increasingly sceptical about claims that we live in an age of radical innovation. High-profile names like Lawrence Summers, Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen elaborate the idea of ‘secular stagnation’, citing that strange slowing of Western economies despite a surface-level technological abundance. Cowen's ‘Great Stagnation’ is exactly what you'd expect if research productivity were to decline at 5.1 per cent a year.51 Prior to the 1970s, living standards doubled every couple of decades.

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 6 Mar 2018

Table of Contents Cover Title Page Contents Introduction The Dictator’s Handbook, US Edition by Eric A. Posner Constitutional Rot by Jack M. Balkin Could Fascism Come to America? by Tyler Cowen Lessons from the American Founding by Cass R. Sunstein Beyond Elections: Foreign Interference with American Democracy by Samantha Power Paradoxes of the Deep State by Jack Goldsmith How We Lost Constitutional Democracy by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq On “It Can’t Happen Here” by Noah Feldman Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, But an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies by Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt States of Emergency by Bruce Ackerman Another Road to Serfdom: Cascading Intolerance by Timur Kuran The Resistible Rise of Louis Bonaparte by Jon Elster Could Mass Detentions Without Process Happen Here?

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Strauss How Democracies Perish by Stephen Holmes “It Can’t Happen Here”: The Lessons of History by Geoffrey R. Stone Acknowledgments Contributor Biographies Notes Index About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Contents Cover Title Page Introduction The Dictator’s Handbook, US Edition by Eric A. Posner Constitutional Rot by Jack M. Balkin Could Fascism Come to America? by Tyler Cowen Lessons from the American Founding by Cass R. Sunstein Beyond Elections: Foreign Interference with American Democracy by Samantha Power Paradoxes of the Deep State by Jack Goldsmith How We Lost Constitutional Democracy by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq On “It Can’t Happen Here” by Noah Feldman Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, But an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies by Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt States of Emergency by Bruce Ackerman Another Road to Serfdom: Cascading Intolerance by Timur Kuran The Resistible Rise of Louis Bonaparte by Jon Elster Could Mass Detentions Without Process Happen Here?

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But we have to pay attention to the real sources of constitutional dysfunction, halt the rot that threatens our constitutional system, and preserve our republic. The history of the American Constitution is a series of struggles for greater democracy, equality, and inclusiveness in the face of well-entrenched opposition. Trump’s presidency signals the beginning of yet another contest. Could Fascism Come to America? Tyler Cowen Could it ever happen here? Fascism, that is. That question is a standard refrain from American history, dating back at least to the 1930s and also related to the classic Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here. It was asked with increasing frequency after the ascent and election of Donald Trump, both on the left and by “Never Trump” commentators on the right.

Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Meg Patrick

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals By Tyler Cowen In my new essay, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, I ask questions about social philosophy for the future of our world. Why do we prefer one choice over another? To what extent do we have good reasons for such preferences? Exactly which choices should we make? Short reads are available for Medium readers, or read the whole thing, or find a full download of the essay at this pdf or pdf without images for Kindle. — Tyler Cowen, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 3434 Washington Blvd, Arlington, VA 22201, tcowen@gmu.edu.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

The hardening of class lines, and the growing concentration of disposable income, sends signals through everything from the political economy to consumer culture. Many theorists, both on the right and the left, suggest the time has come to accept a more stratified, less permeable social order. Conservatives and libertarians, such as economist Tyler Cowen, argue that “average” intelligence and skills are no longer sufficient for social advance. Some 15 percent of the population may do very well, he argues, but the vast majority will have to accept limited prospects for themselves and their offspring. The prospect he lays out essentially recalls the hierarchies of the Middle Ages, or at best the Victorian era.

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Blue-collar workers were described in major media as “bitter” and “psychologically scarred,” and even as an “endangered species.” Americans, noted one economist, suffered a “recession,” but those with blue collars endured a “depression.”26 This perspective extends across ideological lines. Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen suggests that an “average” skilled worker can expect to subsist on little but rice and beans in the future U.S. economy. If they choose to live on the East or West Coast, they may never be able to buy a house and will remain marginal renters for life.27 Left-leaning Slate in 2012 declared that manufacturing and construction jobs, sectors that powered the Yeomanry’s upward mobility in the past, “aren’t coming back.”28 Rather than a republic of Yeoman, we could end up instead, as one left-wing writer put it, living at the sufferance of our “robot overlords,” as well as those who program and manufacture them, likely using other robots to do so.29 Contempt for the middle orders is often barely concealed among those most comfortably ensconced in the emerging class order.

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Ronald Brownstein, “Eclipsed,” National Journal, May 28, 2011, http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/political-connections/white-working-class-americans-see-future-as-gloomy-20110526; Ronald Brownstein, “Meet the New Middle Class: Who They Are, What They Want, and What They Fear,” Atlantic, April 25, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/meet-the-new-middle-class-who-they-are-what-they-want-and-what-they-fear/275307; Phil Izzo, “Bleak News for Americans’ Income,” Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2011. 48. Rich Morin and Seth Motel, “A Third of Americans Now Say They Are in the Lower Classes,” Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, September 10, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/09/10/a-third-of-americans-now-say-they-are-in-the-lower-classes. 49. Brownstein, “Eclipsed.” 50. Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), pp. 23–24. 51. Ibid., p. 36; D. Robert Worley, “In Defense of Conservative Thought,” Huffington Post, September 18, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/d-robert-worley/conservatives-progressives_b_1879200.html. 52.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah
Published 23 Apr 2012

Morgan never had access to sulfa drugs or iPhones or fresh vegetables in wintertime. And the gap between Morgan’s quality of life and that of the typical American during his lifetime was in many important ways larger than the gap today between Bill Gates’s quality of life and that of the typical American. In Morgan’s day, as the George Mason economist Tyler Cowen puts it, “the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture.” But people do not experience life as an interesting moment in the evolution of human living standards.

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Currently forty states provide funding to expand preschool education, though most limit enrollment to low-income families. Nationally, 27 percent of all four-year-olds are enrolled in pre-K programs. That’s roughly equivalent to the number of fourteen-to seventeen-year-olds that were enrolled in high school during the late teens of the previous century. This might be the pool of “smart, uneducated kids” that Tyler Cowen is looking for—“low-hanging fruit” from whom we can derive future productivity gains merely by putting them in school. Research on early education suggests the benefits could be considerable. A 2011 study by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty and five others (including Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez) found that a one-percentile increase in scores on tests administered to Tennessee kindergarteners at the end of the school year was associated with a $94 increase in annual wages at age twenty-seven—and that’s after the numbers were adjusted to take into account variations in family background.

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Frank and Cook argue that corporate boards’ desire to hire known-quantity chief executives from outside the company, described earlier in this chapter, has made the market for CEOs winner-take-all as well. 10: Why It Matters General Sources Arthur C. Brooks, The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Government Will Shape America’s Future (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Matthew Continetti, “About Inequality,” Weekly Standard, Nov. 14, 2011, at http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/about-inequality_607779.html?page=1. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011). ———“The Inequality That Matters,” American Interest 6, no. 3 (Jan.–Feb. 2011), at http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=907.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

Techno-optimists, such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen,22 lampoon the worriers as luddites and point to rising employment around the world as proof that their fears are overblown, while many left-leaning thinkers continue to blame globalization and the erosion of worker bargaining power, rather than robots, for stagnant pay and rising inequality in rich countries. Some writers, like Brynjolfsson and McAfee, and also Tyler Cowen, whose 2013 book, Average is Over,23 speculates about America’s economic future, anticipate a future in which broad economic and social change occurs incrementally, and in which sensible policy reforms (to education, for example) can make a technologically induced decline in the need for labour easier for households to manage.

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In 1965 Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, reckoned his industry could double the number of transistors in an integrated circuit roughly once every two years, and that this doubling would likely continue.7 This astonishing pace of progress has been maintained for most of the last half-century, changing computing from something done at great expense by house-sized machines to something done all the time in tiny devices which now rest in the pockets of about 30 per cent of the world’s population. This slice of history played out during a period that economist Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University, has labelled the ‘Great Stagnation’.8 A half-century of extraordinary gains in computing power somehow did not return humanity to the days of dizzying economic and social change of the nineteenth century. In 1987 the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow mused, in a piece pooh-poohing the prospect of a looming technological transformation, that the evidence for the revolutionary power of computers simply wasn’t there.

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Most importantly, I am indebted to Zanny Minton Beddoes, without whose confidence and trust I would not have found myself in this position, and whose brilliance has made me a better thinker and writer. The ideas in the book were also shaped by years of debate and discussion with fellow economics writers and bloggers. I am especially grateful to Tyler Cowen, Matthew Yglesias, Karl Smith, Steve Randy Waldman and Brad DeLong, whose blogs have been a trusted sound-board off which I could bounce ideas. The book itself has been moulded by many hands. The text was immeasurably improved thanks to comments on early drafts from David Schleicher and Soumaya Keynes, and it was a great pleasure to work with Anna Hervé, who helped shape and polish the text.

Why Liberalism Failed
by Patrick J. Deneen
Published 9 Jan 2018

This recognition has led to a return of Locke’s basic wager that a system that provided material comfort, no matter the vastness of inequality and absent likely prospects of growth and mobility between classes, would nevertheless satisfy most members of society. The most recent muse of Lockean liberalism is the economist Tyler Cowen, whose book Average Is Over echoes the basic contours of Locke’s argument. While noting that liberalism and market capitalism perpetuate titanic and permanent forms of inequality that might have made dukes and earls of old blush, Cowen argues that we are at the end of a unique period in American history, a time of widespread belief in relative equality and shared civic fate, and entering an age in which we will effectively see the creation of two separate nations.

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Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits,” Harper’s, May 2008, 37–38. CHAPTER 6. THE NEW ARISTOCRACY 1. Murray, Coming Apart. 2. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 23, 26. 3. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, ed. Ronald Hamowy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 96. 4. Ibid., 95–96. 5. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Past the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 258. 6. Ibid. 7. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Gray, On Liberty and Other Essays, 12–13. 8. Ibid., 65. 9. Ibid., 67. 10. Ibid., 68. 11. Ibid., 72. 12. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis
Published 7 Mar 2016

Unlike the previous machine age of the first Industrial Revolution, the next one will not threaten manual blue-collar jobs, but those of highly paid, expert, white-collar workers. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, managers, designers, architects, are forecasted to become victims of computer automation. According to American economist Tyler Cowen, in the near future only an elite 10–15 per cent of the working population will have the intellectual capacity to master tomorrow’s AI technology, and that will make them very rich indeed.16 The rest of us will have to make do with low incomes and rather unfulfilling lives, or – at best – work as service providers to the rich.

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This latter category of intelligent machines may in fact prove to be the majority, if not the rule. They will exhibit reclusive types of behaviour similar to some of those we presently associate with autism.24 These behaviours could be the result of social selection. In his book Average Is Over, Tyler Cowen argues that success in the twenty-first century is already becoming synonymous with the ability to work with computers. My personal experience within the IT industry and Internet start-ups has been that the most brilliant programmers are often very shy of other people and social interaction. Science and technology have become so competitive nowadays that success in these professions most often comes to those exhibiting high IQs and maximum dedication to the lab or the computer terminal.

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Indeed, there may come a time when intelligent computers will be seen as the solution to all of humanity’s problems, including how to better govern ourselves. The end of liberty Most of the ideas, or warnings, offered today about the future effects of Artificial Intelligence point to the labour market. Several economists, such as Tyler Cowen, have argued that AI will cost many white-collar jobs. However, their analysis assumes that all other things will remain more or less equal, for instance our political system of parliamentary representation, or our free economies of prices mostly regulated by markets. But this is not necessarily so.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More
by Charles Kenny
Published 31 Jan 2011

Here is a thoughtful and sweeping take on what we don’t know about why countries grow and what we do know about how ideas and technology and yes aid are improving lives everywhere.” —Nancy Birdsall, President of the Center for Global Development “Charles Kenny is one of the best and deepest writers on economic growth and its relationship to quality of life in the modern world. This book represents the pinnacle of his thought.” —Tyler Cowen, Holbert C. Harris Professor of Economics, George Mason University “This nuanced and brilliant book is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand the complexity of development. Kenny doesn’t traffic in trite or facile diagnoses or solutions; instead, he compellingly lays out both the obstacles to success and the good reasons to be hopeful.

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For comments on parts or all of the draft, thanks to Michael Benedikt, Paul Currion, John Daly, Richard Easterlin, Joshua Gallo, Indur Goklany, Carol Graham, Cornlio Hopmann, Anthony Kenny, Nancy Kenny, Pamela Kenny, Andy McLennan, Stephen Mc-Groarty, Todd Moss, Al Rio, Gaute Solheim, Michael Warlters, and “The Disagreeables” book club. In addition, I put a draft of the book online for comments. Many thanks to Felix Salmon for an initial link and some generous comments. Thanks also to Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen, and Brad DeLong for blogging the draft. Beyond attracting interest from publishers (not least Basic Books), the process elicited some very valuable suggestions and corrections. Errors are mine, as are the views expressed. NOTES CHAPTER 1, ABANDONING HOPE 1 Kaplan, 1996, p. 27; Collier, 2007, p. 3; Ferguson, 2005. 2 Moyo, 2009; Clark, 2008, p. 3. 3 Figures are from Penn World tables: http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/. 4 Pritchett, 1997, p. 1. 5 A search of Google Scholar conducted on August 8, 2007, entering the phrase “East Asian Miracle” returned 6,530 hits.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

Sooner or later, a relatively minor reversal of fortune will suffice to spell catastrophe because almost all margin for error has been eliminated. The system as currently constituted is especially vulnerable to insidious, slow-fuse risks lurking in the tails of probability distributions. The economist Tyler Cowen has characterized the problem as a strategy of “going short on volatility”—in other words, “betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices.”23 This strategy can appear to work well for many years, as by definition the contingencies being bet against are rare events. During these good times investors earn above-average returns, amped up by leverage.

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The Costs and Consequences of the 2007–09 Financial Crisis,” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Staff Paper no. 20, July 2013, https://dallasfed.org/assets/documents/research/staff/staff1301.pdf. 3.See Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley T. Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality,” unpublished working paper, April 2012, https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/BakijaColeHeim JobsIncomeGrowthTopEarners.pdf. 4.See Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters,” American Interest 6, no. 3 (January 1, 2011), http://www.the-american-interest.com/2011/01/01/the-inequality-that-matters/. 5.http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/must-read-steve-teles-the-scourge-of-upward-redistribution-2/. 6.William Lazonick, “Profits without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review (September 2014), https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity. 7.See Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, “The Growth of Finance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 3–28. 8.Justin Lahart, “Number of the Week: Finance’s Share of Economy Continues to Grow,” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/12/10/number-of-the-week-finances-share-of-economy-continues-to-grow/. 9.General Accounting Office, “Financial Audit: Resolution Trust Corporation’s 1995 and 1994 Financial Statements,” July 1996, http://www.gao.gov/archive/1996/ai96123.pdf. 10.See David Min, “For the Last Time, Fannie and Freddie Didn’t Cause the Housing Crisis,” The Atlantic, December 16, 201l, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/for-the-last-time-fannie-and-freddie-didnt-cause-the-housing-crisis/250121/. 11.Charles W.

The City: A Global History
by Joel Kotkin
Published 1 Jan 2005

Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan: 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5; Empire City: New York City Through the Centuries, 404. 46. Emanuel Tobier, “Manhattan’s Business District in the Industrial Age,” in Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York, ed. John Mollenkopf (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), 85–87. 47. Beard and Beard, op. cit., 787. 48. Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 120. 49. Hall, op. cit., 522; Fred A. McKenzie, The American Invaders (New York: reprinted by Arno Press, 1976), 9; William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 74–76. 50.

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Jean Gottmann, The Coming of the Transactional City (College Park: University of Maryland Press, 1983), 28–43. 33. Robert Bruegmann, “The American City: Urban Aberration or Glimpse of the Future,” in Preparing for the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces, ed. Michael A. Cohen, Blair A. Ruble, Joseph S. Tulchin, and Allison Garland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 59. 34. Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 31, 83–96, 108–10, 120. 35. David Clark, op. cit., 161–63; Taichi Sakaiya, The Knowledge-Value Revolution, or, A History of the Future, trans. George Fields and William Marsh (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1985), 348; “Population Drop to Affect Tokyo Policy,” Daily Yomiuri, January 31, 1997; Yusuf and Wu, “Pathways to a World City,”; “Falling Birth Rates Revive E.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 4 Oct 2011

The market would thus be the ultimate and efficient regulator, because the market would not forgive failure. Bankruptcy would be the remedy for failure, not a blank check from the Federal Reserve. Yet the banks fought this obvious reform with fury, and succeeded. As Lowenstein describes it, “Wall Street institutions emerged from the crisis more protected than ever.”46 “For better or worse,” as Tyler Cowen wrote after the reform bill was passed, “we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk.”47 Hacker and Pierson quote “two New York Times reporters describing Wall Street executives as ‘privately relieved that the bill [did] not do more to fundamentally change how the industry does business.’ ”48 Sebastian Mallaby “put [it most] simply”: “government actions have decreased the cost of risk for too-big-to-fail players; the result will be more risk taking.

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Ibid., 19. 102. Ibid., 21. 103. Rajan and Zingales, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, 92. 104. Ibid. 105. Gilens, “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness,” 778, 792. 106. Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May 2011, 2, available at link #127. 107. Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters,” The American Interest (Jan.–Feb. 2011), 4–5, available at link #128. 108. Huffington, Third World America, 17–18. 109. Sarah Anderson et al., “Executive Excess 2008: How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway Pay,” 15th Annual CEO Compensation Survey, Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy (Aug. 25, 2008), 1, available at link #129. 110.

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The problem the past ten years has revealed is not innovation. It is innovation deployed in a context in which the risks are not borne by the gamblers. Hedge funds are not that. 45. Johnson and Kwak, 13 Bankers, 214–15. 46. Roger Lowenstein, The End of Wall Street (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 291. 47. Tyler Cowen, “Th c Cote> The American Interest (Jan.–Feb. 2011), 6, available at link #150. 48. Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 282. 49. Mallaby, More Money Than God, 378. 50. MapLight, H.R. 4173: Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, available at link #151; MapLight, S. 3217: Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010, available at link #152; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Commercial Banks, available at link #153; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Finance/Credit Companies, available at link #154; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Securities and Investment Companies, available at link #155; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Savings and Loan Institutions, available at link #156; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Credit Unions, available at link #157. 51.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

Akerlof, “Writing the ‘The Market for “Lemons”’: A Personal and Interpretive Essay,” Nobelprize.org, November 14, 2003, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html. 207 “if this paper were correct”: Ibid. 207 50 million rides per month: Eric Newcomer, “Lyft Is Gaining on Uber as It Spends Big for Growth,” Bloomberg, last modified April 14, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-14/lyft-is-gaining-on-uber-as-it-spends-big-for-growth. 208 In 2013, California passed regulations: Tomio Geron, “California Becomes First State to Regulate Ridesharing Services Lyft, Sidecar, UberX,” Forbes, September 19, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/19/california-becomes-first-state-to-regulate-ridesharing-services-lyft-sidecar-uberx/#6b22c10967fe. 208 by August 2016, BlaBlaCar still did not require them: BlaBlaCar, “Frequently Asked Questions: Is It Safe for Me to Enter My Govt. ID?” accessed February 6, 2017, https://www.blablacar.in/faq/question/is-it-safe-for-me-to-enter-my-id. 209 “Many of the exchanges”: Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, “The End of Asymmetric Information,” Cato Institute, April 6, 2015, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2015/04/06/alex-tabarrok-tyler-cowen/end-asymmetric-information. 209 Airbnb CEO and cofounder Joe Gebbia: Joe Gebbia, “How Airbnb Designs for Trust,” TED Talk, February 2016, 15:51, https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_gebbia_how_airbnb_designs_for_trust?language=en. 209 “High reputation beats high similarity”: Ibid. 209 “can actually help us overcome”: Ibid. 211 SoulCycle: SoulCycle, “All Studios,” accessed February 6, 2017, https://www.soul-cycle.com/studios/all. 217 But if it’s costly to switch: See, for instance, Paul Klemperer, “Markets with Consumer Switching Costs,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 102, no. 2 (1987): 375–94; and Joseph Farrell and Garth Saloner, “Installed Base and Compatibility: Innovation, Product Preannouncements, and Predation,” American Economic Review (1986): 940–55. 219 more than $15 billion in loans: Douglas MacMillan, “Uber Raises $1.15 Billion from First Leveraged Loan,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-raises-1-15-billion-from-first-leveraged-loan-1467934151. 221 The lodging-industry benchmarking company STR: Bill McBride, “Hotels: Occupancy Rate on Track to Be 2nd Best Year,” Calculated Risk (blog), October 17, 2016, http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2016/10/hotels-occupancy-rate-on-track-to-be_17.html. 221 In Los Angeles the daily hotel rate: Hugo Martin, “Airbnb Takes a Toll on the U.S.

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And the TNCs continue to experiment and innovate. Uber, for example, was by early 2017 conducting spot checks by asking drivers to periodically take “selfie” photos. The company compared them to the pictures on file to make sure that the approved person was, in fact, driving the car. The economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok highlight online user reviews of platforms and other products as examples of a broad reduction in information asymmetries. This reduction has come about because of the diffusion of powerful technologies like smartphones, sensors, and networks, and because of ever-growing amounts of data.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

the typical homeowner had about thirty times the net worth of the typical renter: Matthew Desmond, “How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality,” New York Times Magazine, May 9, 2017. The Case-Shiller Index of home values shows: See the “S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Prices Indices” maintained by S&P Dow Jones Indexes at http://us.spindices.com/index-family/real-estate/sp-corelogic-case-shiller. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, notes: Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017). According to the Census Bureau, fifty years ago, some 20 percent: “Americans Moving at Historically Low Rates” (Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau, 2016). Chapter 11 In 2014, the Pew Research Center found: Kim Parker et al., “Record Share of Americans Have Never Married” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014).

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Americans like to think their ancestors traversed the waters seeking political and religious liberty. Many did; many were seeking economic opportunity, leaving the stagnation and social failings of the bust places where they were born for a new land with unlimited boom potential. So why don’t more Americans pull up stakes today within their own still-very-large, still-booming nation? Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, notes that although conventional wisdom says Americans move constantly, the reality is otherwise. “Americans traditionally have thought of themselves as the great movers, and that was true in the nineteenth century and through most of the twentieth,” Cowen has written.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

Koch Charitable Foundation gave GMU $3 million to hire the neoliberal Nobel economist and MPS member Vernon Smith; although that did not work out as planned, Koch gave another $2.5 million to Mercatus in 2009. Public sources suggest Mercatus has benefited to the tune of $30 million from Koch over the last two decades. Its general director is Tyler Cowen, another neoliberal we have already encountered. Reuters has reported that this foresight proved prescient in helping deflect the interpretation of the “consensus” pronouncements of economists in testimony to Congress: The House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee heard from academic economists linked to the Mercatus Center about a dozen times during the financial regulatory reform debate.

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The AEI then threw its weight behind the Freddie/Fannie story, with Wallison as point man, and the trusty echo chamber was revved up. Professional economists were recruited to bolster the narrative. The public-choice crowd was quick to chip in. Mark Calabria from Cato was brought in to fluff up the numbers. Dependable fellow travelers such as David Brooks, George Will, and Tyler Cowen chimed in in the columns and blogs. Douglas Holtz-Eakin signed on, in a way to soon become important in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Edward Pinto at AEI was brought on board to crunch some numbers. Raghuram Rajan promoted a more fuzzy-tinged and humanized version of the story in his Fault Lines.

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Kalle Lasn Associates has also published an anti-textbook entitled Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics which contains contributions by George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz. At least the graphics were radical. Similar ideas were promoted in the curiously titled Occupy Handbook, which included chapters by Raghuram Rajan, Tyler Cowen, Martin Wolf, David Graeber, Jeffrey Sachs, and Robert Shiller.6 Besotted by the millenarian idea of starting anew, and lacking any sense of the history of protest and political organization, both neoliberals and neoclassical economists rapidly addled whatever political curiosity and radical inclinations that the well-intentioned protestors might have had.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Jan 2016

Though an increasing number of people will lose in this new economy as their skill becomes automatable or easily outsourced, there are others who will not only survive, but thrive—becoming more valued (and therefore more rewarded) than before. Brynjolfsson and McAfee aren’t alone in proposing this bimodal trajectory for the economy. In 2013, for example, the George Mason economist Tyler Cowen published Average Is Over, a book that echoes this thesis of a digital division. But what makes Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s analysis particularly useful is that they proceed to identify three specific groups that will fall on the lucrative side of this divide and reap a disproportionate amount of the benefits of the Intelligent Machine Age.

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Advances such as robotics and voice recognition are automating many low-skilled positions, but as these economists emphasize, “other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, increasing the values of these jobs.” In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive. Tyler Cowen summarizes this reality more bluntly: “The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?” Nate Silver, of course, with his comfort in feeding data into large databases, then siphoning it out into his mysterious Monte Carlo simulations, is the epitome of the high-skilled worker.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 31 Aug 2012

[The Half-Life of Facts] does what popular science should do—both engages and entertains.” —Kirkus Reviews “A fascinating and necessary look at the pace of human knowledge.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings “What does it mean to live in a world drowning in facts? Consider The Half-Life of Facts the new go-to book on the evolution of science and technology.” —Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, author of An Economist Gets Lunch “The Half-Life of Facts is fun and fascinating, filled with wide-ranging stories and subtle insights about how facts are born, dance their dance, and die. In today’s world where knowledge often changes faster than we do, Sam Arbesman’s new book is essential reading.”

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For example, the sizes of asteroids discovered annually get 2.5 percent smaller each year. In the first few years, the ease of discovery drops off quickly; after early researchers pick the low-hanging fruit, it continues to “decay” for a long time, becoming slightly harder without ever quite becoming impossible. There is even a similarity in one view of medicine. As Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, has noted, if you tally the number of major advances, or definitive moments, in modern medicine (as chronicled by James Le Fanu) in each decade of the middle of the twentieth century, you get an eventual decline: “In the 1940s there are six such moments, seven moments in the 1950s, six moments in the 1960s, a moment in 1970 and 1971 each, and from 1973 [to] 1998, a twenty-five-year period, there are only seven moments in total.”

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
by Richard Florida
Published 28 Jun 2009

Many have argued that our society’s growing economic divide is not born out of outsourcing, immigration, or even wage gaps. While all those things play a role, the real culprit is the divide in human capital and education. “The return for a college education, in percentage terms, is now about what it was in the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century,” the economics professor and blogger Tyler Cowen writes. Starting around 1950, the relative returns to education began to rise. Since 1980 they have skyrocketed. Furthermore, “evidence suggests that when additional higher education becomes available, it offers returns in the range of 10 to 14 percent per year of college, at least for the first newcomers to enroll.”14 Where we live affects how we grow up, how we spend our free time, the educational opportunities available to us, and the people we meet.

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Bloomsbury USA, 2004. 11 Patrick McGeehan, “New York Area Is a Magnet for Graduates,” New York Times, August 16, 2006. 12 The Segmentation Company, a division of Yankelovich, “Attracting the Young College-Educated to Cities,” CEOs for Cities, May 11, 2006, www.ceosforcities.org/rethink/research/files/CEOsforCitiesAttractingYou ngEducatedPres2006.pdf. 13 Bill Bishop, The Big Sort, Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 14 Tyler Cowen, “Incomes and Inequality: What the Numbers Don’t Tell Us,” New York Times, Economic Scene, January 25, 2007. Chapter 13 1 The Segmentation Company, a division of Yankelovich, “Attracting the Young College-Educated to Cities,” CEOs for Cities, May 11, 2006, www.ceosforcities.org/rethink/research/files/CEOsforCitiesAttracting YoungEducatedPres2006.pdf. 2 Sam Roberts, “In Surge in Manhattan Toddlers, Rich White Families Lead Way,” New York Times, March 23, 2007. 3 Bill Gates, “Prepared Comments for the National Education Summit on High Schools,” February 26, 2005, www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/Speeches/CoChairSpeeches/BillgSpeeches/BGSpeechNGA -050226.htm. 4 According to the study, 1,700 high schools, 2 percent of all U.S. high schools, are places where no more than 60 percent of entering freshman make it to their senior year.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

In truth, Thiel said, “there’s nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if people were.” Thiel was fond of this particular trick—proclaiming himself fully rehabilitated, while often winking that maybe in his heart of hearts, he wasn’t quite falling in line to the degree he seemed to be. During an April 2015 Q&A with Tyler Cowen, the George Mason University economist who runs a fellowship, Emergent Ventures, which was started with $1 million in seed funding from Thiel, he was asked about the Cato essay in which he’d seemed to come out against women’s suffrage and democracy. “Writing is always such a dangerous thing,” Thiel said, coyly, and then pivoted to a riff about how the U.S. government wasn’t really a democracy anyway because it was run by “these very unelected, technocratic agencies.”

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This was, in other words, another kind of hedge, and New Zealand—remote, English-speaking, and with a right-leaning government then led by a wealthy former foreign exchange trader, John Key—was an attractive destination for a conservative billionaire with a paranoid streak. Thiel was looking for more than a bunker; he wanted a backup country. He said nothing about this publicly—and at the time of the Q&A with Tyler Cowen in which New Zealand came up, made no mention of his Kiwi citizenship. He was becoming an important supplier of software to the U.S. military and a patron of far-right politicians who railed against globetrotting elites—which to non-contrarians might have seemed inconsistent. On the other hand, the notion of abandoning the United States had been floating around the Thielverse for years.

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According to Bannon, Thiel’s job was to appoint people who could “break it up.” As a libertarian, Thiel seemed to relish the role. He’d spent his career attacking the government’s regulatory power—going all the way back to PayPal and the dream of Swiss bank accounts, to his 2009 essay in which he’d attacked democracy, to the 2015 interview with Tyler Cowen when he’d complained about “these agencies [which] have become deeply sclerotic, deeply nonfunctioning.” The Trump administration would adopt this rhetoric, complaining about an administrative apparatus so powerful that even the words “deep state” undersold it, according to Bannon. “It’s not deep, it’s in your fucking grill,” he told me, crediting this as “Peter Thiel’s theory of government.”

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
Published 6 Nov 2018

Meek, Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else (London: Verso, 2015), p. 192. 1 Richard Seymour, ‘A Short History of Privatisation in the UK: 1979–2012’, Guardian, 29 March 2012. 2 C. Edwards, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s Privatization Legacy’, Cato Journal 37 (2017), pp. 89–101, at p. 94. 3 Tyler Cowen, ‘Tyler Cowen’s Three Laws’, 15 April 2015, at marginalrevolution. com. 1 There are a few exceptions, typically small states. The Marshall Islands are one such. 2 See, respectively, H. Whiteside, ‘The State’s Estate: Devaluing and Revaluing ‘Surplus’ Public Land in Canada’, Environment and Planning A, 2 August 2017; F.

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No land.1 Chris Edwards’s 2017 tabulation of ‘major British privatizations’ in the libertarian Cato Journal? No land.2 Indeed, the neglect of land privatization in Britain runs considerably deeper. There is, to all intents and purposes, no scholarly literature on the subject; it is the one exception I know of to the second of US economist Tyler Cowen’s ‘three laws’: viz., ‘There is a literature on everything.’3 And as well as not having been studied, British land privatization has, for the most part, also not been substantively contested or protested. Why this lack of engagement, recognition and attention? One of the aims of this book is to try to account for it, but the question is essentially parked until the Conclusion.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

Even the news that companies like GE and Apple are bringing some manufacturing work back to the United States is bittersweet. One of the reasons the work is returning is that most of it can be done without human beings. “Factory floors these days are nearly empty of people because software-driven machines are doing most of the work,” reports economics professor Tyler Cowen.32 A company doesn’t have to worry about labor costs if it’s not employing laborers. The industrial economy—the economy of machines—is a recent phenomenon. It has been around for just two and a half centuries, a tick of history’s second hand. Drawing definitive conclusions about the link between technology and employment from such limited experience was probably rash.

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Edsall, “The Hollowing Out,” Campaign Stops (blog), New York Times, July 8, 2012, campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/the-future-of-joblessness/. 31.See Lawrence V. Kenton, ed., Manufacturing Output, Productivity and Employment Implications (New York: Nova Science, 2005); and Judith Banister and George Cook, “China’s Employment and Compensation Costs in Manufacturing through 2008,” Monthly Labor Review, March 2011. 32.Tyler Cowen, “What Export-Oriented America Means,” American Interest, May/June 2012. 33.Robert Skidelsky, “The Rise of the Robots,” Project Syndicate, February 19, 2013, project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-future-of-work-in-a-world-of-automation-by-robert-skidelsky. 34.Ibid. 35.Chrystia Freeland, “China, Technology and the U.S.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

We look ahead at the prospect of ferocious competition, remorseless downward pressure on pay, the constant prospect of outsourcing, and the incessant press of technological change threatening to disintermediate and—to use the cant term beloved of Silicon Valley—“disrupt” traditional forms of employment. Flat living standards, flat median income, the disappearance of secure employment. We are told, in the title of a lively recent book by Tyler Cowen, that “average is over.” But most of us in our hearts know that in most important aspects, we are average. That’s the whole basis of prosperity in our societies: it provides good livelihoods and life prospects to the ordinary citizen. The notion of its coming to an end is terrifying. It’s no wonder people can’t get all that excited about the fact that out-of-sight poor people in the developing world are having a slightly less horrible time than they used to.

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A considered argument from the other side of the debate is Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, and the annual letter from the Gates Foundation is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the question. The internet offers many superb resources on economics, as well as lively debates that respond to news and data in real time. There is no better place to begin than Twitter: I would start by following Tim Harford, Tyler Cowen, Aditya Chakrabortty, and Paul Kedrosky. Finally, I would urge anyone who’s interested in the subject but hasn’t read The Wealth of Nations to give Adam Smith’s masterwork a go. Smith was a great writer as well as a great thinker, and his book is still fresh and still readable, as well as being a serious candidate for the most influential work of the humanities ever written.

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 4 May 2015

The conversation was so interesting that I thought we’d pose a street charity question to a few other folks. Their answers are presented below (and, FWIW, at the very end you can see what Roland and I thought). The participants are: Arthur Brooks, who teaches business and government at Syracuse and is the author of Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism; Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason who writes books and maintains the Marginal Revolution blog; Mark Cuban, the multifaceted entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner; Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the low-rent classic Nickel and Dimed and many other works; and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the noted flâneur and author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

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This is the easiest case of all. I buy myself a hot dog and ignore the wino. Put some kraut on that and give me a Diet Pepsi, too. Which is my choice? I usually take number two, unless I’m feeling really lazy or I’m with somebody who knows I write books about charity—in which case I sometimes choose number one. TYLER COWEN I’m not keen on giving the money to the beggar. In the long run, this only encourages more begging. If you imagine a beggar earning, say, $5,000 a year, over time would-be beggars would invest about $5,000 worth of time and energy into being beggars. The net gain is small, if indeed there is one.

Stuffocation
by James Wallman
Published 6 Dec 2013

The tale of the average Palaeolithic woman comes from Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism (New York: William Heinemann, 2009). For the rise of “clock-time” and what the Industrial Revolution did to our working week, read Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt’s works mentioned above. For more on threshold earners, see Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters”, The American Interest, January/February 2011. For an excellent deconstruction of that article, read political columnist Reihan Salam, “Threshold Earners and Gentleman Hackers”, National Review, 28 December 2010. “There is no sign of the ‘social snowball’ or ‘tipping point’ that would suggest that the medium chill is set to make the leap along the adoption curve.”

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For the definitive text on consuming fewer materials, read Chris Goodall, “Peak Stuff”, Carbon Commentary, 2011. And read Chris Goodall, Sustainability (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012). Keep up with the latest news via Goodall’s excellent blog www.carboncommentary.com. This chapter was also informed by Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2011), and Robert J Gordon, “Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds”, Centre for Economic Policy Research, September 2012. “In 2007, the average American bought almost twice as many items of clothing each year compared to 1991.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession exposed almost a decade’s worth of Western growth as an illusion, a diverse cast of economists and political scientists and other figures on both the left and the right have begun to talk about stagnation and repetition and complacency and sclerosis as defining features of this Western age: Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, Thomas Piketty and Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber and Peter Thiel, and many others. This book is, in part, an attempt to synthesize their various perspectives into a compelling account of our situation. But it also weaves the social sciences together with observations on our intellectual climate, our popular culture, our religious moment, our technological pastimes, in the hopes of painting a fuller portrait of our decadence than you can get just looking at political science papers on institutional decay or an economic analysis of the declining rate of growth.

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For all the many transatlantic differences, our basic economic experience is the same: persistent stagnation, chronic disappointment, and a growing conflict between the promise of progress and a reality where everything seems—surprisingly, depressingly—to stay the same. The Limits of Neoliberalism There is no shortage of theories to explain this “great stagnation” (to borrow a phrase from one of the theorizers, the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen), and there is also no need to simply choose between them. Like most broad trends, the economic decadence of the developed world is overdetermined, and almost every serious attempt at explanation will contain some element of truth. The most politically appealing theories—the ones animating our populist and socialist insurgencies—tend to blame neoliberalism itself, claiming that the medicine for 1970s stagflation has proven to be poison in large doses.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

Large, monolithic companies, run by all-powerful leaders, stand like totems towering over Lilliputian start-ups. Whether a Caltech research scientist or a hacker high-school dropout, the people seem to lack cognitive diversity; the social equivalent of Norwegian board directors. Patrick Collison, the founder of the fintech firm Stripe, and Tyler Cowen, an economist, have called for a new discipline of “progress studies,” to understand in greater detail why some innovative ecosystems do better than others—and how to sustain success. Perhaps the geeks resemble clones of one another because they have all gone through Joel Podolny’s classes at Apple University only to strive to “think different” in the same way.

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See also: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997). A readable romp is: John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (New York: Penguin, 2015). On Collison’s “progress studies”: Interview with Patrick Collison by Kenneth Cukier, January 2020. Also see Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, “We Need a New Science of Progress,” Atlantic, July 30, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946. For a critical assessment, see: Cukier, “Innovation Around Innovation—Studying the Science of Progress,” The Economist, Babbage podcast, September 4, 2019, https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2019/09/04/innovation-around-innovation-studying-the-science-of-progress.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

Low-cost airlines continue to sell airline tickets with attractive flight times, which they then systematically change to an unearthly hour on Monday morning (didn’t you read the small print?). Unscrupulous loan sharks obscure their default interest rate and use the bailiff as if it were a branch of business. And the customer service of some companies is so chronically understaffed that you can never ask for your money back. Not every businessman is a hero. However, economist Tyler Cowen poses an interesting question to assess the reliability of entrepreneurship. Sure, he notes, companies lie but the question is: do they lie as much as normal people do? That is not a given, because we are not always in line with the truth. On average, we lie about twice in a ten-minute conversation, usually to our loved ones.

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Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, Laissez Faire Books, 1966, pp.269f. 10. Hal R. Varian, ‘Recent trends in concentration, competition, and entry’, Antitrust Law Journal, vol.82, no.3, 2019. 11. Mary Amiti & Sebastian Heise, ‘US market concentration and import competition’, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 5 April 2021. 12. Tyler Cowen, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero, St Martin’s Press, 2019, chap.2. 13. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, HarperCollins, 2017. So remember to never compare your inner self with other people’s social media. 14.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

The fact that all the remarkable progress in computing and the internet does not, by itself, measure up to the expectation that the kind of broad-based progress seen in earlier decades would continue unabated is captured in Peter Thiel’s famous quip that “we were promised flying cars and instead we got 140 characters.” The argument that we have been living in an age of relative stagnation—even as information technology has continued to accelerate—has been articulated at length by the economists Tyler Cowen, who published his book The Great Stagnation in 2011,64 and Robert Gordon, who sketches out a very pessimistic future for the United States in his 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth.65 A key argument in both books is that the low-hanging fruit of technological innovation had been largely harvested by roughly the 1970s.

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Darrell Etherington, “Waymo has now driven 10 billion autonomous miles in simulation,” TechCrunch, July 10, 2019, techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/waymo-has-now-driven-10-billion-autonomous-miles-in-simulation/. 62. Waymo website, accessed May 20, 2020, waymo.com/. 63. Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Kurzweil Library Blog, March 7, 2001, www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns. 64. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, Dutton, 2011. 65. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Princeton University Press, 2016. 66. Nicholas Bloom, Charles I.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 1 Jan 2007

Commodities that aim at secularizing culture can instead be sacralized by those who receive them—as happens famously with so-called cargo cults9 and as happened with the Coke bottle that dropped from the sky in The Gods Must Be Crazy. Even marketing slogans can be turned against themselves. When Pepsi translated its “universal” slogan “Come alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation” into Taiwanese, it became “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead,” not exactly what Pepsi was looking for. As Tyler Cowen has observed in his lively account of cultural consumption, culture itself is a moving target and apparent homogenization can conceal what in fact is mere mutability. To Cowen, all culture is fusion culture and no culture is pristinely indigenous, which certainly applies to consumer culture. Cowen thus shows that the “indigenous” music of Zaire, which is putatively under assault from a totalizing global music marketplace, is in reality itself a product (among other things) of the electric guitar, saxophone, trumpet, clarinet, and flute, “none of which are indigenous to Africa,” but instead arrived in earlier decades along with Cuban and other foreign influences.10 Likewise, Trinidad’s steel bands, among its greatest “indigenous” tourist attractions but vulnerable according to native defenders to the global marketing inroads of MTV, actually were themselves a twentieth-century by-product of the colonial petroleum market that led in the late 1930s to the replacement of truly indigenous bamboo instruments by steel drums—newly “traditional”—cut from oil barrels.

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David Howes, ed., Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 7. 9. Constance Classen and David Howes, “Epilogue: The Dynamics and Ethics of Cross-Cultural Consumption,” in Howes, ed., Cross-Cultural Consumption, p. 182. Also see Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 10. Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 22. Cowen’s title is drawn from classical economist Joseph Schumpeter’s description of the dialectic in which capitalism “creatively” destroys the stages it traverses as it evolves.

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Hence, in his view, “after 1900 the sheer amount of flesh on display decreased; the grotesque body of Carnival virtually disappeared” (p. 117). 55. These quotes are all from the preface in Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You:How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). Johnson’s focus is on video games and their impact on intelligence, but his claims are far more expansive. Tyler Cowen offers a similarly straightforward celebration of consumerism, especially in its putative capacity to sustain serious culture, in the book that preceded his Creative Destruction discussed earlier, a book appropriately titled In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 56.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida
Published 9 May 2016

While it will result in new housing being built and in increased density, the high costs of urban land combined with the high cost of high-rise construction, mean it is likely to mainly add more expensive luxury towers and that it will do little to provide the kinds of affordable housing our cities really need. Even the free-market economist Tyler Cowen has a certain skepticism toward this approach: “More stuff will be built, urban output will expand, land still will be the scarce factor, and by the end of the process rents still will be high,” he wrote. “If we deregulate building, landowners will capture a big chunk of the benefits.”8 As a result, very little of the benefit will end up trickling down to those who need it most.

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The study, which tracked 1,700 pieces of legislation from 1881 to 2000 that dealt with cities or counties in thirteen state legislatures, found that bills dealing with cities of 100,000 or more were far less likely to pass than those aimed at smaller places; bills that were introduced by legislators from smaller places were twice as likely to pass as ones that originated in big cities. 7. Richard Florida, “Is Life Better in America’s Red States?,” New York Times, January 3, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/is-life-better-in-americas-red-states.html. 8. Tyler Cowen, “Market Urbanism and Tax Incidence,” Marginal Revolution, April 19, 2016, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/04/market-urbanism-and-tax-incidence.html. 9. As quoted in Stephen Wickens, “Jane Jacobs: Honoured in the Breach,” Globe and Mail, May 6, 2011, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/jane-jacobs-honoured-in-the-breach/article597904. 10.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

This coincidence of very cheap borrowing and the apparent unwillingness of businesses to invest was what Larry Summers was talking about when he popularized the term “secular stagnation” in a 2013 lecture to the IMF.1 One immediate explanation for this weird mix of cheap money and low investment is simply that the demand for investment has fallen. In his 2011 bestseller The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen suggested that developed countries might have exhausted easy sources of good investments, such as settling new land or getting children to spend more years in education. Most memorably, he argued that technological progress might have slowed down, or, more specifically, that the economic benefit of new discoveries was less than had been the case in the past.

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Paying for citizens to go to school for longer was, for much of twentieth century, an important way that governments increased productivity; the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz documented the vital role of education in the economic growth of the United States, pointing out, for example, that while 62 percent of the 1930 US birth cohort graduated from high school, 85 percent of the 1975 cohort did (Goldin and Katz 2008). Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have argued that there are diminishing returns here—children and young people can only spend so long in school or college—and that this will prove to be a major brake on US economic growth in the future (Gordon 2016; Cowen 2011). Working out how to defy these diminishing returns has proved challenging.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

E-International Relations, 24 January 2014, at e-ir.info; Robert Gordon, Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2012, at nber.org; Lawrence Summers, ‘US Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound’, Business Economics 49: 2 (2014); Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); Coen Teulings and Richard Baldwin, eds, Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes and Cures (London: CEPR, 2014). 134.Cowen, Great Stagnation, pp. 47–8. 135.Thor Berger and Carl Benedikt Frey, Industrial Renewal in the 21st Century: Evidence from US Cities?

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Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (London: Penguin, 2009). 10.Tony Smith, ‘Red Innovation’, Jacobin 17 (2015), p. 75. 11.Mariana Mazzucato, Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Osborne, ‘Robot Panel’, presented at the FT Camp Alphaville, London, 15 July 2014, available at youtube.com. 12.Michael Hanlon, ‘The Golden Quarter’, Aeon Magazine, 3 December 2014, at aeon.co; Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011), p. 13. 13.This is one of the primary conclusions of Mariana Mazzucato’s important book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (London: Anthem, 2013). 14.For a lengthy analysis of how Apple cynically deployed state-developed technologies to build the iPhone, see ibid., Chapter 5. 15.The fact that so many megaprojects continue to go ahead despite their history of cost overruns and lack of profitability is deemed a paradox by one study: Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius and Werner Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 3–5. 16.André Gorz, Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work, transl.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

We see the consequences in the premature deindustrialization of the developing world today. In a world of premature deindustrialization, achieving economy-wide productivity growth becomes that much harder for low-income countries. As we saw in an earlier chapter, it is not clear whether there are effective substitutes for industrialization. The economist Tyler Cowen has suggested that developing countries may benefit from the trickle down of innovation from the advanced economies: they can consume a stream of new products at cheap prices.16 This is a model of what Cowen calls “cellphones instead of automobile factories.” But the question remains: What will these countries produce and export—besides primary products—to be able to afford the imported cellphones?

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Lopez-Calva, and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez, “Deconstructing the Decline in Inequality in Latin America,” Tulane Economics Working Paper Series, Working Paper 1314, April 2013. 14. James Manyika, et al., Digital America: A Tale of the Haves and Have-Mores, McKinsey Global Institute Report, December 2015. 15. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2016. 16. Tyler Cowen, “Economic Development in an ‘Average is Over’ World,” Working Paper, April 8, 2016. 17. Margaret McMillan, Dani Rodrik, and Íñigo Verduzco-Gallo, “Globalization, Structural Change, and Productivity Growth, with an Update on Africa,” World Development, vol. 63, 2014: 11–32. 18. Dietrich Vollrath, “More on Decomposing US Productivity Growth,” Blog, May 11, 2016, https://growthecon.com/blog/More-Decomp/. 19.

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single)
by Richard Newton
Published 11 Apr 2015

“Nice” was the behaviour of champions. And yet suddenly, straight out of the sci-fi movies of your youth here are the robots and computers remorselessly operating on behalf of super-rich corporate titans. And they play by the rules of “Nice” better than you or I ever could or ever will. As the economist Tyler Cowen explained: “Average is over”. When all the world’s knowledge and opinions can be mined by giant social networks, then the average will be served up in real time with greater accuracy than you offer by a mere line of code. In the Nice Age, average ruled. Now it’s done. Anything other than summoning forth your own original ideas is playing to your weakness.

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It)
by Michael R. Strain
Published 25 Feb 2020

Whatever side of politics you’re on, this smart little book will make you a better wonk, with a clearer sense about the facts that underpin the biggest policy debates of our time.” —JUSTIN WOLFERS, professor of economics and public policy, University of Michigan “Just how good or bad are things in America right now? Michael Strain’s The American Dream Is Not Dead is the most balanced and informative take on this question you are likely to see.” —TYLER COWEN, professor of economics, George Mason University and coauthor of the Marginal Revolution blog “The American Dream is alive and well—not based on wishful thinking, but on an abundance of evidence. Michael Strain’s balanced and expert presentation, acknowledging problems but identifying the strengths in America’s economy, is exactly what the policy debate has needed: a data-driven look at good news that has been ignored by politicians of left and right alike.”

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea
by James Livingston
Published 15 Feb 2016

Soon even higher education, the last redoubt of debtors’ prison, will be free, not because the politicians will restore Pell Grants and fund state universities, but because MOOCs and YouTube will give everyone online access to the most influential academics on the planet—from Michael Sandel and Martha Nussbaum to David Harvey. Rifkin and I agree that as the market registers fewer transactions—as we produce and distribute more goods without the mediation of money—our assessments of future economic growth, GDP and so forth, must begin to look bleak. Leading economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have, accordingly, predicted the decline of innovation and the end of growth. After all, the Commerce Department can’t measure what’s off the books. But that’s the thing about this new stage of economic development—it can’t be measured by the old quantitative criteria, even though we’re unquestionably producing more of what we need and want.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

My Department of Economics at UIC was amiable toward my mixing of the humanities with the mathematical social sciences. And the two other departments from which I also recently retired at UIC, of English and of Communication, let me gladly learn and gladly teach the human sciences. Joel Mokyr, as I said, and Robert Wuetherick gave me astoundingly detailed and useful comments on this volume. Tyler Cowen and Jack Goldstone made helpful suggestions at a late stage. Jonathan Feinstein and Gregory Clark participated in an illuminating electronic discussion of Bourgeois Dignity at Cato Unbound, a blog of the Cato Institute, as did Matt Ridley, who has been cordially encouraging in other ways as well.

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Yet if on account of Adam Smith’s hoped-for “universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people” all have access to excellent education—which is a proper subject for social policy—and if the poor are so rich (because the Great Enrichment) that they too have fewer children, which is the case, then the tendency to rising variance will be attenuated.12 The economist Tyler Cowen reminds me, further, that “low” birth rates also include zero children, which would make lines die out—as indeed they often did, even in royal families, well nourished. Nonexistent children, such as those of Grand Duke of Florence Gian Gastone de’ Medici in 1737, can’t inherit either financial or human capital.

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Modern competition is described as the fight of all against all, but at the same time it is the fight of all for all.13 8 Or from the Right and Middle And there are doubts from the right, too. Some students of the economy, such as Robert Gordon, Lawrence Summers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McFee, Edmund Phelps, Edward E. Gordon, Jeffrey Sachs, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Tyler Cowen, have argued recently that countries in the position of the United States, on the frontier of betterment, are facing a slowdown, with a skill shortage, and that technological unemployment will be the result.1 Maybe. The economists would acknowledge that in the past couple of centuries numerous other learned commentators have predicted similar slowdowns—such as the Keynesian economists in the late 1930s and the 1940s, confident in their theory of “stagnationism”—only to find their predictions once again falsified by the continuing Great Enrichment.2 The classical economists of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, Marx included, expected landlords, or in Marx’s case capitalists, to engorge the national product.

The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard
Published 1 Sep 2016

It’s an understatement to say that my business partner, Mitt Romney, winning the Republican nomination for president generated interest in my first book. That interest gave me a second career. The American Enterprise Institute’s stamp of approval and the endorsements of many top economists—Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, Tyler Cowen, Nouriel Roubini, Andrei Shliefer, and others—persuaded some skeptical readers and journalists to take a more thoughtful look at my work. My research assistant, Steve Bogden, ensured that I considered every relevant economic study. I doubt there is a person who has surveyed as much of the economic landscape as Steve.

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Edward Lazear, “How Not to Prevent the Next Financial Meltdown,” Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-not-to-pre vent-the-next-financial-meltdown-1443827426. 30. Conard, Unintended Consequences. 31. Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011). 32. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). 33. Paul Krugman, “The Conscience of a Liberal: Stimulus Arithmetic (Wonkish but Important),” New York Times, January 6, 2009, http://krugman.blogs.ny times.com/2009/01/06/stimulus-arithmetic-wonkish-but-important. 34.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

Learning from Freestyle Chess Several writers who touch on what we are calling mutual augmentation do so with reference to chess. It’s definitely a realm in which some humility on the part of humans is called for. In one-on-one matches, we know the best chess players are computers these days. Yet the trouncing isn’t so complete as you might have been led to believe. The economist Tyler Cowen (not surprisingly, a chess champion in his youth) and The Second Machine Age authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee use the example of “freestyle chess,” in which human chess players are free to use as much help from computers as they wish.11 The two of us personally don’t play chess much (we like to get paid for thinking that hard), but we gather that under these rules, people often manage to beat the best programs.

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John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Norton, 1963), 358–73. 10. David H. Autor, “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth,” prepared for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s economic policy symposium on “Reevaluating Labor Market Dynamics,” September 3, 2014, http://economics.mit.edu/files/9835. 11. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013). 12. CareerSearch, “Career Advice on How to Become an Insurance Underwriter,” http://www.careersearch.com/careers/real-estate-and-insurance/insurance-underwriter/. 13. Mike Batty and Alice Kroll, “Automated Life Underwriting: A Survey of Life Insurance Utilization of Automated Underwriting Systems,” prepared for the Society of Actuaries, 2009, file:///C:/Users/jkirby/Downloads/research-life-auto-underwriting.pdf. 14.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future
by Joseph C. Sternberg
Published 13 May 2019

More recently, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s influential 2014 book The Second Machine Age argued that the American economy inevitably will be characterized by a “bounty” of fabulous economic gains for workers and entrepreneurs with the right skills, but also a widening “spread” between those winners and the growing army of losers whose jobs will disappear under a tidal wave of technological change.32 That book won approving reviews or front-cover blurbs from public figures many Millennials have grown up respecting, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and someone whose job title is “chief maverick” at Wired magazine. Millennials to the Right end of the political spectrum who distrust those figures could instead turn to books like Average Is Over by free-market blogger and professor Tyler Cowen, who in 2013 presented a similar argument about the future of work, with a somewhat more dystopian twist: “I imagine a world where, say, 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires, albeit with better health care.

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Philip Oreopoulos, Till von Wachter, and Andrew Heisz, “The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 4, no. 1 (2012). 31. Richard Florida, “Preface to the Original Edition,” in The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 32. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014). 33. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Plume, 2013). 34. Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand, “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18901, March 2013. 35.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

That’s a pace lower than at any time since the 1970s and half what was seen during the postwar boom years. This leads some to argue that the anecdotal accounts of great breakthroughs in robotics and computation are misleading, because they aren’t actually being translated into economic results. The economists Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon are most closely associated with this view.15 Doug Henwood, of the Left Business Observer, makes a similar case from the Left.16 For more conservative economists like Cowen and Gordon, the problem is largely technical. The new technologies aren’t really all that great, at least from an economic perspective, compared to breakthroughs like electricity or the internal combustion engine.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
by Nathaniel Popper
Published 18 May 2015

EACH NEW RUN-UP in the price had drawn new and more sophisticated scrutiny of the principles underlying Bitcoin, and the December rise and fall were no different. This time, the people training their sights on Bitcoin were some of the highest-profile economists in the United States—including Paul Krugman, the progressive Nobel Prize winner; and Tyler Cowen, the prolific libertarian-leaning blogger. Few of them had much good to say. Krugman focused largely on Bitcoin’s claim to be a currency, given the difficulty it seemed to have fulfilling one of the basic roles of money: serving as a reliable store of value. Why would people store their wealth in Bitcoin if they knew the value was going to fluctuate so violently?

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Silk Road Redux,” All Things Vice, November 7, 2013, http://allthingsvice.com/2013/11/07/remember-remember-silk-road-redux/. 270The number of Blockchain.info wallets: Data on wallets available at https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users. 271But the relatively apathetic public response: David Lauter, “Public Largely Tunes Out NSA Surveillance Debate, Poll Finds,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2014. 271“We see the intrinsic value of Bitcoin”: Gil Luria, “Bitcoin: Intrinsic Value as Conduit for Disruptive Payment Network Technology,” Wed-bush Equity Research, December 1, 2013. 272“emerge as a serious competitor”: David Woo, “Bitcoin: A First Assessment,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch FX and Rates Research, December 5, 2013. 274The good news was that the agencies: The Chinese government statement is available at http://www.pbc.gov.cn/publish/goutongjiaoliu/524/2013/20131205153156832222251/20131 205153156832222251_.html. CHAPTER 27 286Krugman focused largely on Bitcoin’s claim: Paul Krugman, “Bitcoin Is Evil,” New York Times, December 28, 2013, http://krugman.blogs .nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/. 286Cowen, meanwhile, argued: Tyler Cowen, “How and Why Bitcoin Will Plummet in Price,” Marginal Revolution, December 30, 2013, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/how-and-why-bitcoin-will-plummet-in-price.html. 287“to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy”: Charles Stross, “Why I Want Bitcoin to Die in a Fire,” Charlie’s Diary, December 18, 2013, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html. 289“It represents a remarkable conceptual”: Francois Velde, “Bitcoin: A Primer,” Chicago Fed Letter, December 2013. 289Overstock announced that it would begin: The announcement is available at http://blog.coinbase.com/post/72787431702/coinbase-and-overstock-com-announce-largest. 290Overstock processed more than $100,000 in orders: Sales data available at http://www.prweb.com/releases/bitcoin2014Keynote/PatrickByrne/prweb 11699797.htm.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 8 Apr 2012

Meanwhile, the dollar’s depreciation over the past decade has made U.S. exports more competitive. The dollar has strengthened slightly in the last year, but it remains 25 percent below its 2002 peak, a situation that continues to feed a U.S. export recovery. The U.S. share of global exports is up a full point from its all-time low of 7.5 percent, hit in July 2008. Economist Tyler Cowen recently predicted that America’s export success will not only revive the United States as a dominant global economic power but “largely cure its trade imbalance with China” and wipe away the view of America as “the borrowing supplicant in the US-China economic relationship.” The Manufacturing Revival The most dramatic signs of a U.S. revival are in manufacturing.

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For example, as 3D manufacturing advances, it is expected to give manufacturers the capacity to custom build goods for individual consumers more cheaply than the goods can be mass-produced in manned factories in Asia. And as developed nations like China grow richer, their consumers will demand the kind of advanced and custom-designed products that will be made mainly in America. As Tyler Cowen points out, the United States is a leading exporter of products that lie in the “sweet spot” for future demand from the emerging world, including civilian aircraft, semiconductors, cars, pharmaceuticals, machinery and equipment, automobile accessories, and entertainment. Technology, Inequality, and the Debt Threat There is an undeniable and scary connection between technology and persistent or rising income inequality, an issue that has remarkable resonance everywhere I travel, from Chile to South Korea.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

For a general survey of methods, see: Jose David Fernández and Francisco Vico, ‘AI Methods in Algorithmic Composition: A Comprehensive Survey’, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 48 (2013), 513–82. 12 Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015); Simon Parkin, ‘The Artificially Intelligent Doctor Will Hear You Now’, MIT Technology Review 9 March 2016; James Gallagher, ‘Artificial intelligence “as good as cancer doctors”’, BBC, 26 January 2017. 13 Kate Brannen, ‘Air Force’s lack of drone pilots reaching “crisis” levels’, Foreign Policy, 15 January 2015. 14 Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013); Brad Bush, ‘How combined human and computer intelligence will redefine jobs’, TechCrunch, 1 November 2016. 15 Ulrich Raulff, Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship (London: Allen Lane, 2017); Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 286; Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 197; Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, ‘The Decline of the Urban Horse in American Cities’, Journal of Transport History 24:2 (2003), 177–98. 16 Lawrence F.

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, Artificial Intelligence 199–200 (2013), 93–105. 18 ‘Google’s AlphaZero Destroys Stockfish in 100-Game Match’, Chess.com, 6 December 2017; David Silver et al., ‘Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm’, arXiv (2017), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf; see also Sarah Knapton, ‘Entire Human Chess Knowledge Learned and Surpassed by DeepMind’s AlphaZero in Four Hours’, Telegraph, 6 December 2017. 19 Cowen, Average is Over, op. cit.; Tyler Cowen, ‘What are humans still good for? The turning point in freestyle chess may be approaching’, Marginal Revolution, 5 November 2013. 20 Maddalaine Ansell, ‘Jobs for Life Are a Thing of the Past. Bring On Lifelong Learning’, Guardian, 31 May 2016. 21 Alex Williams, ‘Prozac Nation Is Now the United States of Xanax’, New York Times, 10 June 2017. 22 Simon Rippon, ‘Imposing Options on People in Poverty: The Harm of a Live Donor Organ Market’, Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (2014), 145–50; I.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

Three decades or more since we first began to talk of living in a computer age, the total number of workers employed in the development and production of computer hardware, software and applications, is still only 4 per cent of the total workforce in the US, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts just 135,000 new jobs in software development over 2014 to 2024, versus 458,000 additional personal care aides, and 348,000 home health aides. Total employment in the giant mobile phone, software and Internet companies which dominate global equity values is a minute drop in the global labour market. Facebook, with a market capitalization of $500 billion, employs just 25,000 people.45 Turner takes issue with Tyler Cowen’s book Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation in which he argues that rising income inequality is inevitable but will not lead to social revolt, because low earners will still enjoy adequate living standards as long as housing costs are kept low. Cowen imagines a future in which “say 10 to 15 per cent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives” while “much of the rest of the country will have stagnant or maybe falling wages in dollar terms, but a lot more opportunities for cheap fun and cheap education” because of the free or near free services that the Internet makes available.46 The average citizen will not be able to afford to live well in the successful big cities… but will migrate to those parts of the United States, such as Texas, where plentiful land and easy zoning rules make housing affordable.

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Goldthorpe, Social Mobility and Education in Britain: Research, Politics and Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 38 John Boys, CIPD, private correspondence using ONS Dataset EMP04: “Employment by Occupation.” 39 Jacques Bughin, Eric Hazan, Susan Lund et al., Skills Shift: Automation and the Future of the Workforce, McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) Discussion Paper, May 2018. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 “EY Transforms Its Recruitment Selection Process for Graduates, Undergraduates and School Leavers,” press release from Ernst and Young, August 3, 2015. 43 “EY: How to Excel in a Strengths-Based Graduate Interview,” Target Jobs, https://targetjobs.co.uk/employers/ey/ey-how-to-excel-in-a-strengths-based-graduate-interview-323859. 44 See UK High Pay Centre. 45 Adair Turner, Capitalism in the Age of Robots: Work, Income and Wealth in the 21st Century, Lecture given at the School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University, April 10, 2018, 29. 46 Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013). Chapter Ten: Cognitive Diversity and the Future of Everything 1 David Brooks, Intelligence Squared lecture, October 20, 2015. 2 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 3 Jonathan Rowson and Iain McGilchrist, Divided Brain, Divided World: Why the Best Part of Us Struggles to be Heard, RSA, February 2013, 4–5, https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/blogs/rsa-divided-brain-divided-world.pdf. 4 Richard Layard, Can We Be Happier?

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

As astrophysicist Mario Livio writes, “More than 20 percent of Einstein’s original papers contain mistakes of some sort.”71 Sara Blakely, the founder and CEO of Spanx, highlights her own oops moments at company-wide meetings.72 Catmull, the former president of Pixar, talks about the mistakes he has made at new-employee orientations: “We do not want people to assume that because we are successful, everything we do is right,” he explains.73 Economist Tyler Cowen wrote a detailed analysis of how, in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, he “badly underestimated the chance that something systemic had gone wrong in the American economy.” Cowen admitted his remorse: “I regret that I was wrong, and I regret that I was overconfident in my belief that I was right.”74 If these individuals now appear more endearing to you, you’re experiencing what researchers call the “beautiful mess effect.”75 Exposing your vulnerability can make you more desirable in the eyes of others.

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Mario Livio, Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein—Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 266. 72. Hal Gregersen, “Bursting the CEO Bubble,” Harvard Business Review, April 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/03/bursting-the-ceo-bubble. 73. Catmull and Wallace, Creativity, Inc. 74. Tyler Cowen, “My Biggest Regret,” Econ Journal Watch, May 2017, https://pingpdf.com/pdf-econ-journal-watch-142-may-2017.html. 75. Anna Bruk, Sabine G. Scholl, and Herbert Bless, “Beautiful Mess Effect: Self–Other Differences in Evaluation of Showing Vulnerability,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 115, no. 2 (2018): 192–205, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-34832-002. 76.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

The effect of a minimum wage increase on the overall price level is likely to be small … small enough that they are far outweighed by fluctuations in prices for products such as gasoline and apparel.”69 CHAPTER 20 OFFSHORING AND THE APPLE PROBLEM “Manufacturing in America is in serious decline, with 40,000 factory closures and more than 4 million jobs lost over the last decade.”1 Manufacturing: A Better Future for America, Alliance for American Manufacturing, 2009 “We stood by as big American companies became global companies with no more loyalty or connection to the United States than a GPS device.”2 ROBERT REICH, Aftershock “The problem with that strategy is that for the past two decades we have allowed our industrial and technological base to deteriorate as talent and capital were grossly misallocated toward other sectors of the economy….”3 STEVEN PEARLSTEIN, Washington Post, September 2010 “American companies often save on costs by finding lower wages abroad, not by enhancing the abilities of American workers.”4 TYLER COWEN, George Mason University, August 2011 “These are the jobs that have created the Midwestern middle class for generations. Manufacturing jobs paid for college educations, including mine. They have been cut in half over the past two decades.”5 JEFFREY IMMELT, CEO, General Electric, December 2009 Lord Uxbridge was Wellington’s deputy commander as the combined forces arrayed against Napoleon fought desperately in Belgium against the fearsome French cuirassiers and cannoneers who had conquered Europe.

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Jensen, “Capitalism Isn’t Broken,” Wall Street Journal, March 29, 1996, A-10. 29 Norbert Häring, “Man As a Yardstick,” Handelsblatt, Aug. 19, 2010. 30 Charles Lane, “Obama’s Leaky Bucket,” Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2011. 31 Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry, “Equality and Efficiency: Is There a Trade-off Between the Two or Do They Go Hand in Hand,” Finance and Development, International Monetary Fund, Washington, September 2011. 32 David Brooks, “The Biggest Issue,” New York Times, July 29, 2008. See also Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (New York: A Penguin Group e-Special from Dutton, 2011). 33 Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 34 This includes: Alan Blinder, Edward N. Wolff, Deborah Reed, Daniel Cohen, Gordon Lafer, Frank Levy, and Peter Temin.

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Wascher, Minimum Wages, 97. 69 Ibid., 248, 252. CHAPTER 20 1 “Manufacturing: A Better Future for America,” ed. Richard McCormack, Alliance for American Manufacturing, 2009. 2 Robert Reich, Aftershock, 56. 3 Steven Pearlstein, “The Bleak Truth About Unemployment,” Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2010. 4 Tyler Cowen, “The Sad Statistic That Trumps the Others,” New York Times, Aug. 21, 2011. 5 Jeffrey Immelt, “Renewing American Leadership,” General Electric, Dec. 9, 2009. 6 Max Hastings “The West’s Crisis of Honest Leaders,” Financial Times, Aug. 15, 2011. 7 “Public Says American Work Life Is Worsening, But Most Workers Remain Satisfied with Their Jobs,” Social Trends Project, Pew Research Center, September 2006. 8 “The Story so Far,” Economist, Jan. 19, 2013, 5. 9 Justin R.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

Even elite jobs in the civil service have lost their cachet. The situation is so dismal that students who study public service would prefer to work in the voluntary sector. There are some first-rate people in the public sector—brilliant economists, smart diplomats, wily spies. But the bench is far weaker than the private sector. The American economist Tyler Cowen called one of his books Average Is Over. It certainly isn’t over in the halls of Leviathan. Do an average job and you will still be able to coast to retirement (and, according to one study in America, get paid more than a private sector worker, once you take perks and hours into account).19 By contrast, do an exemplary job for the Western state and you will never get the rewards you get at Google—or indeed in Asian government.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

Much of the recent literature on corporate governance, business development, and strategy that we have read has felt like a copy of the original thought derived from the works of Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, Henry Minzberg, Philip Kotler, and Igor Ansoff. There are several thinkers today that can be put in the same category. If you get bored by all those who just repeat the conventional wisdom about the economy and how it evolves, pick any work from these economic thinkers and you will immediately be reinvigorated: David Autor, Tyler Cowen, Deirdre McCloskey, Malcolm Gladwell, David Graeber, Deepak Lal, Joel Mokyr, Matt Ridley, Richard Sennett, Robert Solow, Lawrence Summers, Peter Thiel, and Martin Wolf. Their works have contributed to our thinking for this book. Likewise, there are many successful investors and entrepreneurs whose thinking about innovation and business creation have inspired us.

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Between 1995 and 2009, Europe’s labor productivity grew by just 1 percent annually.13 Figure 2.3 G7 labour productivity growth Like the United States, the other G7 countries seem to have exhausted the usual sources of productivity growth, especially the growth from the first (1760–1840) and second (1870–1970) industrial revolutions. That tallies with economist Tyler Cowen’s catchy summary of declining strength in the American economy, that it has “eaten all the low-hanging fruits of modern history and got sick.”14 Translated into economic prose, this means that new technologies do not create much economic growth, or at least are not making as large a contribution as in the past.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

This included information and communication technologies such as the telephone, radio, and television, but it also included advances in many other industries, such as transportation, energy, housing, and medicine. Since 1970, there’s been substantial progress in information and communication technologies, but in all those other industries, progress has been comparatively incremental. Since 1970, the pace of progress seems to have slowed. The economist Tyler Cowen has argued that a growth slowdown is extremely bad from a longterm perspective.14 Decreases to the rate of economic growth, he argues, would be hugely harmful to future generations. For example, suppose that the long-run growth rate slows from 2 percent per year to 1.5 percent per year. The difference this makes for people in a hundred years’ time will be massive: they will be nearly 40 percent poorer at a 1.5 percent growth rate than they would have been at a 2 percent growth rate.

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Paul Burke (climate change), Prof. Bryan Caplan (population ethics), Dr Lucius Caviola (psychology of wellbeing), Dr Paulo Ceppi (climate science), Prof. David Christian (history), Prof. Antonio Ciccone (climate change), Prof. Matthew S. Clancy (economic stagnation), Dr Paul Collins (Sumerian Empire), Prof. Tyler Cowen (economic stagnation), Dr Colin Cunliff (public policy), Dr Allan Dafoe (great-power war), Prof. Lewis Dartnell (civilisational collapse and recovery), Prof. Hadi Dowlatabadi (climate change), Dr David Edmonds (population ethics), Prof. Kevin Esvelt (biosecurity), Grethe Helene Evjen (civilisational collapse), Prof.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

To subject their lives to such uncertainty is anathema to people who’ve expected a salaried job to last a lifetime and to provide security and permanence. People will have to figure out how to apply their particular skills to this Brave New World and, if they can’t apply them, how to rapidly acquire the right skills. As Tyler Cowen noted in his book Average Is Over, “The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?” Cowen’s thesis, which drew in part from the “work is over” theory, wasn’t a rosy one for Middle America.

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Visa, MasterCard, and Western Union: Employee tallies taken from 2013 annual reports for Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., and Western Union Holding Inc. Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist: Chris Dixon, phone interview with Michael J. Casey, June 25, 2014. Asked to describe the job market: Daniel Larimer, interviewed by Michael J. Casey, April 8, 2014. As Tyler Cowen noted in his book: Tyler Cowan, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (Dutton, 2013). Yale’s Robert Shiller: Joe Weisenthal, “Robert Shiller: Bitcoin Is an Amazing Example of a Bubble,” Business Insider, January 24, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-shiller-bitcoin-2014-1#ixzz3Cmp0YFyx.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy Siegel
Published 7 Jan 2014

Except for the top 1 percent of the income distribution, Gordon predicts the vast majority of the U.S. population will experience growth of only 0.5 percent per year, less than one-quarter the long-term average. Others have echoed Professor Gordon’s pessimism and complain that discoveries today have not changed people’s lives as fundamentally as they did a century ago. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and author of The Great Stagnation, has voiced his belief that the developed world is on a technological plateau and that all the low-hanging fruit has already been discovered.13 Indeed, look at Table 4-1. It shows the most important life-changing inventions of the past 100 years.

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Productivity growth was slightly higher immediately following World War II, but since 1960, productivity growth in the United States has shown no significant downward trend. 12. Robert Gordon, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts Six Headwinds,” NBER #18315, August 2012. For a rejoinder, see the response by John Cochrane of the University of Chicago in his blog at http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/08/gordon-on-growth.html. 13. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, New York: Dutton Adult, 2011. 14. These are not the dates when these items were discovered but when they became operational or widespread in the general population in the United States and most other advanced economies. 15.

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders
by Jason L. Riley
Published 14 May 2008

Those conclusions are not cherry-picked exceptions. They are the rule. Indeed, the current economic literature is replete with such findings from, among many others, Pia Orrenius, Julian Simon, Gordon Hanson, John Whalley, Giovanni Peri, Bjorn Letnes, Jonathon Moses, David Henderson, Alberto Alesina, Tyler Cowen, Bob Hamilton, Jagdish Bhagwati, Philippe Legrain, and Grancesco Giavazzi. Yes, you occasionally will come across a serious economist like George Borjas who makes the opposite argument. But even his research simply concludes that, at most, low-skill immigrants from Mexico might have a slight negative impact on this country’s small (and shrinking) unskilled native labor force.

The Tyranny of Metrics
by Jerry Z. Muller
Published 23 Jan 2018

Sutton, “Evidence-Based Management,” Harvard Business Review (January 2006), pp. 63–74, esp. p. 68. 7. Boris Ewenstein, Bryan Hancock, and Asmus Komm, “Ahead of the Curve: The Future of Performance Management,” McKinsey Quarterly, no. 2 (2006), pp. 64–73, esp. p. 72. 8. Ewenstein et al., “Ahead of the Curve,” pp. 67–68. 9. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles of Macroeconomics, 3rd ed. (New York, 2014), p. 413. 10. Mark Maremont, “EpiPen Maker Dispenses Outsize Pay,” Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2016; and Tara Parker-Pope and Rachel Rabkin Peachman, “EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers,” New York Times, August 22, 2016. 11.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right
by Philippe Legrain
Published 22 Apr 2014

Now he wants to build a Hyperloop – basically a solar-powered maglev train in a vacuum tube that would whisk passengers along at 760 miles (1,220 kilometres) an hour, three times faster than a high-speed train, and cost ten times less to build.705 Gloomsters argue that technological progress is grinding to a halt. The low-hanging fruit have all been picked, argues Tyler Cowen in The Great Stagnation.706 Nothing can ever compare to the great leap forward ushered in by electricity and other advances during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution between 1870 and 1900, such as cars, running water, petroleum and chemicals, claims Robert Gordon of Northwestern University.707 “Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once – urbanisation, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying tons of water per year, and the role of central heating and air conditioning in achieving a year-round constant temperature.”

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Interestingly, though, the highest enterprise rates are found among UK-born blacks (11.3 per cent). 699 http://startupmanifesto.eu/files/manifesto.pdf 700 http://www.economist.com/node/21559618 701 http://www.economist.com/node/17680631 702 http://www.eif.org/news_centre/publications/eif_-annual_report_2012.pdf 703 http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21588384-stock-exchanges-are-courting-small-firms-never-capital-remedy 704 http://www.europecrowdfunding.org/2013/01/the-european-crowdfunding-network-on-euronews/ 705 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23681266 706 Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation, Dutton: 2011 707 Robert J Gordon, “Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering innovation confronts the six headwinds”, NBER working paper #18315, August 2012 708 http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21569381-idea-innovation-and-new-technology-have-stopped-driving-growth-getting-increasing 709 http://www.voxeu.org/article/technological-progress-thing-past 710 Tools such as DNA sequencing machines and cell analysis through flow cytometry are revolutionising molecular microbiology.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
by Michael Huemer
Published 29 Oct 2012

The incident stands as a lesson to players in other industries, where the smaller firms struggling to get established dream that, one day, the leaders in their industry, too, will devise a harebrained price-fixing scheme. 10.11.2 Cartelization by threat of force Some industries may differ materially from the famously competitive widget industry. In those industries in which a firm’s success depends upon its good relations with other firms, anticompetitive collusion may be more feasible because the large firms in the industry can effectively punish those who reject cartel policies. Tyler Cowen and Daniel Sutter suggest that this may be true in the protection industry because the success of a protection agency depends upon its ability to peacefully resolve disputes with other agencies.36 Cowen and Sutter imagine the protection agencies in a given area forming a single multilateral agreement detailing the procedures for resolving disputes involving customers of different agencies.

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‘American Resistance to a Standing Army’, Teaching History, http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24671. Accessed January 26, 2012. Hamor, Ralph. 1614. A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia and the Successe of the Affaires There Till the 18 of Iune, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/lhbcb:@field(DOCID+@lit(lhbcb02778)). Accessed May 14 2012. Hanson, Robin, and Tyler Cowen. 2004. ‘Are Disagreements Honest?’ unpublished ms., http://hanson.gmu.edu/deceive.pdf. Accessed January 29, 2012. Hardin, Garrett. 1974. ‘Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor’, Psychology Today 8, September: 38–126. Hare, Robert D. 1993. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths among Us.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

Even as China’s fixed asset growth decreases, the gains from efficient mobility are evident for everyday workers, Alibaba shoppers, and millions of internal tourists and migrants taking advantage of affordable transportation all across the country. The lesson from America’s postwar period and China today is that infrastructure is not a one-off investment but a set of connective arteries to be constantly nurtured. Prominent American economists such as Robert Gordon of Northwestern and Tyler Cowen of George Mason argue that the U.S. economy is plagued by falling productivity gains, poor infrastructure, a technological innovation plateau, declining education standards, and rising inequality; its transportation system remains too slow and inefficient to meet its export targets. And yet, deeper capital investment is the largest source of productivity growth in the U.S. economy.

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Extra special thanks are due to Peter Marber for his profoundly constructive intellectual guidance over the years and his pinpoint observations and corrections and to Neeraj Seth, whose immense knowledge of global financial challenges doesn’t inhibit him from thinking of creative solutions nor fortunately from sharing them with me. Many expert thinkers on technology and its wide-ranging impact have provided forward-thinking ideas such as Scott Borg, Tyler Cowen, Marc Goodman, James Law, Daniel Rasmus, Tom Standage, Peter Thiel, and Vivek Wadhwa. Numerous innovators and doers in the information technology industry have also provided wide-ranging insights such as Jeff Jonas, Deepankar Sengupta, and Donald Hanson of IBM; Ann Lavin, Jared Cohen, and Will Fitzgerald of Google; Shailesh Rao, Aliza Knox, and Peter Greenberger of Twitter; Yinglan Tan of Sequoia Capital; John Kim of Amasia; Tom Crampton of Ogilvy; and James Chan of Silicon Straits.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
by Paul Scharre
Published 23 Apr 2018

President, we and you ought not”: Department of State Telegram Transmitting Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, October 26, 1962, http://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct26/doc4.html. 317 “there are scenarios in which”: Haas, “Autonomous Weapon Systems.” 19 Centaur Warfighters: Humans + Machines 321 Gary Kasparov: Mike Cassidy, “Centaur Chess Brings out the Best in Humans and Machines,” BloomReach, December 14, 2014, http://bloomreach.com/2014/12/centaur-chess-brings-best-humans-machines/. 321 centaur chess: Tyler Cowen, “What are Humans Still Good for? The Turning Point in Freestyle Chess may be Approaching,” Marginal Revolution, November 5, 2013, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what-are-humans-still-good-for-the-turning-point-in-freestyle-chess-may-be-approaching.html. 322 “On 17 April 1999”: Mike Pietrucha, “Why the Next Fighter will be Manned, and the One After That,” War on the Rocks, August 5, 2015, http://warontherocks.com/2015/08/why-the-next-fighter-will-be-manned-and-the-one-after-that/. 323 Commercial airliners use automation: Mary Cummings and Alexander Stimpson, “Full Auto Pilot: Is it Really Necessary to Have a Human in the Cockpit?

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Within a mere four hours of self-play and with no training data, AlphaZero eclipsed the previous top chess program. The method behind AlphaZero, deep reinforcement learning, appears to be so powerful that it is unlikely that humans can add any value as members of a “centaur” human-machine team for these games. Tyler Cowen, “The Age of the Centaur Is *Over* Skynet Goes Live,” MarginalRevolution.com, December 7, 2017, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/12/the-age-of-the-centaur-is-over.html. David Silver et al., “Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm,” December 5, 2017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf. 325 as computers advance: Cowen, “What Are Humans Still Good For?”

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Without America’s unwavering commitment to the Cold War, Joseph Stalin’s progeny might still be in power in Eastern Europe and perhaps much of Asia. Uncle Sam provided the arsenal of democracy that saved the twentieth century from ruin. This is a remarkable story. But it is also a story with a sting in the tail: today, productivity growth has all but stalled. Tyler Cowen has talked about a “great stagnation.” Lawrence Summers has revived Alvin Hansen’s phrase, “secular stagnation.” Robert Gordon’s study of the American economy since the Civil War is called The Rise and Fall of American Growth. America is being defeated by China and other rising powers in one industry after another.

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Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Twelve. America’s Fading Dynamism 1. Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 500. 2. Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017). 25. Cowen’s book has been an invaluable source of data and references for this chapter. 3. Oscar Handlin and Lilian Handlin, Liberty in Expansion 1760–1850 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 13. 4.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Published 14 Feb 2012

Just as there are things you can do to court serendipity, there are ways to court serendipitous intelligence. Keep a few general questions in your back pocket to ask people in these kinds of situations or settings. A back-pocket question could be as broad as “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned over the past few months?” (the economist Tyler Cowen asks Ben this every time they see each other), or as targeted as “Have you come across any awesome entrepreneurs or start-ups that I should invest in?” (I ask this of anyone in the entrepreneurial ecosystem during casual conversation). You never know where these questions may lead—possibly somewhere interesting.

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
by Peter Singer
Published 3 Mar 2009

In addition to the Uehiro Lectures, I have presented work related to this book to my colleagues and to the 2007–08 visiting fellows at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and—limiting myself to relatively more recent occasions—at: Scripps College; the University of California, Los Angeles; Pacific Lutheran University; Quinnipiac University; Denison University; the Ethics Research Institute of the University of Zurich; the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia; the University of Melbourne; Monash University; as one of my Dasan Lectures in Korea; and at the University of Stockholm, where I gave the 2008 Wedberg Lectures. I particularly thank the following individuals, from whom I have received valued suggestions or information: Mallika Ahluwalia, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Steve Barney, Lyn Bender, Tyler Cowen, Rachel Croson, Pam DiLorenzo, Chris and Anne Ellinger, Eric Gregory, Jonathan Haidt, Elie Hassenfeld, James Hong, Dale Jamieson, Stanley Katz, Holden Karnofsky Magda King, Carol Koller, Zell Kravinsky Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, David Morawetz, Chris Olivola, Jung Soon Park, Miyun Park, Toby Ord, Rebecca Ratner, Robert Reich, Geoff Russell, Agata Sagan, Pranay Sanklecha, Eldar Shafir, Jen Shang, Israel Shenker, Renata Singer, Paul Slovic, Louise Story, John War-nick, and Leif Wenar.

My Start-Up Life: What A
by Ben Casnocha and Marc Benioff
Published 7 May 2007

by William Poundstone The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law, by Constance Bagley Good to Great, by Jim Collins On Becoming a Leader, by Warren Bennis 179 180 APPENDIX C Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian eBoys, by Randal Stross Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Compassionate Capitalism, by Marc Benioff Love Is the Killer App, by Tim Sanders Globalization The World Is Flat, by Tom Friedman Creative Destruction, by Tyler Cowen Globaloney, by Michael Veseth Money Makes the World Go Round, by Barbara Garson How “American” Is Globalization? by William Marling Intellectual Life The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman Reflections by an Affirmative Action Baby, by Stephen Carter Integrity, by Stephen Carter The Accidental Asian, by Eric Liu Mind Wide Open, by Steven Johnson Socrates Café, by Chris Phillips Self-Renewal, by John Gardner Public Intellectuals, by Richard Posner Psychology Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl Biography/Memoir My Life, by Bill Clinton This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff Swimming Across, by Andy Grove All Over But the Shoutin’, by Rick Bragg Personal History, by Katherine Graham Emerson: Mind on Fire, by Robert Richardson In an Uncertain World, by Robert Rubin The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion Religion End of Faith, by Sam Harris The Universe in a Single Atom, by the Dalai Lama APPENDIX C The World’s Religions, by Huston Smith The Bhagavad-Gita Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer Politics/Current Affairs Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll Running the World, by David Rothkopf Founding Brothers, by Joseph Ellis A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell Going Nucular, by Geoffrey Nunberg America at the Crossroads, by Francis Fukuyama Holidays in Hell, by P.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

Also thanks to Jerry Colonna, Chad Dickerson, Patrick Collison, Ev Williams, Andy Baio, Sunny Bates, Tina Roth Eisenberg, Lance Ivy, Hope Hall, Jeff Hammerbacher, Tim O’Reilly, Jess Search, Jennifer Pahlka, Joi Ito, Karin Chien, Keri Putnam, Luis Von Ahn, Max Temkin, Deray McKeesson, Lawrence Lessig, Daryl Morey, Tyler Cowen, and Thaniya Keerepart. To my Echo Park family, Trish and Tony Unruh, Lucien Unruh, Rohan Ali, Alexa Meade, Anna Bulbrook, and Sadye Henson, thank you for making us feel so at home. To the 29 Palms Inn, thank you for always being a place of inspiration and solace. To New York City, the Lower East Side, and Chinatown, this book would have never happened without your energy and inspiration.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

With the frontier expanding more slowly, their growth also slowed. Most economists envisage growth for economies at the frontier as periods of path-breaking innovation (when the key innovations of the technological revolution emerge) followed by steady development and implementation until most of the gains from that innovation have been reaped. Tyler Cowen of George Mason University and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argue that most of the possibilities of the Second Industrial Revolution had been exhausted by the end of the 1960s.22 For instance, the big innovation that made commercial air travel more attractive than travel by ocean liner was reasonably safe and fast jet planes with pressurized air cabins.

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CHAPTER 5: THE PRESSURE TO PROMISE 1. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Science 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 236. 2. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Decline of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 120. 3. See Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011). 4. See Harold James, Europe Reborn, A History 1914–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 231–33. 5. Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 6.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
by Robert D. Putnam
Published 12 Oct 2020

Some argue that affluence encourages a focus on “we,” whereas hard times produce a focus on “I.” In the midst of the postwar boom, a widely read book, People of Plenty by historian David Potter (1954), emphasized that material abundance was fundamental to the consumerist consensus in American society.23 More recently, Tyler Cowen has argued that economic dynamism before 1973 allowed for policies that promoted equality, and conversely, the post-1970s stagnation explains the trend toward inequality and political dysfunction. That stagnation has in turn been explained by the end of a long period (1880–1940) of high innovation and productivity growth.24 When people are affluent and satisfied, so the argument goes, they can afford to be more generous toward others.

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Uslaner and Mitchell Brown, “Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement,” American Politics Research 33, no. 6 (2005): 868–894, doi:10.1177/1532673X04271903; and Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (New York: Viking, 2017). 23 David Morris Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 24 See Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); and John L. Campbell, American Discontent: The Rise of Donald Trump and Decline of the Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For a sophisticated and thoroughly documented argument about the effects of technological innovation and productivity (1920–1970), see Robert J.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

“It’s a really strange job, and there are many weeks where you’re just sitting in the car waiting for orders and hoping something comes in, not being paid to be there,” one of Instacart’s personal shoppers, a 24-year-old college dropout based in Chicago, told the Huffington Post in an interview. “But it’s keeping gas in my car. I’m working a job that requires gas that is essentially just paying for my car. It feels like selling my hair to buy a hairbrush.” 24 Maybe the shopper should take heart from economist Tyler Cowen, who cheerily opined (based on no quoted evidence at all) that “I wouldn’t want to suggest people will become grocery-delivery millionaires, but if you don’t have a college education but you’re smart and responsible, could you make a living doing this and maybe piecing it together with some of these other kinds of jobs?

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

But soon, the non-commercial values behind many platforms were rewritten in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, turning the “sharing economy” into a misnomer. Today, facing various prophecies about sharing and the future of work, we need to remind ourselves that there is no unstoppable evolution leading to the uberization of society; more positive alternatives are possible. In Average Is Over, the economist Tyler Cowen foresees a future in which a tiny “hyper meritocracy” would make millions while the rest of us struggle to survive on anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a year. It already works quite well in Mexico, Cowen quips. Carl B. Frey and Michael A. Osborne predict that 47 percent of all jobs are at risk of being automated over the next twenty years.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

Even Silicon Valley heroes such as Elon Musk and his Tesla car are merely producing what Christensen calls “performance-improving innovations [that] replace old products with new and better models. They generally create few jobs because they’re substitutive: When customers buy the new product, they usually don’t buy the old product.” While economists of such different political affiliations as Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, and Tyler Cowen all have written extensively about the cause of the joblessness and “secular stagnation” in the US economy that has endured since 2000, they never examine the role that monopoly capitalism might play in this crisis. If the rise of monopoly can be seen as a cause of economic stagnation, why has it endured?

Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
by Garett Jones
Published 15 Feb 2015

I am enormously grateful to Matt Devries and Karen Johnson, who each read the entire manuscript and were my sounding board for early drafts. I also want to thank my colleagues at George Mason University’s Center for Study of Public Choice, who discussed ideas and read chapters and offered excellent advice, much of it unheeded: Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, John Nye, and Alex Tabarrok. The Center for Study of Public Choice, founded by my late colleague, the Nobel laureate James Buchanan, is that rare place in modern social science, a place of genuine disagreement and debate, where important ideas from across and even outside the political spectrum are evaluated with vigor and civility and human warmth.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 9 May 2022

BELIEVE THE MacArthur Foundation, who in 2012 awarded him their “Genius Grant.” Or believe the economics profession, who in 2013 gave him their John Bates Clark Medal for the best economist under the age of forty. Or believe the government of India, who in 2015 gave him the Padma Shri, one of their highest honors. Or believe the economist Tyler Cowen, who has called Chetty “the single most influential economist in the world today.” So, yeah, basically everybody is united in the belief that Chetty, who got his BA from Harvard in three years and his PhD three years later and now ping-pongs between teaching at Stanford and Harvard, is extraordinary.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

Several European states acted to raise the legal retirement age.55 These initial reductions in state pensions were but a first step. ‘Over the last few decades, we have been conducting a large-scale social experiment with ultralow savings rates, without a strong safety net beneath the high-wire act,’ wrote economist Tyler Cowen.56 Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager featured in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, put it more bluntly. ‘The zero interest-rate policy,’ said Burry, ‘broke the social contract for generations of hardworking Americans who saved for retirement, only to find their savings are not nearly enough.’57 An increasing number of Americans were forced to work beyond the traditional retirement age.58 For younger workers, the dream of enjoying a comfortable old age would remain a dream – another illusion of wealth.

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‘Bull Market in Liabilities’. 54. Title of a report by Andy Lees of Macro Strategy, 4 April 2016. 55. For instance, the state pension age in the UK has increased to 66 for both men and women. The government has planned further increases, which will raise the state pension age from 66 to 67 between 2026 and 2028. 56. Tyler Cowen, ‘Why Trump’s Prosperous Supporters are Angry, Too’, Bloomberg, 19 July 2016. 57. Jessica Pressler, ‘Michael Burry, Real-life Market Genius from The Big Short, Thinks Another Financial Crisis is Looming’, Intelligencer – New York Magazine, 28 December 2015. 58. By early 2017, nearly a fifth of the US population aged 65 and older was working, according to the BLS.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

Moreover, measurement problems cannot account for the current productivity slowdown; industries with greater investment in digital technologies show neither differential productivity deceleration nor any evidence of faster quality improvements than those that are less digital. A few economists, such as Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, believe that this disappointing productivity performance reflects dwindling opportunities for revolutionary breakthroughs. In contrast to techno-optimists, they claim, the great innovations are behind us, and improvements from now on will be incremental, leading only to slow productivity growth.

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See also Pethokoukis (2017b). Evidence that manufacturing industries investing more in digital technologies are not showing faster productivity growth or any evidence of more mismeasurement is from Acemoglu, Autor, Dorn, Hanson, and Price (2014). Robert Gordon’s views are in Gordon (2016). For Tyler Cowen’s views, see Cowen (2010). The discussion of Japanese robot adoption and later attempts to introduce flexibility is provided in Krzywdzinski (2021). On the Fremont plant before and after Toyota’s investments and comparisons to other US car manufacturers, see Shimada and MacDuffie (1986) and MacDuffie and Krafcik (1992).

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
by John Lanchester
Published 14 Dec 2009

I have learnt an enormous amount from the work of Evan Davis, Stephanie Flanders, and Robert Peston at the BBC—Flanders and Peston have high-quality blogs, in addition to their old-media work; Philip Coggan, John Kay, Gillian Tett, and Martin Wolf at the Financial Times; Larry Elliott at The Guardian; and although as a Nobel Prize winner he is too grand to count, Paul Krugman at The New York Times is also a superb journalist and commentator. There is a great deal of lively economic commentary on the Internet, and the best clearinghouse for the debates is the superb blog run by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, at www.marginalrevolution.com. NOTES Full references for books can be found in the Sources. INTRODUCTION 1 You can follow the progress toward the goals at http://ddp-ext.worldbank.org/ext/GMIS/home.do?siteId=2. The news is less bad than one might expect, providing that you can swallow the fact that nothing is improving in sub-Saharan Africa.

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will
by Geoff Colvin
Published 3 Aug 2015

The favorite example to support the counterargument is chess: While IBM’s Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, by 2008 or so a person and a computer working together could beat a computer alone. You still hear this example cited as proof that people add an ineffable something that computers just can’t supply. The trouble is that the argument is getting shakier by the moment. The example became famous after economist Tyler Cowen cited it in his excellent 2013 book, Average Is Over. But he also noted in the book that as computers improved, the day might come when humans could no longer add any value to the computer’s play, and by late 2013 he was able to post a blog entry citing evidence that the day may have arrived. At this writing, human-computer teams still beat computers some of the time, but in a domain where the world’s software powerhouses like IBM and Google aren’t competing.

Social Democratic America
by Lane Kenworthy
Published 3 Jan 2014

Moreover, even if productivity growth is sluggish in low-end services, it may, as Baumol himself points out, be rapid in other parts of the economy.44 Technological advance and improvements in work organization can yield leaps forward. The computer and communications revolutions already have generated considerable advance in manufacturing, finance, and an array of other services. They will soon do so in medicine, education, and elsewhere. In recent years, several analysts, including Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen, have expressed pessimism about the likelihood of further productivity-enhancing innovations.45 The information technology revolution has largely run its course, they say, and in any case it never boosted productivity to the same degree as earlier innovations such as steam engines, railroads, electricity, the assembly line, indoor heating and air conditioning, running water, sewers, roads, and the internal combustion engine.

In Defense of Global Capitalism
by Johan Norberg
Published 1 Jan 2001

Jonah Goldberg, ‘‘The Specter of McDonald’s: An Object of Bottomless Hatred,’’National Review, June 5, 2000. 5. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Kulturterrorismen: en uppgo¨relse med tanken om kulturell renhet (Nora, Sweden: Nya Doxa, 1999), p. 46. 6. For numerous examples of ‘‘indigenous’’ cultural products made possible by cultural contact and trade, see Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 7. Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘‘Can Culture Be Exempt from Free Trade Agreement?’’ Daily Yomiuri, April 25, 1994. 8. Giddens, p. 66. 9. Berg and Karlsson, p. 51. 10.

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
by Jenny Blake
Published 14 Jul 2016

by Brian Tracy Business Model You by Tim Clark, with Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky The War of Art by Steven Pressfield Launch Smartcuts by Shane Snow The Dip by Seth Godin Outrageous Openness by Tosha Silver The Intuitive Way by Penney Peirce Playing Big by Tara Mohr Lead Conscious Business by Fred Kofman The Work Revolution by Julie Clow How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg The Alliance by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier NOTES INTRODUCTION Pivot Is the New Normal People are no longer working: Tyler Cowen, “A Dearth of Investment in Young Workers,” New York Times, September 7, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/business/a-dearth-of-investment-in-young-workers.html. average tenure drops to three years: Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employee Tenure in 2014,” September 18, 2014, www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
by Steve Silberman
Published 24 Aug 2015

Even now, few people outside a small circle of cognitive psychologists know that the adoption of the spectrum model of autism by the psychiatric establishment in the 1980s represented a decisive defeat for the father of the diagnosis. For decades, Kanner maintained that his syndrome was monolithic by definition, limited to childhood, and vanishingly rare. The notion of an influential economist like Tyler Cowen touting the virtues of having an “autistic cognitive style,” a Hollywood star like Daryl Hannah coming out in midlife about her diagnosis, or a Fields Medal–winning mathematician like Richard Borcherds musing about his autistic traits in the press would have seemed irresponsible to him, if not downright delusional.

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“Nearly all” of the Dirac stories: The Strangest Man, p. 422. he had no intention of venturing a diagnosis: Graham Farmelo, personal communication, March 4, 2013. “If Dirac was autistic”: “Silent Quantum Genius,” Freeman Dyson. New York Review of Books, Feb. 25, 2010. the virtues of having an “autistic cognitive style”: Create Your Own Economy, Tyler Cowen. Dutton, 2009. coming out in midlife about her diagnosis: “Daryl Hannah Breaks Her Silence about Her Autism Struggle,” Rebecca Macatee. E! Online, Sept. 27, 2013. http://www.eonline.com/news/464173/daryl-hannah-breaks-her-silence-on-autism-struggle musing about his autistic traits: “Interview with Richard Borcherds,” Simon Singh.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
by William MacAskill
Published 27 Jul 2015

Warning: Failure to read it, share it, and keep it close as you set out to ‘do good’ is likely to be harmful to yourself and others!” —Charlie Bresler, executive vice president of Men’s Wearhouse and executive director of the Life You Can Save “Are you interested in giving away money more effectively? This is the very best book on how to do that.” —Tyler Cowen, Holbert C. Harris professor of economics at George Mason University and author of Average Is Over “Doing Good Better has a rare combination of strikingly original ideas, effortless clarity of delivery, and a thoroughgoing practicality that leaves the reader inspired to get out of their chair and take on the world.

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

A growing number of skeptics have questioned the importance of innovation for the American economy, arguing that the increase in jobs is not large enough to offset the losses in manufacturing. Intel’s former CEO Andy Grove has famously criticized America’s “misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs.” Tyler Cowen’s influential book The Great Stagnation argued that companies like Facebook or Twitter do not have many employees, because they rely on their users for most of the content and are simply too small to replace the titans of the past, like Ford and General Motors. But the picture that emerges from the data is more complex.

The Locavore's Dilemma
by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu
Published 29 May 2012

True, many of these are supplied by small businesses that cater to narrower niches, but the diversity and affordability of products offered by large supermarket chains and “Big Box” retail stores has become truly astounding, even by recent historical standards. 30 For a more detailed examination of this claim that isn’t limited to food offerings, see Tyler Cowen. 2002. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures. Princeton University Press. 31 For a more detailed discussion of the issue, see Susan Fleiss Lowenstein. 1965. “Urban Images of Roman Authors.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 8 (1): 110–123. 32 Virgil. 37 BCE.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

They also led to perverse business incentives. As it became easier to make big money through business strategies that were essentially unproductive, trading, investment and restructuring decisions changed in ways that often weakened the foundations of the economy. According to the American economist, Tyler Cowen, the author of the influential book, The Great Stagnation, the increased concentration at the top mattered because it had been largely generated within finance, encouraging banks to ‘take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in a correlated fashion.’ Over time, Cowen argues, the way the finance sector operates ‘corrodes productivity, because what the banks do bears almost no resemblance to a process of getting capital into the hands of those who can make most efficient use of it.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

So, in that sense, the rise of ExOs is a deepening of the specialization trend that started 10,000 years ago: only focus on those areas in which you are really outperforming. This not only maximizes profits, but in a world with pervasive digital reputational systems, also sets your image at the highest possible level, as author Tyler Cowen says in the title of his book: Average is Over. Airline operators used to build their own engines, an intricate and high-risk operation. Then GE and Rolls Royce, both experts in manufacturing engines, began offering leasing programs. Today, airlines pay for engines by the number of hours flown.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

This was the infamous essay in which Thiel condemned what he saw as the consequences of women’s suffrage and declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel later minimized but did not repudiate his Cato Unbound article. “It was late at night. I quickly typed it off,” he told the blogger Tyler Cowen in a 2015 interview. All the same, Thiel said, “You could never disown anything that you’ve written.” * * * The rise of the neoreactionaries was not exclusively a coup orchestrated from above with the help of powerful, well-connected hyperlibertarians like Thiel, Patri Friedman, and Trump’s campaign financier, the tech billionaire Robert Mercer.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jan 2008

That may sound a little abstract: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2006, bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Til%20Death%20-%20MAY%2012%202005%20QJE%20FINAL.pdf. And they are perhaps delayed indefinitely: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces,” NBER Working Paper 12944. Also Tyler Cowen, “Matrimony Has Its Benefits, and Divorce Has a Lot to Do with That,” The New York Times, April 19, 2007. “We know there exists something”: Interview with Justin Wolfers, June 2007. “The man whose whole life”: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book 5, chapter 1, par. 178, www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html. 4.

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope
by John A. Allison
Published 20 Sep 2012

One need look no further than John’s principled leadership of BB&T—and the company’s resulting accomplishments—for validation of the theories he presents in this timely, insightful book.” —Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO, Koch Industries, Inc. “John Allison is America’s leading business defender of the morality and philosophy of capitalism, and he was also the longest standing CEO of a major financial institution. His take on the financial crisis is not to be missed.” —Tyler Cowen, General Director, Mercatus Center, and Professor of Economics, George Mason University “John Allison provides an invaluable lesson based on unique insights. His astute understanding of finance, economics, history and philosophy combine to provide a must read for business leaders, and more important, policy makers, if we are to avoid a cataclysmic economic collapse.”

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

One of the things I like most about writing about the experiences of real people is the opportunity it’s given me to discuss issues with Ellen and to benefit from her rich insights. Others too numerous to mention have also been enormously helpful. But I would especially like to thank Bruce Buchanan, Gary Burke, Philip Cook, Tyler Cowen, Lee Fennell, Ted Fischer, Chris Frank, Herbert Gans, Srinagesh Gaverneni, Tom Gilovich, Marc Groeger, Maria Guadalupe, Henry Hansmann, Ori Heffetz, Moritz Heumer, Bob Hockett, Graham Kerslick, Mark Kleiman, Jim Luckett, David Lyons, Michael F. Martin, Rex Mixon, Sendhil Mullainathan, Tom Nagel, Matthew Nagler, Michael O’Hare, Sam Pizzigati, Kate Rubenstein, Tim Scanlon, Tom Schelling, Eric Schoenberg, Philip Seeman, Larry Seidman, Peter Singer, Jeff Sommer, Timon Spiluttini, Kai Tang, Steve Teles, Fidel Tewolde, Michael Waldman, David Sloan Wilson, Saskia Wittlake, and Andrew Wylie for their insightful comments.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

By several estimates, American innovation has slowed of late, as massive investments in fields like green energy and pharmaceuticals have failed to produce the return that investments in information technology generated just a few decades ago.29 (Some of that analysis, we should note, predates the new development of “fracking.”) George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen recently argued that innovation in the United States has actually stagnated, noting that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit of technologies produced by previous generations and are burning through the competitive advantages those breakthroughs bestowed on today’s economy.30 Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and a powerful figure in the world of venture capital, has sounded a similar alarm, arguing that whatever advances Silicon Valley has spurred of late have been cancelled out by America’s failure to make progress on other technological and scientific fronts.31 No fair assessment can blame the stagnation of American innovation entirely on the structure of American community.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

I don’t care if the one is a professional economist, it is clear that they have not yet grokked the Quantitative Way as it applies to everyday life and matters like personal self-improvement. That which I cannot eliminate may be well worth reducing. Or consider this exchange between Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen. Robin Hanson said that he preferred to put at least 75% weight on the prescriptions of economic theory versus his intuitions: “I try to mostly just straightforwardly apply economic theory, adding little personal or cultural judgment.” Tyler Cowen replied: In my view there is no such thing as “straightforwardly applying economic theory” . . . theories are always applied through our personal and cultural filters and there is no other way it can be.

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This time the pain was only slightly eased. I am continually aghast at apparently intelligent folks—such as Robin Hanson’s colleague Tyler Cowen—who don’t think that overcoming bias is important. This is your mind we’re talking about. Your human intelligence. It separates you from an ape. It built this world. You don’t think how the mind works is important? You don’t think the mind’s systematic malfunctions are important? Do you think the Inquisition would have tortured witches, if all were ideal Bayesians? Tyler Cowen apparently feels that overcoming bias is just as biased as bias: “I view Robin’s blog as exemplifying bias, and indeed showing that bias can be very useful.”

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 57. Steven Feld, “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 ( January 1, 2000): 145–71. 58. David Rothkopf, “Praise of Cultural Imperialism?” Foreign Policy, no. 107 (1997): 38–53. 59. Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 60. Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Remote Control: The Rise of Electronic Cultural Policy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597 ( January 2005): 122–33; Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 61.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

You didn’t need technology to make these jobs happen; you just needed a large pool of laborers willing to work for pennies, motivated chiefly by poverty and inequality. Technological inequality is a term many have cited as a big cause of the hollowing-out of the middle class in America and other developed nations. “Tech inequality gets going in the 1990s, and stacks on top of financial sector inequality,” said Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University who believes inequality is inherent in the nature of technology jobs. “The trend will continue. Major tech companies don’t employ many people. They do indirectly create jobs, but they tend to be low-paying service jobs. The cognitive requirements for working with tech are so high, it’s antiegalitarian.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives
by Tim Harford
Published 3 Oct 2016

David Fraser, Knight’s Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (London: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 39. 2. “A Sinister Advantage,” The Economist, December 9, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/3471297. 3. Monte Cox, “Southpaws: Doing It Right the Wrong Way,” Fightbeat/Fightworld, May 2005, republished at http://coxscorner.tripod.com/southpaws.html. 4. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over (New York: Dutton, 2013), pp. 101–104; Jonathan Rowson, “Carlsen: The Nettlesome World Champion,” The Herald, December 29, 2013; republished on Chessbase at http://en.chessbase.com/post/carlsen-the-nettlesome-world-champion. 5. Author interview with Guy Haworth, December 9, 2014. 6.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World
by Sandra Navidi
Published 24 Jan 2017

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin, 2008), Kindle locations 1098-1103, Kindle edition. 9. Andy Serwer and Melanie Shanley, “Wall Street’s Hottest Hand Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman Has Built a Powerhouse Unlike Any Other,” Fortune, June 9, 2003, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/06/09/343947/index.htm. 10. Tyler Cowen, “The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality,” New York Times, December 24, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/upshot/marriages-of-power-couples-reinforce-income-inequality.xhtml. 11. Jordan Weissmann, “Ben Bernanke to Princeton Grads: The World Isn’t Fair (and You All Got Lucky),” The Atlantic, June 3, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/ben-bernanke-to-princeton-grads-the-world-isnt-fair-and-you-all-got-lucky/276471. 12.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 14 May 2017

The roots of this phenomenon can be traced to the dating market of urban centers (particularly as people marry like, rather than marrying “up” or “down,” a twenty-first-century trend economists term “assortative mating”23). Smart people want to be around other smart people not just for work, but also for friendships and romantic relationships, and over time that results in highly stratified hyper-educated affluent places where, as the economist Tyler Cowen remarked, “Money and talent become clustered in high-powered, two-earner families determined to do everything possible to advance the interests of their children.”24 The social and economic interplay of urban inhabitants enables and promotes cities as the ultimate sites of consumption. A sizable number of the people in today’s metropolis are more highly skilled and as a result more highly paid than most and they demand luxurious consumption options—whether art galleries, prestigious preschools, or cocktail bars.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Hariton, Sorting Out the Tangle of Economic Substance, 52 Tax Lawyer 235 (1999); David A. Weisbach, Ten Truths about Tax Shelters (John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 122, 2001). 65. Note that the nominal principal does not fall; it is the value of the claim against this principal that falls. 66. Piketty et al., Distributional National Accounts. 67. Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). 68. Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich, To Do or to Have? That Is the Question, 85 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1193 (2003). 69. More recent exponents of this view are, for example, Robert H.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

Not become bakers—89 percent of them are expected to lose their jobs to automation by 2033, along with 83 percent of sailors. Wall Street is steadily shedding jobs because algorithms now execute 70 percent of equity trades; it’s great for those who remain, given that there’s ever more money to go in fewer pockets, but it does make you wonder if we might not be in the last era of high employment. Tyler Cowen, described by BusinessWeek as “America’s hottest economist” and proprietor of the country’s most widely read economics blog, works in the same Koch-funded economics department at George Mason University where James Buchanan was once a star. His advice to young people is to develop a skill that can’t be automated, and that can be sold to the remaining high earners: be a maid, a personal trainer, a private tutor, a classy sex worker.

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life
by Alan B. Krueger
Published 3 Jun 2019

“We were just kids from a poor area in Liverpool who wanted to make some money.” Even if musicians do not personally feel that they are motivated by economic incentives, economic forces quietly orchestrate success and failure. In his book In Praise of Commercial Culture (Harvard University Press), Tyler Cowen has likewise argued that “economic effects have had stronger effects on culture than is commonly believed. The printing press paved the way for classical music, while electricity made rock and roll possible. For better or worse, artists are subject to economic constraints.” To truly understand and appreciate music, you need to understand economics.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

“Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century,” he writes, “the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live.” Fox has a lot of company. He points to science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, who worries that the internet, far from spurring a great burst of industrial creativity, may have put innovation “on hold for a generation.” Fox also cites economist Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we’re living in a time of innovation stagnation. He might also have mentioned tech powerbroker Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we’ve entered a technological “desert.” Thiel blames the hippies.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

“semiotically nourished authors”: Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (Orlando: Mariner Books, 2014). Chapter 5: The Myth-Making Mind II For their respective work on the dark side of stories, I’d like to thank Maria Konnikova, the author of a great book, The Confidence Game (New York: Viking, 2016), and Tyler Cowen, who delivered a 2009 TED talk, “Be Suspicious of Simple Stories.” popular universal myths in the world: Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). sarcastic entry in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary: Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, Part 5, 1764, translated by William F.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 31. 88 ‘Freak machines’: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 29. 89 England’s pride was intact: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 32. 89 ‘The Battle of Britain was won by Chamberlain’: McKinstry, Spitfire, p.194. 89 One might think that there is no problem enouraging innovation: as this book was going to press, Tyler Cowen’s book The Great Stagnation (Dutton, 2011) appeared. Owen’s book offers further evidence of an innovation slowdown in addition to that presented here. 90 Even the design of niche cars: Chris Anderson, ‘In the next industrial revolution, atoms are the new bits’, Wired, February 2010, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/ 90 ‘Failure for free’: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (London: Penguin, 2008). 90 US health secretary Margaret Heckler announced: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june01/aids_6-27.html 92 The whole process has become harder: Benjamin F.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown
by Simon Johnson and James Kwak
Published 29 Mar 2010

Bradford DeLong’s Grasping Reality with Opposable Thumbs: http://delong.typepad.com/ Econbrowser (Menzie Chinn and James Hamilton): http://www.econbrowser.com/ Econlog (Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, and David Henderson): http://econlog.econlib.org/ Economists’ Forum (Martin Wolf and guests): http://blogs.ft.com/economistsforum/ Economist’s View (Mark Thoma): http://economistsview.typepad.com/ Economix (New York Times reporters and guest economists): http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/ Executive Suite (Joe Nocera): http://executivesuite.blogs.nytimes.com/ Free Exchange (The Economist): http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/ Interfluidity (Steve Randy Waldman): http://www.interfluidity.com/ Ezra Klein: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/ Making Sense (Paul Solman): http://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/makingsense/ Greg Mankiw: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/ Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok): http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ Naked Capitalism (Yves Smith and others): http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/ Real Time Economics (Wall Street Journal): http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/ Rortybomb (Mike Konczal): http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/ Felix Salmon: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/ Acknowledgments This book is the product of a friendship that began twenty years ago and a collaboration that began at the peak of the financial crisis in 2008.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

Michael Mandel, “The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S.,” http://Businessweek.com, June 3, 2009, accessed September 14, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/ content/09_24/b4135000953288.htm; Bruce Nussbaum, “America’s Innovation Shortfall and How We Can Solve It,” Harvard Business Review, September 20, 2011, accessed September 14, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/ americas_innovation_shortfall.html. 234 While futurists in the nineties: Michael Mandel, “My Review of Tyler Cowen’s New Book,” Mandel on Innovation and Growth, February 2, 2011, accessed September 14, 2012, http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/tag/ innovation-shortfall/; Michael Mandel, discussions with the author, 2012. 235 The consequences of this: Mandel, “The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S.”; Michael Mandel, discussions with the author, 2012. 235 almost $7 trillion: Michael Mandel, discussions with the author, 2012; Ian Campbell, “U.S.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Published 17 Mar 2020

Martin’s; Tim Wu, 2018, The curse of bigness: Antitrust in the new gilded age, Columbia Global Reports; Elizabeth Anderson, 2017, Private government: How employers rule our lives (and why we don’t talk about it), Princeton University Press; Dean Baker, 2016, Rigged: How globalization and the rules of the modern economy were structured to make the rich richer, Center for Economic Policy Research; Tim Carney, 2019, Alienated America: Why some places thrive while others collapse, Harper; Lane Kenworthy, 2019, Social democratic capitalism, Oxford University Press. For an unapologetic defense, see Tyler Cowen, 2019, Big business: A love letter to an American anti-hero, St. Martin’s. 7. Philippon, Great reversal. 8. David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson, and John van Reenen, 2019, “The fall of the labor share and the rise of superstar firms,” NBER Working Paper 23396, revised May 2, figure 4, https://economics.mit.edu/files/12979. 9.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

Write two economists in the New York Times: “Computerization has . . . fostered a polarization of employment, with job growth concentrated in both the highest- and lowest-paid occupations, while jobs in the middle have declined [. . .] This bifurcation of job opportunities has contributed to the historic rise in income inequality.”45 Average Is Over, thunders the title of George Mason university economist Tyler Cowen's book assessing the economic future of America. Basically he sees, as a reviewer puts it, “a future largely stripped of middling jobs and broad prosperity.”46 Finally, there is the perfectly reasonable supposition that the pace of IT-inspired productivity is, if anything, going to increase. Every year, computer speed and capacity continues to expand in accordance with principles like good old Moore's Law, and more and more industries and occupations are learning how to get into the IT game.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

Empire podcast, “How Sam Bankman-Fried Made $10 Billion by the Age of 28,” April 1, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “As an individual”: Robert Wiblin, “Sam Bankman-Fried on Taking a High-Risk Approach to Crypto and Doing Good,” 80,000 Hours podcast, April 14, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Fifty-one percent you double the earth”: Tyler Cowen, “Sam Bankman-Fried on Arbitrage and Altruism,” Conversations with Tyler podcast, January 6, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The way to really make money”: Caroline Ellison, Twitter, March 7, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT buying Dogecoin because Elon Musk: Sam Trabucco, Twitter, April 22, 2021.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

Rachel Monroe, “How Natural Wine Became a Symbol of Virtuous Consumption,” New Yorker, November 18, 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/25/how-natural-wine-became-a-symbol-of-virtuous-consumption. 74. Gretchen Reynolds, “Do We Really Need to Take 10,000 Steps a Day for Our Health?” New York Times, updated September 15, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/well/move/10000-steps-health.html; Tyler Cowen, “Cheating Markets in Everything,” Marginal Revolution, May 25, 2021, https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/05/cheating-markets-in-everything.html; @EllenKo1111, “Sore and Exhausted,” Fitbit Community, Fitbit, August 19, 2014, https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Get-Moving/Sore-and-exhausted/td-p/445170. 75.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

Martin Wolf, an influential economist with the Financial Times, however, accepted much of what Gordon had to say and concluded that economic elites in the high-income world would welcome the future that Gordon described but everyone else would like it ‘vastly less. Get used to this. It will not change.’ Other contributions would be Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate all the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, E-special from Dutton, 2011. All these arguments are, however, US-focused. 3. The Thelluson case is described in Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond. 4. Cited in Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3, Harmondsworth, Penguin, p. 519. 5.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

Any judgment on whether giving to the arts is a good use of a philanthrocapitalist’s money must also take into account what role the state is playing, which varies widely from one country to the next. Perhaps an American philanthrocapitalist has greater justification for giving to the arts than, say, a German. According to economist Tyler Cowen, America’s direct government subsidies to the arts are limited to the $120 million that the National Endowment for the Arts spends every year. At fifty cents per American per year, he says, it is peanuts compared with the $80 that every German contributes to state-funded arts. One test for the philanthrocapitalist considering supporting the arts is “what difference will the money make?”

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020

But at last a good book on globalisation has appeared … wonderfully lucid and intelligent’ – Martin Wolf, Financial Times Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them (2007) Shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award ‘Invaluable … A superb combination of direct reportage with detailed analysis of the evidence’ – Martin Wolf, Financial Times ‘Energetic and right-minded … Sense as good as this needs cherishing’ – Guardian ‘The single best non-technical defence of a liberal immigration policy’ – Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy after the Crisis (2010) ‘Legrain has a gift for combining big numbers that offer a sense of the scale while zeroing in on what all this means for people …a particularly good survey of what made up the unpleasant cocktail which the world has yet to digest’ – The Economist European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics are in a Mess – and How to Put Them Right (2014) Among the Financial Times’ Best Books of 2014 ‘Philippe Legrain provides an original and insightful analysis of what has gone wrong with Europe’s economies and politics and a timely warning that the crisis ultimately threatens our open societies.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Should it hold, in ten years Azhar, Exponential, 249. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Outside the weightless world of code See, for example, Michael Bhaskar, Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021); Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); and Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), among many others.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

The highest British-born entry in 2013 was the Duke of Westminster at eighth place; at number one was Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, followed by Ukraine’s Leonard Blavatnik. In part, these billionaires – among the richest people who have ever walked the earth – are attracted by Britain’s status as a ‘residential tax haven’, as US economist Tyler Cowen has described it. It is not just British businesses and assets that are being bought up by foreign billionaires. In the first half of 2011 alone, 60 per cent of new-build homes in central London were bought by overseas investors. The £5.2 billion splashed out by foreign investors on London’s housing in 2011 dwarfed all government investment in the Affordable Housing Programme in the whole of England.17 In no sense could Britain’s modern economic system be described as ‘popular capitalism’, dominated by small-time entrepreneurs, shareholders and property owners.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

Carrington and Bruce Fallick, “Why Do Earnings Fall with Job Displacement?” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Working Paper no. 14–05, June 19, 2014, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2456813. 12. See Lawrence H. Summer, “U.S. Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound,” Business Economics 49 (2014): 65–73; and Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011). For a nuanced discussion of the prospects of a convergence between countries like China, on the one hand, and North America as well as Western Europe, on the other, read Dani Rodrik, “The Future of Economic Convergence,” Jackson Hole Symposium of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 2011, http://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/future-economic-convergence.pdf?

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

I immediately thought, ‘Yes, this thing has no intrinsic value, there’s no way it’s going to work.’” Like many teenagers, Buterin “spent ridiculous amounts of time on the Internet,” reading about different ideas that were heterodox, out of the mainstream. Ask him which economists he likes, and he rattles off Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Robin Hanson, and Bryan Caplan. He can speak on the works of game theorist Thomas Schelling and behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely. “It’s actually surprisingly useful, how much you can learn for yourself by debating ideas like politics with other people on forums.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics
by Nicholas Wapshott
Published 10 Oct 2011

—David Marquand, New Statesman “Nicholas Wapshott’s new book, Keynes Hayek, does an excellent job of setting out the broader history behind this revival of the old [Keynes vs. Hayek] debates. Wapshott brings the personalities to life, provides more useful information on the debates than any other source, and miraculously manages to write for both the lay reader and the expert at the same time.” —Tyler Cowen, National Review “Wapshott’s engaging book, a popular history of the intellectual sparring between the two men, and (this makes it so much more complicated) their colleagues, followers, successors and popularizers, attempts to fill in some of the blanks for those who will not be picking up Keynes’s General Theory any time soon, or, for that matter, Hayek’s Prices and Production.”

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

As for whether Musk is leading the technology industry to new heights like Gates and Jobs, the professional pundits remain mixed. One camp holds that SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX offer little in the way of real hope for an industry that could use some blockbuster innovations. For the other camp, Musk is the real deal and the brightest shining star of what they see as a coming revolution in technology. The economist Tyler Cowen—who has earned some measure of fame in recent years for his insightful writings about the state of the technology industry and his ideas on where it may go—falls into that first camp. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued that the American economy has slowed and wages have been depressed as a result.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

The origins and the economic importance of the Internet are part of a much larger debate about the nature of technological innovation and economic growth. The industrial revolution reshaped the material basis of society, introducing technologies and products we still use today. But there are widely differing views on just how that happened. Pessimists like economist Tyler Cowen believe that a handful of breakthrough innovations drove America’s economic engine over the last one hundred years. He sees the decline of productivity growth, the pace of improvement in output per unit of input (labor, capital, machinery), in the US economy as a sign that we have finally exhausted the stockpile of the breakthroughs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Published 29 May 2009

A few others: former Federal Reserve governor Frederic Mishkin (MIT 1976); Bush administration economic advisers Glenn Hubbard (Harvard 1981), Larry Lindsey (Harvard 1985), and Greg Mankiw (MIT 1984); Clinton administration economic adviser Laura Tyson (MIT 1974); Columbia professor and globetrotting do-gooder Jeffrey Sachs (Harvard 1980); blogger/professors Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen (both Harvard 1987); freakonomist Steven Levitt (MIT 1994), and so on. 14. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1978, press release, Oct. 16, 1978. 15. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” Econometrica (March 1979): 263–92. 16.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie
Published 20 Jul 2020

Oddly, the number of negative words in abstracts also increased in frequency, though only by a tiny touch, so perhaps we should say that abstracts have become more extreme. Neutral and randomly selected words didn’t increase in frequency at all. 58.  In fact, there’s some evidence that scientific progress is slowing down over time. Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood, ‘Is the Rate of Scientific Progress Slowing Down?’, 5 Aug. 2019; https://bit.ly/3ahf70m 59.  Nature: https://www.nature.com/authors/author_resources/about_npg.html; Science: https://www.sciencemag.org/about/mission-and-scope; Cell: https://www.cell.com/cell/aims; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org/page/authors/purpose-scope 60.  

Money Free and Unfree
by George A. Selgin
Published 14 Jun 2017

What sort of change is a question beyond the scope of this paper, which has only indicated some possibilities. We hope that it will also encourage further research exploring those alternatives’ capacity to contribute to a genuinely improved monetary system. * Originally published in the Journal of Macroeconomics 34, no. 3 (September 2012): 569–96. The authors thank David Boaz, Don Boudreaux, Tyler Cowen, Christopher Hanes, Jeff Hummel, Arnold Kling, Jerry O’Driscoll, Scott Sumner, Alex Tabarrok, Dick Timberlake, Randy Wright, and numerous blog commentators for their helpful suggestions, while absolving them of all responsibility for the paper’s arguments and conclusions. William D. Lastrapes is a professor in the department of economics at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. 9 OPERATION TWIST-THE-TRUTH: HOW THE FEDERAL RESERVE MISREPRESENTS ITS HISTORY AND PERFORMANCE* FOR A PRIVATE-SECTOR FIRM, success can mean only one thing: that the firm has turned a profit.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

If we consider such a massive wealth increase it is easier to understand why a particular change in redistribution in this year’s government budget, so that you get a little more or less, is trivial. Much more important is how those changes affect the incentive to, say, get an education that is more in demand on the labour market, start a business or take a risk on a new idea. This is what increased wealth for us all in the long run. The George Mason economist Tyler Cowen points out that if the US had grown one percentage point less annually between 1870 and 1990 the country would in 1990 have had the same material standard as Mexico in 1990.7 All redistribution is not consumption, though. For example, public spending on mass education has given more people the abilities they need to participate in society and to develop their ideas and skills.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Published 10 May 2010

These include Yves Smith of “Naked Capitalism”; “Calculated Risk,” home to Bill McBride and the much-missed Doris Dungey; the anonymous bloggers at Zero Hedge; Brad DeLong at “Grasping Reality with Both Hands”; Barry Ritholtz at “The Big Picture”; Mark Thoma at “Economist’s View”; Jim Hamilton at “Econbrowser”; Paul Krugman at “The Conscience of a Liberal”; Mike Shedlock at “Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis”; Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok at “Marginal Revolution”; The Wall Street Journal’s “Real Time Economics”; Dave Altig and the other economists at the Atlanta Fed who contribute to “macroblog”; Dean Baker at “Beat the Press”; Greg Mankiw on his blog; and many, many others who have played such an instrumental role in covering the financial crisis.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
Published 8 Mar 2011

International Journal of Selection and Assessment 9, nos. 1–2 (March/June 2001): 9–30, http://www.uni-graz.at/psy5www/lehre/kaernbach/doko/artikel/bergner_Barrick_Mount_Judge_2001.pdf. 11 Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate, “Superstar CEOs,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124, no. 4 (November 2009): 1593–1638, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.146.1059&rep=rep1&type=pdf. 12 When people around the world Tyler Cowen, “In which countries do kids respect their parents the most?” Marginal Revolution, December 5, 2007, http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/12/in-which-countr.html. 13 “A man has as many social” Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 56. 14 By the third generation David Brooks, “The Americano Dream,” New York Times, February 24, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/24/opinion/the-americano-dream.html?

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis
by Martin Wolf
Published 24 Nov 2015

But the other component of economic growth – rising productivity – is even more important than demography in determining the rate of growth over the long run. It is also the principal determinant of incomes per head. Nobody knows what will happen to productivity over the coming decades, but some well-informed people have put forward reasonable arguments that it must slow. Among these are Robert Gordon of Northwestern University and Tyler Cowen of George Mason University.34 An important reason why the pace of innovation might be slowing is that many opportunities have already been exploited: the population of the high-income countries is already highly educated and highly urbanized; the economy has already exploited the most readily available natural resources; people have already enjoyed the fruit of many life- and economy-transforming innovations, such as running water and sanitation, inoculation, electricity, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, civil aviation, telephony, the computer and the internet.

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821
by George Anthony Selgin
Published 13 Jul 2008

INDEPENDENT STUDIES IN POLITICAL ECONOMY THE ACADEMY IN CRISIS: The Political Economy of Higher Education I Ed. byJohn W Sommer MAKING POOR NATIONS RICH: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Economic Development I Ed. by Benjamin Powell AGAINST LEVIATHAN: Government Power and a Free Society I Robert Higgs MARKET FAILURE OR SUCCESS: The New Debate I Ed. by Tyler Cowen & Eric Crampton ALIENATION AND THE SOVIET ECONOMY: The Collapse of the Socialist Era I Paul Craig Roberts MONEY AND THE NATION STATE: The Financial Revolution, Government, and the World Monetary System Ed. by Kevin Dowd & Richard H. Timberlake, Jr. AMERICAN HEALTH CARE: Government, Market Processes and the Public Interest I Ed. by Roger Feldman ANARCHY AND THE LAW: The Political Economy of Choice I Ed. by Edward P.

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
by Robin Hanson
Published 31 Mar 2016

I’ve returned home, with much to say, but mostly hungry for human communion. I’ve never felt as intellectually isolated or at risk as when writing this book, and I hope my desert days end now, as readers like you join me in discussing The Age of Em. Acknowledgments For their comments, I thank Paul Christiano, Peter Twieg, Katja Grace, Carl Shulman, Tyler Cowen, Fabio Rojas, Bonnie Hanson, Luke Muehlhauser, Nikola Danaylov, Bryan Caplan, Michael Abramowicz, Gaverick Matheny, Paul Crowley, Peter McCluskey, Sam Wilson, Chris Hibbert, Thomas Hanson, Daniel Houser, Kaj Sotala, Rong Rong, David Friedman, Michael LaTorra, Ben Goertzel, Steve Omohundro, David Levy, Jim Miller, Mike Halsall, Peggy Jackson, Jan-Erik Strasser, Robert Lecnik, Andrew Hanson, Shannon Friedman, Karl Mattingly, Ken Kittlitz, Teresa Hartnett, Giulio Prisco, David Pearce, Stephen Van Sickle, David Brin, Chris Yung, Adam Gurri, Matthew Graves, Dave Lindbergh, Scott Aaronson, Gary Drescher, Robert Koslover, Don Hanson, Michael Raimondi, William MacAskill, Eli Dourado, David McFadzean, Bruce Brewington, Marc Ringuette, Daniel Miessler, Keith Henson, Garett Jones, Alex Tabarrok, Lee Corbin, Norman Hardy, Charles Zheng, Stuart Armstrong, Vernor Vinge, Ted Goertzel, Mark Lillibridge, Michael Chwe, Olle Häggström, Jaan Tallinn, Joshua Fox, Chris Hallquist, Joshua Fox, Kevin Simler, Eric Falkenstein, Lotta Moberg, Ute Shaw, Matt Franklin, Nick Beckstead, Robyn Weaving, François Rideau, Eloise Rosen, Peter Voss, Scott Sumner, Phil Goetz, Robert Rush, Donald Prell, Olivia Gonzalez, Bradley Andrews, Keith Adams, Agustin Lebron, Karl Wiberg, Thomas Malone, Will Gordon, Philip Maymin, Henrik Jonsson, Mark Bahner, Adam Lapidus, Tom McKendree, Evelyn Mitchell, Jacek Stopa, Scott Leibrand, Paul Ralley, Anders Sandberg, Eli Lehrer, Michael Klein, Lumifer, Joy Buchanan, Miles Brundage, Harry Beck, Michael Price, Tim Freeman, Vladimir M., David Wolf, Randall Pickett, Zack Davis, Tom Bell, Harry Hawk, Adam Kolber, Dean Menk, Randall Mayes, Karen Maloney, Brian Tomasik, Ramez Naam, John Clark, Robert de Neufville, Richard Bruns, Keith Mansfield, Gordon Worley, Giedrius, Peter Garretson, Christopher Burger, Nithya Sambasivam, Zachary Weinersmith, Luke Somers, Barbara Belle, Jake Selinger, Geoffrey Miller, Arthur Breitman, Martin Wooster, Daniel Boese, Oge Nnadi, Joseph Mela, Diego Caleiro, Daniel Lemire, Emily Perry, Jess Riedel, Jon Perry, Eli Tyre, Daniel Erasmus, Emmanuel Saadia, Erik Brynjolfsson, Anamaria Berea, Niko Zinovii, Matthew Farrell, Diana Fleischman, and Douglas Barrett.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

The outbreak of mass nostalgia in the 1970s that then developed into a general cultural listlessness, in other words, is comorbid with what happened to our political economy. One illness didn’t exactly cause the other illness, but each made the other more serious, and harder to cure. The economics professor (and author and blogger and podcaster) Tyler Cowen has written intelligently about our national stagnation and “the growing number of people in our society who accept, welcome, or even enforce a resistance to things new, different, or challenging.” He also thinks we reached a tipping point on this score in the 1990s. “Americans are in fact working much harder than before to postpone change,” he wrote in his 2017 book The Complacent Class, or to avoid it altogether, and this is true whether we’re talking about corporate competition, changing residences or jobs, or building things.

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas
by Markus K. Brunnermeier , Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau
Published 3 Aug 2016

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the following for their helpful advice and criticism of drafts of the manuscript: Mark Aguiar, Jörg Asmussen, Leszek Balcerowicz, José Manuel Barroso, Michael Bordo, Gerald Braunberger, Margaret Bray, Claudia Buch, Marco Butti, Elena Carletti, Christophe Chamley, Vítor Constâncio, Giancarlo Corsetti, Benoît Cœueré, Tyler Cowen, Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, Mario Draghi, Tom Ferguson, Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Eugenio Gaiotti, Gabriele Galati, Luis Garicano, Thomas Gehrig, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Helmut Herres, Fédéric Holm-Hadulla, Patrick Honohan, Otmar Issing, Nobu Kiyotaki, Yann Koby, Jan Pieter Krahnen, Christine Lagarde, Philip Lane, Sam Langfield, Wolfgang Lemke, Stefan Luck, Klaus Masuch, Falk Mazelis, Sebastian Merkel, Ashoka Mody, Andrew Moravcsik, Stephen Morris, Jerry Z.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

Andrea Burgess supplied me with a ceaseless supply of books from the London Library, despite the fact that they had no obvious relationship with my day job. I’m particularly grateful to Zanny Minton-Beddoes, the editor-in-chief, for smiling on my bookwriting habits. Several academics provided ideas, information and general inspiration at a particularly important stage of writing: Luigi Zingales, of the University of Chicago’s Booth School, Tyler Cowen, Garett Jones and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University, and Jerry Muller of the Catholic University of America. Michael Sandel was kind enough to point out a number of slips and errors. I would like to record my debt to Keith Hope, who alerted me, many years ago, to the fascinating connections between Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British intellectual aristocracy and IQ testing.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
by Joseph Henrich
Published 7 Sep 2020

Along the way, I benefited from conversations in interactions with many researchers and authors, including Dan Smail, Rob Boyd, Kim Hill, Sarah Mathew, Sascha Becker, Jared Rubin, Hans-Joachim Voth, Kathleen Vohs, Ernst Fehr, Matt Syed, Mark Koyama, Noel Johnson, Scott Atran, Peter Turchin, Eric Kimbrough, Sasha Vostroknutov, Alberto Alesina, Steve Stich, Tyler Cowen, Fiery Cushman, Josh Greene, Alan Fiske, Ricardo Hausmann, Clark Barrett, Paola Giuliano, Alessandra Cassar, Devesh Rustagi, Thomas Talhelm, Ed Glaeser, Felipe Valencia Caicedo, Dan Hruschka, Robert Barro, Rachel McCleary, Sendhil Mullainathan, Lera Boroditsky, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová, Mike Gurven, and Carole Hooven, among many others.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

We assume today that revolutionary new technologies equivalent to steam power and the internal combustion engine will continue to appear into the future. But the laws of physics do not guarantee such a result. It is entirely possible that the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution captured what Tyler Cowen calls the “low-hanging fruit” of productivity advance, and that while future innovations will continue, the rate at which they improve human welfare will fall. Indeed, a number of laws of physics suggest that there might be hard limits on the carrying capacity of the planet to sustain growing populations at high standards of living.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

Then there are genres that are flourishing as never before, such as animation and industrial design, and still others that have only recently come into existence but have already achieved moments of high accomplishment, such as computer graphics and rock videos (for instance, Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer). In every era for thousands of years critics have bemoaned the decline of culture, and the economist Tyler Cowen suggests they are the victims of a cognitive illusion. The best works of art are more likely to appear in a past decade than in the present decade for the same reason that another line in the supermarket always moves faster than the one you are in: there are more of them. We get to enjoy the greatest hits winnowed from all those decades, listening to the Mozarts and forgetting the Salieris.

Global Catastrophic Risks
by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic
Published 2 Jul 2008

When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. ( 1 983, p. 220) Acknowledgements For discussion and useful suggestions I would like to thank Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Alex Tabarrok, Dan Houser, Don Boudreaux and Ilia Rainer. Geoffrey Lea provided excellent research assistance. 5 18 Global catastrophic risks Suggestions for further reading Becker, J . ( 1 996). Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (New York: The Free Press). An eye-opening history of Chinese Communism's responsibility for the greatest famine in human history.

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

{647} John Stossel, Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media… (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 250. {648} “Aspiring Africa,” The Economist, March 2, 2013, p. 12. {649} Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 14. {650} Tyler Cowen “Public Goods and Externalities,” The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David Henderson (New York: Warner Books, 1993), pp. 74–77. {651} Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: The Free Press, 1969), p. xv. {652} Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights, pp. 62–63