Hello everyone, I am Tyler Cowen, Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University. I serve as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With my colleague Alex Tabarrok, I coauthor the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and am cofounder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.
I have authored several bestselling books, as well as publishing widely in academic journals and the popular media. My latest book is Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. Some of my other well-known books include The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better and Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals. I write a regular column for Bloomberg View, and am host of Conversations with Tyler, a popular podcast series featuring today's most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between. In 2019, Patrick Collison and I authored We Need A New Science of Progress.
Ask me anything! I will answer a selection of questions on Tuesday, January 17.
Use the comments below to add questions, and upvote any questions you'd particularly like me to answer.
Many of the movements you are involved in and praise (e.g econ and EA) use online writing/blogging to communicate and generate new ideas.
Will this continue in recognizable form despite AIs surpassing human skill at writing? Are the young people who are investing in this skill learning how to use the hand powered loom in 1800?
Some ~12 years after the book, what are your thoughts on the Great Stagnation? (Asking more about the phenomenon of stagnation and less for thoughts on the book itself.) How has this played out? Have your predictions held up? What will stagnation look like going forward?
You are well-known for your love of food, cuisine and dining, both as a diner and as a cook. Has your deep relationship with food informed or substantiated how you think about progress and progress studies?
What's the lowest-hanging fruit you see in Progress Studies? What are the research topics or programs that are sitting there, waiting on the right people? If it's important to the answer, who are the right people?
Since writing We Need A New Science of Progress, a number of intellectuals have started to work on Progress Studies writ large. Which areas of progress do you think the movement underrates, or are in the need of more attention?
What role should biography play in progress studies? What do you think of the “Great Man Theory of History”? Should economists write more biographies?
Are you excited about Charter Cities for more progress? I.e. not charter cities in developed countries as a kind of developmental anti global powerty intervention. I mean highly developed charter cities meant for rich well educated ppl to live there. Those CCs could implement all the cool progress movement ideas. E.g. they could be a heaven for biomedical companies wanting to do human challenge trials. They could test out land value tax schemes, or different voting mechanisms and other, more effective forms of government.
Are current US rates of growth and disruption enough to keep protectionist interest groups from outpacing innovation (#MancurOlson)? Comparing your 2003 work and present work, it seems, at least to me, that your sense of how culture works has changed, namely the extent to which culture and individuals are elastic. What's your current view here?
What should we do to ensure capital allocators (VC, etc) begin to care more about stagnation? I believe we have enough evidence at this point that when interest rates are low and there are fast growing companies with 80% gross margins (a relatively ahistoric phenomenon) - many capital allocators will optimize for book value mark ups and liquidity as opposed to backing enduring productivity growth bets. Perhaps Marc Andreessen's "It's time to build" blog post led to an early zeitgeist shift here - what should we do next?
Are you more of a hedgehog or a fox? (In Isaiah Berlin / Archilochus terminology: “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”)
Are you more of a bird or a frog? (In Freeman Dyson terminology: “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas … out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one a... (read more)
Do the GPTs constitute >10% of the AI capabilities progress (set zero at just before AlexNet) necessary for automating most of the science R&D process?
Dear Tyler, I have 2 related questions about developing countries.
Russia and China are considered to be the least religious countries - for example only 4 % Russians regularly go to the church. Do you think there is a connection between the lack of religion and the authoritarian form of government Russia and China seem to revert to every time they have a chance?
And another question – it seems that as soon as some developing countries arrive at some higher income levels, instead of keep improving the lives of their citizens, they try to go for some historical grandeur theme. Russia, Turkey, China, Ethiopia. Will we see the same happening in India – will they try to restore a Mauryan empire?
Is the ability to automate most of the scientific R&D process a necessary component of transformative AI that meaningfully accelerates economic growth? If not, what do these intermediate abilities look like?
I would think that computers being orders of magnitude better than humans would diminish interest in chess, but that does not seem to be the case.
Human chess seems to be more popular than ever. What’s driving that? Is it a fad?
What do you think Effective Altruism 1) gets right and 2) is important?
What do you think Effective Altruism 1) gets wrong and 2) is important?
Emerson: overrated or underrated?
Why is David Foster Wallace overrated?
What will the world look like when we get our flying cars?
Related: Does the theory that low impact regulations can have a super-additive impact on productivity hold muster? When I was reading "Where's My Flying Car?", the book claimed regulations reduced GDP growth by a massive amount, and I read about the foregoing theory when I went digging in the literature.
Should modernisation theory receive more attention in critiques and apologetics of economic development?
Thanks for doing this!
What is the most important domain for which talent is just not very important?
In your book on Talent you mention “crystallising experiences” in the last chapter. Do you have any ideas how people might generate these “synthetically” for themselves, I.e. get themselves to experience certain possibilities as vivid and real without any external input?
To what extent is fieldwork underrated by economists? I feel it is quite so because it captures things that numbers often lose (eg nuance) and context that is hard to get without it. IMO i
t shouldn't be the best form of evidence, but definitely a starting point in it
How do the returns to high verbal intelligence change if AI gains the writing abilities of the median NYT opinion writer? How should people whose comparative advantage is in writing prepare for this?
Cowen writes...
"For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up."
Can you please explain why the goal should be to speed up the knowledge explosion?
We already have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, an ever present existential threat that we typically consider too boring to bother discussing, perhaps because we haven't the slightest clue how to rid ourselves of these weapons. And so, we're ... (read more)
What US state are you most optimistic about, with regards to progress, development, YIMBYism, investment, higher education, and so on?
What about pessimistic?
In e.g. 50 years, what states do you think will have trended upwards vs. downwards from now?
Post Dobbs and the fall of Roe v Wade, what should society do about the problem of unwanted pregnancies?
Who was your mentor?
Do you think is there more low hanging fruit in implementing policies that improve the plus side of Wealth Plus, or the wealth side?
What are some of your top suggestions on how society can enhance the Plus side of the equation in the current political and social climate?
At the margin, do you think developed countries like Canada would increase Wealth Plus by decreasing average annual labour hours (ie increasing statutory minimum vacation/reducing work week) ?
Could you give a prediction of the form "in 2040, there will exist people which are more efficient at skill X than the best AI models" in which you are more confident than not? What about 2030 or 2050?
(Don't take this in bad faith, I have no intention of going back and mocking anyone's predictions; but there is very useful signal in correct answers and I'm curious why more people don't offer takes on this.)
One of the consequences of the pandemic is a dispersion of talent and capital away from of the traditional regional economic engines. Steve Case documented that change in his Rise of the Rest book and you spoke on Joe Londsdale's American Optimist podcast on how Austin maybe one of big beneficiaries of this change.
To see if this is leading to a change in regional innovation we have to be able to measure it, but as I see it the traditional measures have some large flaws.
The primary challenge is that innovation is created locally and distur... (read more)
Is cool weather an underrated factor in economic growth ? With the exception of city/states like singapore gdp per capita seems to be higher in cooler areas. If this factor has any credence will it affect your optimism about India ?
In academia, you've said that “The incentive is to build a brick … not to build a building.” If the balance is off here, how could we reform academic incentives to get more buildings?
Preface: If we assume that a global zeitgeist of degrowth, anti-solutionism, pessimism, national tribalism, de-enlightenment, and de-globalization — creates a non-trivial risk to future human progress, then
Q: What might reasonably be done by the progress studies community to move the zeitgeist? Or is it too little, by too few, coming too late? It's sometimes difficult not to see the entirety of the progress movement as a drop in the ocean of doom-centric media.
Is the internet and social media driving global emotion and feelings? If so, what are the main outcomes and how should we be thinking about it?
You have previously argued that envy is local (in either Average is Over or Great Stagnation), and in a recent talk (Why do liberal democracies feel stuck) you argued that the internet is a global engine for ideas more so than before. My feeling is that in the last ~7 years emotion and feelings are more becoming global due to the internet. An important point is that people celebrate wins far less than th... (read more)
miscellaneous fun questions:
Is the best yet to come for New Jersey?
Is the best yet to come for the Visegrad 4?
Who's the most talented Brontë sister? Best Brontë book?
Who was the most important British woman author?
Is it important for kids to play sports?
Ignoring the possibility of crazy AI stuff, will economists 'solve' development economics in the next 100 years?
What's your guess on which will end up increasing productivity more: the internet, or the latest AI models?