Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowenis an American economist, academic, and writer. He occupies the Holbert C. Harris Chair of economics, as a professor at George Mason University, and is co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution. Cowen and Tabarrok have also ventured into online education by starting Marginal Revolution University. He currently writes the "Economic Scene" column for the New York Times. He also writes for such publications as The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Newsweek, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth21 January 1962
CountryUnited States of America
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We're seeing an enormous amount of global upward mobility that's quite rapid and quite sudden, and undiscovered individuals have a chance - using the Internet, using computers - to prove themselves very quickly. So I think the mobility story will be a quite complicated one.
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At least in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers - not even corrupt ones. It's directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise. It's directed at the husband of your wife's sister, because he earns 20 percent more than you do.
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When you look at the actual data on technological innovation, one thing you see is that what I call the 'low-hanging fruit' has been exhausted. So radio, flush toilets, electricity, and automobiles - a lot of very basic inventions - have spread to almost all households.
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The way to make the world a better place, through your eating, is simply to eat a bit less meat. Local is sometimes good, sometimes bad. But even when it's good, its environmental impact is relatively small compared to other possible improvements.
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Sports is remarkably cognitive. I think it's underrated just how smart it is. Actually, if I had more time, I would spend more time with sports. Watching it, reading about it, I think it's oddly underrated.
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If we want to improve American food and make it much cheaper, we should deregulate the food trucks and the other street vendors, provided they meet certain sanitation standards. Many cities have already moved down this path, and people are not keeling over with salmonella.
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The iPhone is made on a global scale, and it blends computers, the Internet, communications, and artificial intelligence in one blockbuster, game-changing innovation. It reflects so many of the things that our contemporary world is good at - indeed, great at.
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Economics is everywhere, and understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.
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I think people who are not rich can be extremely happy. And I think the chances to be happy in this new world - with many more opportunities to be creative, to be online, to educate yourself - there'll be a lot more chances to be happy. It's not to say everyone will take them, but there will be a lot of new paths to opportunity.
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I think higher ed in the U.S. is fairly healthy, and by global standards it dominates, and it makes people more productive. But a lot of our K-12 is a disaster. And the single most important reform would just be to fire the worst ten or 15 percent of teachers in the lot, and we would have massive improvements.
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Some Google employees have their self-driving vehicles take them to work. These car robots don't look like something from 'The Jetsons'; the driverless features on these cars are a bunch of sensors, wires, and software. This technology 'works.'
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I think as individuals, people overrate the virtues of local food. Most of the energy consumption in our food system is not caused by transportation. Sometimes local food is more energy efficient. But often it's not. The strongest case for locavorism is to eat less that's flown on planes, and not to worry about boats.
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Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism.
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Throwing more science at things isn't always the answer.