Someone told me he ran into someone who said his goal was to be Tyler Cowen. OK, fine, it’s a worthy goal, but I don’t think it’s so easy.
Someone told me he ran into someone who said his goal was to be Tyler Cowen. OK, fine, it’s a worthy goal, but I don’t think it’s so easy.
Tyler has followed up since your 2009 post with works that put him even further out of reach: The Great Stagnation was enormously influential amongst pundits and scholars, and is now in the mainstream political discourse. He tried a more Freakonomics approach with An Economist Gets Lunch and that was moderately successful (I don’t know exact figures, but it was reviewed in every major paper I can remember). Becoming 2009 Tyler was hard enough, 2013 Tyler is downright impossible. One only has to look at his “Books on my pile” column – he gets through more books in a month than I do in a year…
I know Tyler eats because he blogs about eating. I know he teaches because he blogs about his MRUniversity. I know he writes because he has many books. I know he appears on TED, TV, etc. because he links to those things. I know he reads a lot of books, at least enough of them so that if I read the book later he opinion seems reasonably sound.
Given this, I doubt Tyler Cowen sleeps, because he’s never blogged about that.
(intended to be humorous, not snarky; I’m a great admirer of the MR blog, including the comments section)
Andrew:
Your analysis of Tyler is very astute. MR is a great place to discover interesting stuff and prolifically too. Plus a good comments section.
But Tyler’s personal insights are pretty annoying at times: “It looks like some strawberries are reddish and self reccomending. Don’t get me wrong, it is very possible that there exist brown and blue strawberries and I am open to a theory of rainbow colored strawberries. But if someone called strawberries red he might not be too wrong. OTOH I don’t reject alternative points of view either. With a good enough argument I might be convinced that strawberries are mostly yellow. Those are my thoughts right now but I need to ponder more on this. With the way things are changing it is not entirely inconceivable that I might have a different theory of strawberry color in a follow up post next month. ”
He never takes a position on anything and you can never catch him in a corner.
Heh, that’s spot on. I think Alex Tabarrok is the more interesting of the MR bloggers because he takes clear stances. Tyler’s links are great though.
Tabarrok is way less interesting because I can tell what he’s going to say just by knowing the topic of his post. (Hint: it generally involves less government and free markets). Tyler Cowen is great because he doesn’t just trot out libertarian dogma. And his links have a pretty good chance of being interesting/funny/both.
I have been reading Marginal Revolution for years now. This is absolutely spot on.
No, i don’t want to be the next Tyler Cowen. Instead I want to learn to think like an adult..