Friday, May 27, 2011

Bloomberg Profiles Tyler Cowen

Bloomberg profiles George Mason economist, blogger, infovore, speed reader Tyler Cowen.

4 Comments:

At 5/27/2011 9:57 AM, Blogger Buddy R Pacifico said...

Tyler Cowan consumes books like I consume potato chips; voraciously.

Tyler Cowan's Great Stagnation has created quite a stir in economics and publishing.

Prof. Perry presented the argument "Maybe the Yardstick's Deficient, Not Growth" in response to Cowan's Great Stagnation hypothesis.

How do you measure "Consumer Surplus" makes a lot of sense to me. Regardless, Tyler Cowan gets people engaged in a cascade of interesting ideas.

 
At 5/27/2011 11:16 AM, Blogger Che is dead said...

"Cowen’s first rule of reading is as follows: You need not finish. He takes up books with great hope and no mercy, and when he is done -- sometimes after five minutes -- he abandons them in public, an act he calls a “liberation.”. . . Cowen had been skeptical himself, but saw too many bits of evidence to ignore: sports salaries, data on executive compensation, the gulf between J.K. Rowling’s fortune and what other authors make."

Too, funny.

 
At 5/27/2011 2:55 PM, Blogger juandos said...

I think this particular commentary is far & away my favorite Cowen commentary: The Inequality That Matters

Leave it to that idiot David Brooks to insult Cowens though...

 
At 5/27/2011 5:27 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The problem with Cowen is the same as for most young savants after they grow up: they are able to use their advanced processing ability to collate a sea of information a mile wide and more than an inch deep, but are unable to filter and ruminate about all that information to come to new and worthwhile conclusions. There are a few historical exceptions, maybe someone like von Neumann, but it's largely the rule. It is fascinating though how the long-broken educational system will greatly reward these savants while largely eschewing those with original thought in their own lifetime- Boltzmann comes to mind- only to later teach the original thinkers' work when they are inevitably proven right. :) Further evidence that academia is a dustbin that needs to be thrown away.

 

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