Nationality American Role Economist Name Tyler Cowen | ||
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Born January 21, 1962 (age 62) ( 1962-01-21 ) Influences Chicago SchoolThomas SchellingCarl Menger Books The Great Stagnation, Average is Over, Modern Principles: Microeconomics, Modern Principles of Econo, Discover Your Inner Economist Similar People Alex Tabarrok, Bryan Caplan, James M Buchanan, Thomas Schelling, David D Friedman | ||
Tyler cowen the rise and fall of the chinese economy
Tyler Cowen (; born January 21, 1962) is an American economist, who is an economics professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert C. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the economics blog, Marginal Revolution, together with co-author Alex Tabarrok. Cowen and Tabarrok also maintain the website Marginal Revolution University, a venture in online education.
Contents
- Tyler cowen the rise and fall of the chinese economy
- Tyler cowen author of an economist gets lunch
- Education and personal life
- Culture
- Books
- New York Times columns
- Dining guide
- Political philosophy
- Criticism
- Attack
- Select journal articles
- Select articles
- References
Cowen writes the "Economic Scene" column for The New York Times, and since July 2016 has been a regular opinion columnist at Bloomberg View. He also writes for such publications as The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Newsweek, and the Wilson Quarterly. He serves as general director of George Mason's Mercatus Center, a university research center that focuses on the market economy.
In February 2011, The Economist conducted a poll in which the magazine asked "experts at Economics...which economists were most influential over the past decade." After the ten most popular nominations, there were twenty six more getting one vote each, with Cowen among them.
He was ranked #72 among the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" in 2011 by Foreign Policy Magazine "for finding markets in everything."
Tyler cowen author of an economist gets lunch
Education and personal life
Cowen was born in Bergen County, New Jersey. At 15, he became the youngest ever New Jersey state chess champion.
He graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor of science degree in economics in 1983 and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987 with his thesis titled Essays in the theory of welfare economics. At Harvard, he was mentored by game theorist Thomas Schelling, the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is married to Natasha Cowen, a lawyer.
Culture
The Los Angeles Times has described Cowen as "a man who can talk about Haitian voodoo flags, Iranian cinema, Hong Kong cuisine, Abstract Expressionism, Zairian music and Mexican folk art with seemingly equal facility." One of Cowen's primary research interests is the economics of culture. He has written books on fame (What Price Fame?), art (In Praise of Commercial Culture), and cultural trade (Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures). In Markets and Cultural Voices, he relays how globalization is changing the world of three Mexican amate painters. Cowen argues that free markets change culture for the better, allowing them to evolve into something more people want. Other books include Public Goods and Market Failures, The Theory of Market Failure, Explorations in the New Monetary Economics, Risk and Business Cycles, Economic Welfare, and New Theories of Market Failure.
Books
New York Times columns
Cowen's New York Times columns cover a wide range of issues, such as the 2008 financial crisis: "Too Few Regulations? No, Just Ineffective Ones".
Dining guide
His dining guide for the DC area, "Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide," was reprinted in the Food section of The Washington Post.
Political philosophy
Cowen has written papers on political philosophy and ethics. He co-wrote a paper with philosopher Derek Parfit arguing against the social discount rate. In a 2006 paper, he argued that the epistemic problem fails to refute consequentialist forms of argument.
Cowen has been described as a "libertarian bargainer" who can influence practical policy making, yet he endorsed bank bailouts in his March 2, 2009 column in The New York Times. In a 2007 article entitled "The Paradox of Libertarianism," Cowen argued that libertarians "should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don't have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal."
In 2012, David Brooks called Cowen "one of the most influential bloggers on the right," writing that he is among those who "start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way."
In an August 2014 blog post, Cowen wrote, "Just to summarize, I generally favor much more immigration but not open borders, I am a liberal on most but not all social issues, and I am market-oriented on economic issues. On most current foreign policy issues I am genuinely agnostic as to what exactly we should do but skeptical that we are doing the right thing at the moment. I don’t like voting for either party or for third parties."
Criticism
Non-mainstream economists have criticized Cowen's pro-free market views. In his January 23, 2009 blog titled "Dumping on Robert Barro," Cowen challenged those who were advocating at the time more stimulus for the US economy to "cheer [him] up by [their] evidence [that stimulus works," claiming that "pro-stimulus proponents...are not putting up comparable empirical evidence of their own for the efficacy of fiscal policy and there is a reason for that, namely that the evidence isn’t really there." In response, economist Bill Mitchell pointed out "the Post World War II period up until the mid-1970s."
According to William K. Black, associate professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and former bank regulator, while Cowen "assumes that productivity determines personal wealth and is measured by wealth," in reality Cowen's "meritocratic vanguard caused the greatest loss of wealth to society" while "so many financial CEOs not only destroyed societal wealth, but also became wealthy through accounting control fraud." Black also pointed out that Cowen along with what he calls "theoclassical economists," through their ideas, have "created such a criminogenic environment that control fraud is frequently the optimal strategy for maximizing the CEOs’ self-interest." In another column, Black challenged Cowen’s "assumption that unrestrained self-interested actions produce a hyper-meritocracy that improves life," stating that, instead, "unrestrained self-interested actions are the primary threat to humanity."
Attack
On March 26, 2014, Cowen was attacked while teaching "Law and Literature" in his classroom by Jonathan Pendleton, who tried to perform a "citizen's arrest" of Cowen and then pepper sprayed him. A bystander intervened and Pendelton was detained and arrested shortly after by police. Cowen and his students reportedly suffered no lasting injuries. In Pendelton's trial, Cowen testified that his attacker believed that Cowen accused him that he "controlled his mind at a distance" and also [of] sexual harassment."