Tyler Cowen > Quotes

“Food is a product of supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.”
― Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies

“The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“It’s harder to get outside your own head than you think.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe… Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them.

Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader. Maybe we think we are supposed to like tough books, but are we? Who says? Many writers (and art museums) produce for quite a small subsample of the… public.”
― Tyler Cowen

“Once you're using sides and sauces you're on the right track and you're also following the general principles about how to eat well in the United States.”
― Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies

“Machines have no fear of the unfamiliar.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“The right wing will be identified with the monied class, even when the left often has more money. And the left wing will be identified as the whiners, even though the right at times whines as much or more. You might say that both sides are monied, high human capital whiners, on the whole.”
― Tyler Cowen

“1. Quality land and natural resources 2. Intellectual property, or good ideas about what should be produced 3. Quality labor with unique skills”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Social systems proceed by (usually) covering up the brutalities upon which they are based. The doctor doesn't let you get to his door and then turn you away, rather his home address is hard to find. The government handcuffs you so they don't have to shoot you trying to escape. And so on.”
― Tyler Cowen

“...apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953...The wonders portrayed in THE JETSONS, the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass...Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down compared to what people saw two or three generations ago.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that mechanized intelligence can solve a rapidly expanding repertoire of problems.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“The world—not to mention the American Medical Association—is pretty far from accepting this fact, but the person working with the computer doesn’t have to be a doctor or even a medical expert. She has to be good at understanding and correcting the computer’s mistakes, which is a very different skill. This will involve some knowledge of medicine, brain scans, or whatever, but it is a less comprehensive medical knowledge than what a prestigious MD would have. It may well involve more knowledge of smart machines, how they work, and what their failings are likely to be.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“If you have an unusual ability to spot, recruit, and direct those who work well with computers, even if you don’t work well with computers yourself, the contemporary world will make you rich.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“When I look back at the last decade, I think the following: There are some very wealthy people, but a lot of their incomes are from financial innovations that do not translate to gains for the average American citizen.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better

“we tend to visualize future events very poorly and with a deficit of proper imagination.”
― Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

“The lesson about food is that the most predictable and the most orderly outcomes are always not the best. They are just easier to describe. Fads are orderly. Food carts and fires aren't. Feeding the world could be a delicious mess, full of diverse flavors and sometimes good old-fashioned smoke.”
― Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies

“Most Web activities do not generate jobs and revenue at the rate of past technological breakthroughs. When Ford and General Motors were growing in the early part of the twentieth century, they created millions of jobs and helped build Detroit into a top-tier U.S. city. Today, Facebook creates a lot of voyeuristic pleasure, but the company doesn’t employ many people and hasn’t done much for Palo Alto; a lot of the “work” is performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers. You could say that the real work is done by its users, in their spare time and as a form of leisure. Web 2.0 is not filling government coffers or supporting many families, even though it’s been great for users, programmers, and some information technology specialists. Everyone on the Web has heard of Twitter, but as of Fall 2010, only about three hundred people work there.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better

“It is often a puzzle for foreigners why the United States has such a dismal performance when it comes to murder, guns, and mental illness, all features of American life that, when compared to most of the other wealthy countries, are so awful they do not require further documentation. You might wonder how those bad results square with America’s relatively strong performances on most social capital indices, such as trust, cooperation, and charitable philanthropy; on philanthropy, we even rate as the global number one. The truth is that those positive and negative facets are two sides of the same coin: Cooperation is very often furthered by segregating those who do not fit in. That creates some superclusters of cooperation among the quality cooperators and a fair amount of chaos and dysfunctionality elsewhere.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Firms and employers and monitors will be able to measure economic value with a sometimes oppressive precision.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“All of the criticisms one might mount against the corporate form—some of which are valid—pale in contrast to two straightforward and indeed essential virtues. First, business makes most of the stuff we enjoy and consume. Second, business is what gives most of us jobs. The two words that follow most immediately from the world of business are “prosperity” and “opportunity.”
― Tyler Cowen, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero

“Therefore, I wish to say it again: The biggest story of the last fifteen years, both nationally and globally, is the growing likelihood that a cyclical model of history will be a better predictor than a model of ongoing progress.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Few people read coffee-table photo books, and indeed they are not intended to be read. I find the text in these books is often surprisingly good, perhaps because the author--or more importantly, the editor--feels no need to pander.”
― Tyler Cowen, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist

“And to be blunt—while I know I can’t prove this—I wonder how much of the middle class consists of people in government or protected service-sector jobs who don’t actually produce nearly as much as their pay.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Consider the top man–machine medical diagnosticians, circa 2035. They will make life-and-death decisions for patients, hospitals, and other doctors. But what in a malpractice case should count as persuasive evidence of a medical mistake? The judgment of either “man alone” or “machine alone” won’t do the trick, because neither is up to judging the team. Sometimes it will be possible to ascertain that a top human team member was in fact a fraud, but more typically the joint human–cyber diagnostic decisions themselves will be our highest standards for what is best. Having one team dispute the choice of another may indicate a mistake, but it will hardly show malfeasance. When”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“As chain stores rise, there is also a loss of dynamism, competition, and market entry for new ideas and products. Keep in mind that today’s major chain was once a small individual store on a street somewhere. A bit more economic chaos, even if it is inconvenient in the short run, actually tends to be correlated with higher rates of innovation.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“But once again, there is some disappointing news, as the income of the median or typical American household is down since 2000, and unless wage gains are very strong in the next few years, this country essentially will have gone twenty years with wage stagnation or near wage stagnation for median earners.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“There has been an enduring misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up. Turing’s core message was never “If a machine can imitate a man, the machine must be intelligent.” Rather, it was “Inability to imitate does not rule out intelligence.” In his classic essay on the Turing test, Turing encouraged his readers to take a broader perspective on intelligence and conceive of it more universally and indeed more ethically. He was concerned with the possibility of unusual forms of intelligence, our inability to recognize those intelligences, and the limitations of the concept of indistinguishability as a standard for defining what is intelligence and what is not. In section two of the paper, Turing asks directly whether imitation should be the standard of intelligence. He considers whether a man can imitate a machine rather than vice versa. Of course the answer is no, especially in matters of arithmetic, yet obviously a man thinks and can think computationally (in terms of chess problems, for example). We are warned that imitation cannot be the fundamental standard or marker of intelligence. Reflecting on Turing’s life can change one’s perspective on what the Turing test really means. Turing was gay. He was persecuted for this difference in a manner that included chemical castration and led to his suicide. In the mainstream British society of that time, he proved unable to consistently “pass” for straight. Interestingly, the second paragraph of Turing’s famous paper starts with the question of whether a male or female can pass for a member of the other gender in a typed conversation. The notion of “passing” was of direct personal concern to Turing and in more personal settings Turing probably did not view “passing” as synonymous with actually being a particular way.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Personal qualities of character such as self-motivation and conscientiousness will reap a lot of gains in the new world to come.”
― Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Overall, the people from the more commercialized societies are much more willing to cooperate outside of narrow kinship circles. The core message is that commerce and advanced market societies tend to breed trust and reciprocal cooperation. It is no accident that such hypotheses were common among eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, such as the Frenchman Montesquieu, and others who were observing the rise of commercial society on a massive scale for the very first time.”
― Tyler Cowen, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero

“The books that are most likely to be stolen from libraries are books on ethics, especially those that are likely to be read by faculty and advanced students in moral philosophy. Those books go missing at a rate 50 to 150 percent higher than comparable texts not about ethics. And if it is any consolation, books by Nietzsche are among the most likely to be snatched, and another target is Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Again, maybe businesspeople are not the most dishonest group after all.”
― Tyler Cowen, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero