Tyler Cowen
Biographic Data
| ID | 537006 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tyler Cowen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tyler |
| FAMILY NAME | Cowen |
| SIGNATURE | COWEN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Censorship of U.S. movies in China
The Complacent Class
The problem, according to legendary blogger, economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen, is that Americans today have broken from this tradition. Working harder than ever to avoid change, seeking more security and more safety. Moving homes less, making children play inside more, choosing their music and friends on algorithms that wall us off from anything that might be too new or too different. While this might feel rational and be good individ…
A Skeptical View of the National Science Foundation's Role in Economic Research
We can imagine a plausible case for government support of science based on traditional economic reasons of externalities and public goods. Yet when it comes to government support of grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for economic research, our sense is that many economists avoid critical questions, skimp on analysis, and move straight to advocacy. In this essay, we take a more skeptical attitude toward the efforts of the NSF to sub…
Economists’ Lives
Reviewed by: Economists’ Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics Tyler Cowen (bio) E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget, eds. Economists’ Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 402 pp. ISBN 978-0-822-36683-6, $59.95. If there is one method that economists are reluctant to embrace, it is that of biography. Biographies are so often about the individual, the unique, and the subj…
Why everything has changed
The Importance of Defining the Feasible Set
How should we define the feasible set? Even when individuals agree on facts and values, as traditionally construed, different views on feasibility may suffice to produce very different policy conclusions. Focusing on the difficulties in the feasibility concept may help us resolve some policy disagreements, or at least identify the sources of those disagreements. Feasibility is most plausibly a matter of degree rather than of kind. Normative econo…
The Epistemic Problem Does Not Refute Consequentialism
Should radical uncertainty about the distant future dissuade us from judging options by referring to their consequences? I argue no. Some short-run benefits are sufficiently high that we should pursue them, even if our long-run estimates possess a very high variance. I discuss the relationship between the epistemic argument and ‘fuzzy’ rankings and also ‘arguments from infinity’. Furthermore, extant versions of the epistemic argument require the …
Terrorism as theater
Market failure for the treatment of animals
Markets and Cultural Voices
This intriguing work explores the world of three amate artists. A native tradition, all of their painting is done in Mexico, yet, the finished product is sold almost exclusively to wealthy American art buyers. Cowen examines this cultural interaction between Mexico and the United States to see how globalization shapes the lives and the work of the artists and their families. The story of these three artists reveals that this exchange simultaneous…
Conflict, Cooperation and Competition in Anarchy
Postwar Reconstruction
Steven J. Brams, Biblical games
Self-deception as the root of political failure
Creative Destruction
A Road Map to Middle Eastern peace? – A Public Choice Perspective
Response to Steven Plaut
Policing Nature
Earl A. Thompson and Charles R. Hickson, Ideology and the Evolution of Vital Institutions
The Public Goods Rationale for Government and the Circularity Problem
It has been suggested that the production of public goods through a government involves a circularity problem. Since government itself is a public good, how can we use government to produce other public goods? Several solutions to this supposed circularity are offered. Government is a unique kind of public good with some potentially self-generating and self-supporting features. The public goods theory of government remains intact, and this enterp…
Creative Destruction
A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra's "My Way" as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly original treatment of a fiercely debated issue, Tyler Cowen makes a bold new case for a more sympathetic understanding of cross-cultural trade. Creative Des…
The Esteem Theory of Norms
Uncommon Culture
In Praise of Commercial Culture
Risk and business cycles
Rosser's thoughtful and careful review of my book on business cycles reflects a different methodological stance than my own. I believe that economic theory and macroeconomics cannot escape using the concept of risk, even though, as Rosser points out, risk is not a simple unidimensional magnitude in many circumstances. I view the rational expectations assumption as a useful way of presenting a theory, rather than as a descriptive account of real‐w…
Why only Nixon could go to China
Public Goods Definitions and their Institutional Context
(1985). Public Goods Definitions and their Institutional Context: a Critique of Public Goods Theory. Review of Social Economy: Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 53-63
The Importance of Defining the Feasible Set
How should we define the feasible set? Even when individuals agree on facts and values, as traditionally construed, different views on feasibility may suffice to produce very different policy conclusions. Focusing on the difficulties in the feasibility concept may help us resolve some policy disagreements, or at least identify the sources of those disagreements. Feasibility is most plausibly a matter of degree rather than of kind. Normative econo…
Self-deception as the root of political failure
A Road Map to Middle Eastern peace? – A Public Choice Perspective
The Development of the New Monetary Economics
This paper looks into the history of economic thought to examine the forerunners of the "new monetary economics." This approach emphasizes the role of regulations on private financial intermediation in determining the particular institutional arrangements that contemporary monetary theory treats as data. The "new view" investigates the possibility that under laissez-faire the unit of account and means of payment, traditionally bundled together in…
What Do We Learn from the Repugnant Conclusion
Postwar Reconstruction
Discounting and Restitution
Terrorism as theater
Policing Nature
Risk and business cycles
Rosser's thoughtful and careful review of my book on business cycles reflects a different methodological stance than my own. I believe that economic theory and macroeconomics cannot escape using the concept of risk, even though, as Rosser points out, risk is not a simple unidimensional magnitude in many circumstances. I view the rational expectations assumption as a useful way of presenting a theory, rather than as a descriptive account of real‐w…
Economic effects of a conflict-prone world order
Why Keynesianism triumphed or, could so many Keynesians have been wrong
Defenders of laissez‐faire have not successfully explained the historical experience of the Great Depression. Unemployment was widespread and persistent and cannot be ascribed to government intervention. Legal restrictions offer at best a partial explanation of why real wages did not fall. The Keynesian world view is also supported by experience with investment and equity market volatility, the conversion of Lionel Robbins, the wartime recovery, …
The Epistemic Problem Does Not Refute Consequentialism
Should radical uncertainty about the distant future dissuade us from judging options by referring to their consequences? I argue no. Some short-run benefits are sufficiently high that we should pursue them, even if our long-run estimates possess a very high variance. I discuss the relationship between the epistemic argument and ‘fuzzy’ rankings and also ‘arguments from infinity’. Furthermore, extant versions of the epistemic argument require the …
Response to Steven Plaut
The Esteem Theory of Norms
Do Artists Suffer From a Cost-Disease
We consider the Baumol-Bowen cost-disease argument from the perspective of an artist's occupational choice. Both theory and evidence suggest that the incentives to create art do not diminish and probably increase in a growing market economy. First, countervailing factors may check or limit the operation of the cost-disease. Second, artists can increase their productivity by generating new ideas. New ideas provide the base for all productivity imp…
Public Goods Definitions and their Institutional Context
(1985). Public Goods Definitions and their Institutional Context: a Critique of Public Goods Theory. Review of Social Economy: Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 53-63
The Development of the New Monetary Economics
This paper looks into the history of economic thought to examine the forerunners of the "new monetary economics." This approach emphasizes the role of regulations on private financial intermediation in determining the particular institutional arrangements that contemporary monetary theory treats as data. The "new view" investigates the possibility that under laissez-faire the unit of account and means of payment, traditionally bundled together in…
Why Keynesianism triumphed or, could so many Keynesians have been wrong
Defenders of laissez‐faire have not successfully explained the historical experience of the Great Depression. Unemployment was widespread and persistent and cannot be ascribed to government intervention. Legal restrictions offer at best a partial explanation of why real wages did not fall. The Keynesian world view is also supported by experience with investment and equity market volatility, the conversion of Lionel Robbins, the wartime recovery, …
Economic effects of a conflict-prone world order
Can Keynesianism explain the 1930s? Rejoinder to Smiley
What Do We Learn from the Repugnant Conclusion
Do Artists Suffer From a Cost-Disease
We consider the Baumol-Bowen cost-disease argument from the perspective of an artist's occupational choice. Both theory and evidence suggest that the incentives to create art do not diminish and probably increase in a growing market economy. First, countervailing factors may check or limit the operation of the cost-disease. Second, artists can increase their productivity by generating new ideas. New ideas provide the base for all productivity imp…
Politics and the pursuit of fame
Discounting and Restitution
Why only Nixon could go to China
In Praise of Commercial Culture
Risk and business cycles
Rosser's thoughtful and careful review of my book on business cycles reflects a different methodological stance than my own. I believe that economic theory and macroeconomics cannot escape using the concept of risk, even though, as Rosser points out, risk is not a simple unidimensional magnitude in many circumstances. I view the rational expectations assumption as a useful way of presenting a theory, rather than as a descriptive account of real‐w…
Uncommon Culture
Creative Destruction
A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra's "My Way" as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly original treatment of a fiercely debated issue, Tyler Cowen makes a bold new case for a more sympathetic understanding of cross-cultural trade. Creative Des…
The Esteem Theory of Norms
Policing Nature
Earl A. Thompson and Charles R. Hickson, Ideology and the Evolution of Vital Institutions
The Public Goods Rationale for Government and the Circularity Problem
It has been suggested that the production of public goods through a government involves a circularity problem. Since government itself is a public good, how can we use government to produce other public goods? Several solutions to this supposed circularity are offered. Government is a unique kind of public good with some potentially self-generating and self-supporting features. The public goods theory of government remains intact, and this enterp…
Creative Destruction
A Road Map to Middle Eastern peace? – A Public Choice Perspective
Response to Steven Plaut
Markets and Cultural Voices
This intriguing work explores the world of three amate artists. A native tradition, all of their painting is done in Mexico, yet, the finished product is sold almost exclusively to wealthy American art buyers. Cowen examines this cultural interaction between Mexico and the United States to see how globalization shapes the lives and the work of the artists and their families. The story of these three artists reveals that this exchange simultaneous…
Conflict, Cooperation and Competition in Anarchy
Postwar Reconstruction
Steven J. Brams, Biblical games
Economics (26 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Public finance (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Positive economics (9 works) · Business (7 works) · Economic Theory and Institutions (7 works) · Microeconomics (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works)