Tyler Cowen: ‘Economists can’t predict the effects of new technologies. Surely that should humble us a bit?’

Tyler Cowen has only drunk coffee twice in his life. He only drinks tea if someone offers it. He doesn’t touch alcohol. “Alcohol is bad for everyone’s productivity.”

Instead Cowen’s drug of choice is information. He isn’t just an addict — he’s a peddler, a kingpin. Through his blogs, podcasts and books, he spreads big thoughts and highbrow trivia. He is among the most eclectic economists. He champions markets and big business. He insists that artificial intelligence, starting with chatbots such as ChatGPT, is about to change the world. But he also writes about restaurants, films and books — because he enjoys them, and because he’s convinced that culture shapes markets (and vice versa). “People should collect more information about music, about economics, about books. So I try to show them how I do that.”

A professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia, Cowen has become a cult figure among a hyper-intellectual elite bent on self-improvement. At Marginal Revolution, the blog that he co-founded in 2003, he highlights the latest research on, say, why the US gender wage gap stopped narrowing (family leave policies) and how long Roman emperors lasted before being killed. Devoted readers include author Malcolm Gladwell and, Cowen is told, the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak. But he wants more. He has launched an online university, made up of free economics modules.

“My personal ambition is to be the individual who has done the most to teach the world economics, broadly construed,” he tells me. When I ask who his competitors might be for this title, he starts by naming Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes.

Cowen’s brand of economics is practical. Last year he and Daniel Gross, an entrepreneur, published a book, Talent, about how to hire creative individuals. Some organisations eschew unstructured interviews, worried that they discriminate against candidates. Cowen celebrates such free-flowing interviews, particularly if the interviewer asks about things that they’re genuinely interested in.

He often delights in being contrarian. When we meet in London, the consensus is that Britain’s economy couldn’t be much worse. He disagrees. “I view south England — London, Cambridge, Oxford — as one of the most marvellous parts of the world, one of the few places where you can really birth and execute a new idea. You see it with the [Oxford Covid-19] vaccine, you see it with DeepMind [Google’s AI unit founded in London]. This corner of England: it’s already passed Singapore-on-Thames. You’ve left Singapore in the dust!”

Doesn’t Britain lack animal spirits? “That’s true, partly. I wish the ethic of working hard and having a lot of money were [seen as] more unambiguously positive. But not everywhere will be like America. The strong suits here are so strong. London is literally the best city in the world.”

This is typical Cowen: quick to rank people, places and cultures. Others would say, for example, that all major cities have good Asian food these days. “That’s not true! While there is plenty of good Asian food in Paris, you can’t just stumble upon it.”

He has an unfashionable love of generalisation. “People think this stuff anyway, they’re just afraid to say it. Why not just say what you think?” He sees himself as more “psychologically integrated. My natural inclination is just to tell you what I think.”

Maybe books are overrated. Travel is underrated. Among smart educated people, books might be a little bit overrated

He wants to push economics beyond academic methods. He hasn’t written any peer-reviewed articles since 2017. “I’ve done plenty,” he says. “A lot of [economics] is too narrow. I’ve tried to engage with real world issues and express uncertainty when and where I feel it. I think that resonates with a great number of people.”

Cowen, 60, was not always curious. He grew up in New Jersey with little interest in exotic food or travel. Then in his late teens he started travelling to New York, with its concerts, crowds and used bookstores.

He had his first economics papers accepted by journals aged 19, and was a tenured professor at 27. But it was blogging that allowed him to find his audience. “The modern internet totally changed my life.”

Cowen’s superpower is reading. He sees himself as hyperlexic, having the ability for prodigious reading. “If it’s a non-fiction book where I know something about it, I could read maybe five books a night.” He starts reading shortly after 7am, and eats dinner early, at about 5pm, finding it helps him work better in the evening. (Although he loves the diversity of cities, he lives in the Virginia suburbs, partly because of the tax rate.)

His lists of best books of 2022 included 36 titles, including his own Talent, with the unashamed proviso: “These were the best books!” Yet he is open to non-readers: “Maybe books are overrated. Travel is underrated. Among smart educated people, books might be a little bit overrated.”

Hyperlexia is often associated with autism, but Cowen does not have the social difficulties often felt by autistic people. In person, he is engaging and direct, his answers often helpfully blunt.

Conversation, like reading, is a way he gathers information. But neither is enough. “If you only were to read, you might stay an idiot.” It’s writing that “forces you to decide what you think about something. If you get something written every day, no matter what the length, it adds up to quite a bit. It’s the people who go many days without writing who have productivity problems.”

Since 2003, Cowen has written every day — “Sunday, birthday, Christmas, whatever.” On Christmas Day, he blogged on China’s zero-Covid polices. On Thanksgiving, he asked why more currencies weren’t more valuable than the dollar.

What is Cowen’s overall credo? He seeks to view issues “drained of the emotion”. That leads him to an optimism about human progress, not dissimilar to psychologist Steven Pinker’s. He calls himself moderately libertarian, and has collaborated with the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s foundation. He has also defended classical liberalism against the populist right, arguing that the latter, by fomenting distrust in elites, may accelerate “the Brazilianification of the United States”. “I don’t know whether I’m centrist on the issues, but I’m centrist on the mood and the approach.”

He is excited by technological change, but favours institutional continuity, even if the US’s politics seem broken. “My core intuition is, if your per capita GDP is 30-40 per cent higher than that of most of your peer nations, probably not to change. I’ve always been anti-Trump [but] I don’t think Trump will win again, or even get the nomination again. But it seems to me the system works. And we’ve had a lot of policy change lately, not all of it good, but it’s not gridlock at all.”

What does Cowen’s open-mindedness get him? He supported the former UK prime minister Liz Truss’s tax cuts, which led to her being ejected from office: “I thought the market overreacted.” In March 2022, he interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of now defunct crypto platform FTX, and declared him “excellent”.

(That interview displayed Cowen’s scattergun questioning: “I think the best french fries in the world are in southern Argentina, in Patagonia. Where do you think they are?”)

Cowen first met Bankman-Fried a decade ago. They played bughouse chess, a variation of the game. “He was good. He was better at bughouse than at chess. It’s a very important concept for understanding FTX. You have four people and two boards. If I take your piece on this board, I hand it to my partner, and my partner can plunk the piece down in lieu of making a move. You can be in this desperate situation, all of a sudden your partner hands you a queen. So there’s no balance sheet in bughouse chess. Things come out of nowhere to save you. You play desperately and take a lot of risk. If people play bughouse, that’s their core mentality.”

Cowen is a talent spotter. After interviewing Bankman-Fried, would he have hired him? “I would have funded him as a VC, I don’t know if I would have hired him as an employee. One thing Daniel Gross and I say in Talent is: conscientiousness is the hardest trait to judge and the easiest trait to fake.”

Cowen remains hopeful about crypto. “Crypto is such a truly new idea. And people shouldn’t just dump on it.”

In general, he sees disruption as unthreatening. “YouTube is the most important educational vehicle in the world,” but prestigious universities and large state ones “will keep on doing well”. Humans will get through the disruption of AI too, he says, although he challenges economists to try to predict the fallout more precisely. “We can’t predict business cycles, we can’t predict the effects of new technologies. Surely that should humble us a bit?”

He plans to focus less on writing and more on speaking appearances, to adapt to a world where readers spend time with chatbots. “If they built a really good GPT [chatbot] that mimicked me, I would be really happy. It would make some version of me immortal. I’m 60, and I have tenure and other sources of income, so not everyone is in that…