Episode: Tyler Cowen: Two Blundering Fools
Pub date: 2018-01-25
Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast
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Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University. He runs the Mercatus Center, which bridges the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. He blogs every day at Marginal Revolution, writes for Bloomberg, and hosts his own podcast called Conversations with Tyler. He writes about economics, arts, culture, food, and globalization.
As I prepared for this episode, I settled on three things that I wanted to focus on: how Tyler thinks about travel, the rise of China and India, and how he learns so much. Enjoy this exploration of knowledge and culture, and I hope you laugh with us along the way.
I particularly recommend Tyler’s most recent book, Stubborn Attachments.
TranscriptDavid: Tyler Cowen, welcome to the North Star.
Tyler: Thank you for having me.
David: So tell me a little bit about where you grew up in northern New Jersey. What was growing up like for you and what were you into as a kid?
Tyler: I was born in Kearny, New Jersey, Hudson county, which was a blue collar town, and my father climbed some kind of career ladder from having been bankrupted at thirty, to being upper, upper middle class, so I caught different parts of that income stream. I went to a great high school where I had four or five close friends who were super smart and had a blast. We were like a nerd fest before nerds were cool and I learned something every day but not from the teachers. I loved it and I just knew New York City.
David: Well, let's dive into it. I think that one thing that's really interesting about the Internet is I like to say it rewards obsession in a way that the world didn't use to and I think a byproduct of that is nerd culture is, is cool now.
Tyler: You know, I specialized in the style of learning before there wasn't an internet and then when the Internet came along, I feel it made me like 20 times more productive. So I'm very lucky to have gotten this extreme productivity boost at about age 40, which is very rare in careers. There are people who might have some kind of productivity turning point when they're 29 or 22, but to get it at age 40, it's given my life a very different trajectory.
David: So I know you wrote a book about that, but talk about what was that productivity boost like, how do you think about productivity, and how did that boost manifest itself?
Tyler: Well, I worked very hard for years at trying to absorb more information and absorb it quickly and order it effectively and when the way you do that is driving around to used bookstores and carry used books home and read them, well, that's a wonderful thing to do, but when you can just go to your iPad or your laptop and whoosh, it's all there, you're going to do a lot better.
Tyler: Whereas people who say do research, they've been made more productive by the In