Tyler Cowen Quotes

#1. The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility.

Tyler Cowen

#2. I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand.

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#3. Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.

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#4. perhaps we are not as free as we might think in the first place. Given your background, your friends, your family, the books you read, and the movies you watch, how surprising is your vote in a federal election?

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#5. 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.

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#6. I'm not a vegetarian. But I think people who are vegetarians, they are actually more virtuous than the rest of us. I think they should be admired.

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#7. Real cultural diversity results from the interchange of ideas, products, and influences, not from the insular development of a single national style.

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#8. You might like either the Republicans or the Democrats more than I do, but still something is wrong in today's politics, even if we don't always agree

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#9. A bad or mediocre meal is more than just an unpleasant taste, it is an unnecessary negation of one of life's pleasures - a wasted chance to refine our palates, learn about the world, and share a rewarding experience.

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#10. The more extreme conservatives will embrace religion and nationalism to a higher degree.

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#11. To get anything done, Obama has to be seen as having winning economy - which isn't easy.

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#12. A lot of local food is very tasty. I'm very happy to eat it. I just don't think it's the same thing as saving the world.

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#13. Some Google employees have their self-driving vehicles take them to work. These car robots don't look like something from 'The Jetsons'; the driverless features on these cars are a bunch of sensors, wires, and software. This technology 'works.'

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#14. It's becoming increasingly clear that mechanized intelligence can solve a rapidly expanding repertoire of problems.

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#15. Most of us are not pure self-starters; most people need role models, they need coaches, they need exemplars, they maybe need some discipline or some rewards. We need to be motivated.

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#16. Look at electricity in human history - it took a few decades for electricity to really revolutionize the American economy. And the Internet will be the same. At some point in the future, we will arrive at a new era of low-hanging fruit.

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#17. 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.

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#18. The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?

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#19. Economics evolved as a more moral and more egalitarian approach to policy than prevailed in its surrounding milieu. Let's cherish and extend that heritage. The real contributions of economics to human welfare might turn out to be very different from what most people - even most economists - expect.

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#20. Presidents always want to do nice, noble, long-run things, and Congress is less keen to do so. We've seen that throughout the history of this country.

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#21. We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We'll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won't be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hurts to give that up.

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#22. What I would like to vote for is a candidate that is socially liberal, a fiscal conservative, broadly libertarian with a small 'l' but sensible and pragmatic and with a chance of winning. That's more or less the empty set.

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#23. The fourth and final step is that the human isn't needed much at all because the program on its own is so strong.

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#24. In the early stages of negotiation software, on your smartphone, there may be programs that listen to the pitch of a voice, or that test for stress. You'll just ask the program, 'Was he lying? Was he eager to do business with me?' Maybe the computer will be right sixty per cent of the time.

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#25. For the U.S., I think we should have a carbon tax, for environmental reasons.

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#26. 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.

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#27. There's so much free material on the Internet you can learn from, and some people are pure self-starters: they pick up computers and teach themselves everything. Certainly there are millions of people like that. But at the same time, I think it's a pretty small percentage of the population.

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#28. The way to make the world a better place, through your eating, is simply to eat a bit less meat. Local is sometimes good, sometimes bad. But even when it's good, its environmental impact is relatively small compared to other possible improvements.

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#29. 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.

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#30. Most restaurants in most cities, including Washington, are at a sort of mid-level. They're somewhat trendy, or they have some sort of gimmick, or they're somewhat expensive. And they make a lot of money off drinks. I tell people don't go to most of them, unless your goal is just to socialize.

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#31. I see three forces militating in favor of growing inequality: increasing measurement of worker value added, automation through smart software, and globalization.

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#32. A particular personality trait that doesn't come easily to everyone will be needed in a lot of situations: the ability to handle or maybe just ignore the ongoing appearance of stressful situations.

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#33. 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.

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#34. Economics is sometimes associated with the study and defense of selfishness and material inequality, but it has an egalitarian and civil libertarian core that should be celebrated.

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#35. When humans team up with computers to play chess, the humans who do best are not necessarily the strongest players. They're the ones who are modest and who know when to listen to the computer. Often, what the human adds is knowledge of when the computer needs to look more deeply.

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#36. The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.

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#37. When you look at the actual data on technological innovation, one thing you see is that what I call the 'low-hanging fruit' has been exhausted. So radio, flush toilets, electricity, and automobiles - a lot of very basic inventions - have spread to almost all households.

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#38. Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.

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#39. What the banking system needs is creditors who monitor risk and cut their exposure when that risk is too high. Unlike regulators, creditors and counterparties know the details of a deal and have their own money on the line.

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#40. It's harder to get outside your own head than you think.

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#41. One of the major Lockhart restaurants, Kreuz Market, ships to anywhere in the continental United States.

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#42. The 'low' quality of many American films, and of much American popular culture, induces many art lovers to support cultural protectionism. Few people wish to see the cultural diversity of the world disappear under a wave of American market dominance.

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#43. El Paso is parasitic off of Juarez rather than vice versa.

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#44. Marcel Proust shut out visitors from his cork-lined room, where he wrote, but he probably expected to be immortalized in the literary canon. Even the most introverted drives and motives are set in a social context and amplified by the potential for achieving fame.

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#45. 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.

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#46. Economics is everywhere, and understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.

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#47. In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.

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#48. Machines have no fear of the unfamiliar.

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#49. Everything will have a Yelp review. And if you're a worker, there will be like credit scores. There already are to some extent. How reliable are you? How many jobs have you had? Have there been lawsuits filed against you? How many traffic tickets?

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#50. The iPhone is made on a global scale, and it blends computers, the Internet, communications, and artificial intelligence in one blockbuster, game-changing innovation. It reflects so many of the things that our contemporary world is good at - indeed, great at.

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#51. Buying from a local farmer can mean that he makes a two-hour extra truck drive, which can damage the environment more than a bunch of bananas on a boat.

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#52. Countries with lots of unmarried young men are the most vulnerable to sudden upheavals - this is what fueled the Arab Spring.

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#53. For the very top earners, vision and inspiration are essential. You need those to become the next Steve Jobs, but perhaps not to be the highest paid dentist in Beverly Hills.

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#54. 1. Quality land and natural resources 2. Intellectual property, or good ideas about what should be produced 3. Quality labor with unique skills

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#55. Sports is remarkably cognitive. I think it's underrated just how smart it is. Actually, if I had more time, I would spend more time with sports. Watching it, reading about it, I think it's oddly underrated.

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#56. If we want to improve American food and make it much cheaper, we should deregulate the food trucks and the other street vendors, provided they meet certain sanitation standards. Many cities have already moved down this path, and people are not keeling over with salmonella.

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#57. After aircraft production, the entertainment industry is America's largest source of trade surplus.

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#58. Newton expected no money from establishing his originality but rather desired recognition for his excellence.

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#59. For many artists fame complements the value of creative self-expression. Ludwig van Beethoven loved composing music, but he probably would have enjoyed it less if no one ever listened to the product.

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#60. In most of the world, breakfast is an important meal.

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#61. The more information that's out there, the greater the returns to just being willing to sit down and apply yourself. Information isn't what's scarce; it's the willingness to do something with it.

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#62. We're seeing an enormous amount of global upward mobility that's quite rapid and quite sudden, and undiscovered individuals have a chance - using the Internet, using computers - to prove themselves very quickly. So I think the mobility story will be a quite complicated one.

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#63. I don't really watch TV.

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#64. My view of the internet is that it is way overrated in what it's done to date but considerably underrated in what it will do.

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#65. 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.

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#66. 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.

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#67. I think a lot of people will be liberated from a lot of oppressive manufacturing jobs, or a lot of service jobs, because they'll be done by computers. There'll be the world's best education available online and free.

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#68. Unintended Consequences is full of substance, it is one of the must-read books of the year, and once I finish it I will be giving it a second read through right away.

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#69. Firms and employers and monitors will be able to measure economic value with a sometimes oppressive precision.

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#70. I'm a pessimist about the euro, but not about Europe. So the southern periphery, Spain, Italy, Greece, leave - Italy might be the first to go - and the rest stay. That will work just fine. But unless they want to give up democracy, I don't see greater fiscal union as the answer.

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#71. I sometimes say I am a 'happiness optimist' but a 'revenue pessimist.'

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#72. We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor.

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#73. When I hear people express extreme optimism about the Internet, I say, we've had it in mature form for about ten years. Macroeconomically speaking, those are about the worst 10 years we've had since about the 1930s. I don't blame the Internet for that - that would be ridiculous.

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#74. Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism.

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#75. 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.

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#76. At fancy and expensive restaurants (say, $50 and up for a dinner), you can follow a simple procedure to choose the best meal. Look at the menu and ask yourself: 'Which of these items do I least want to order?' Or: 'Which one sounds the least appetizing?' Then order that item.

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#77. Throwing more science at things isn't always the answer.

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#78. 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.

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