Tyler Cowen

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Tyler Cowen : biography

January 21, 1962 –

Tyler Cowen ( born January 21, 1962) is an American economist, academic, and writer. He occupies the Holbert C. Harris Chair of economics as a professor at George Mason University and is co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution. Cowen and Tabarrok have also ventured into online education by starting Marginal Revolution University. He currently writes the "Economic Scene" column for the New York Times, and he also writes for such publications as The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Newsweek, and the Wilson Quarterly. Cowen also serves as general director of George Mason’s Mercatus Center, a university research center that focuses on the market economy. In February 2011, Cowen received a nomination as one of the most influential economists in the last decade through a survey by The Economist. He was ranked #72 among the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" in 2011 by Foreign Policy Magazine, "for finding markets in everything".

Publications

Books

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Education and personal life

Cowen was born on January 21, 1962. At the age of 15, Cowen became the youngest ever New Jersey state chess champion. New Jersey State Chess Federation, Official Site Cowen graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor of science degree in economics in 1983 and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987 with thesis titled . At Harvard, he was mentored by game theorist Thomas Schelling, the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is married to Natasha Cowen, a lawyer.

Political philosophy

Cowen has written papers in political philosophy and ethics: for example, he co-wrote a paper with the philosopher Derek Parfit, arguing against the social discount rate.’Against the social discount rate’, Derek Parfit and Tyler Cowen, in Peter Laslett & James S. Fishkin (eds.) Justice between age groups and generations, Yale University Press: New Haven, 1992, pp. 144-161. A recent paper has argued that the epistemic problem fails to refute consequentialist forms of argument.The Epistemic Problem Does Not Refute Consequentialism, Tyler Cowen, Utilitas (2006), 18: 383-399 Cowen has been described as a "libertarian bargainer", someone of moderate libertarian ideals who can influence practical policy making.Klein, Daniel B. "". Reason Papers. Vol. 27: Fall 2004. In a 2007 article entitled "," Cowen argued that libertarians "should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal". His argument was subsequently criticized by Bryan Caplan, Justin Raimondo, Christopher Westley, and Doug MacKenzie. Cowen endorsed bailouts in a March 2, 2009 column in the New York Times. He was a supporter of the Iraq War.

In 2012, David Brooks called Cowen one of the most influential bloggers on the right, writing that he is among those who "start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way."

Writings

Culture

The Los Angeles Times has described Cowen as "a man who can talk about Haitian voodoo flags, Iranian cinema, Hong Kong cuisine, Abstract Expressionism, Zairian music and Mexican folk art with seemingly equal facility"., February 7, 2003, Daniel Akst, Los Angeles Times One of Cowen’s primary research interests is the economics of culture. He has written books on fame (What Price Fame?), art (In Praise of Commercial Culture), and cultural trade (Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures). In , he relays how globalization is changing the world of three Mexican amate painters. Cowen argues that free markets change culture for the better, allowing them to evolve into something more people want. Other books include Public Goods and Market Failures, The Theory of Market Failure, Explorations in the New Monetary Economics, Risk and Business Cycles, Economic Welfare, and New Theories of Market Failure.

Recent books

Cowen followed the controversial success of his 2011 work, The Great Stagnation with An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies "taking on food with equally provocative ideas." The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better is a short, 15,000-word take on the United States’ recent economic trajectory and was released only in electronic format in January 2011. Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World was released in July 2009 (and rereleased in 2010 with the new title The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy) and received favorable reviews from critics including Matthew Yglesias and Tim Harford.

New York Times columns

Cowen’s New York Times columns cover a wide range of issues, including the 2008 financial crisis, .

Dining guide

His dining guide for the D.C. area, "Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide", was reprinted in the Food section of the Washington Post.