Tyler Cowen
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.
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.
I see three forces militating in favor of growing inequality: increasing measurement of worker value added, automation through smart software, and globalization.
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.Collection: Creative
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.Collection: Down And
Understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.Collection: Decision
Beethoven and Michelangelo, who sold their artworks for profit, were entrepreneurs and capitalists.Collection: Entrepreneur
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.Collection: Views
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Home
Newton expected no money from establishing his originality but rather desired recognition for his excellence.Collection: Excellence
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?Collection: Intelligent
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.Collection: Class
The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.Collection: World
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.Collection: Book
If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.Collection: Simple
To get a person's real opinion, ask what she thinks everyone else believes... If people truly hold a particular belief, they are more likely to think that others agree or have had similar experiences. [People] tend to assume that other people have had life histories at least somewhat similar to their own. When we talk about other people, we are often talking about ourselves, whether we know it ourselves.Collection: Real
Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.Collection: Art
People feel better because Donald Trump says all kinds of things no one else would say and we get certain tendencies out of our system. So if attacking immigrants, say, is a substitute for doing something worse, there's at least a scenario under which that's a better alternative than something else that might have happened.Collection: Feel Better
I sometimes call Donald Trump the placebo president. He will talk a big game, but for domestic policy I think change remarkably little.Collection: Thinking
I'm not optimistic about reform in many, if any, policy areas at all. I think we'll make further progress by inventing new things that aren't much regulated yet and outracing bad policy. I look at so many policy areas - regulation, regulatory reform, health care reform - it's all failing, we're not making improvements, we're going backwards.Collection: Optimistic
Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Rooms
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.Collection: Hands
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. Thats more or less the empty set.Collection: Winning
Apart from the seemingly magical Internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953... The wonders portrayed in 'The Jetsons,' the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass... Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Fire
Here's the positive scenario: that something has been going wrong in American society. You see it in wage growth, opioid abuse, many other social indicators, as you know. Sometimes it's better to get the bad reaction to that over with quickly while your civil society still is strong and you can react and respond and protest, and you know, four or eight years from now, make another decision, and maybe it's better to have that happen in 2017 than 20 years later when some of our problems are worse and our national mood is worse.Collection: Strong