Tyler Cowen

He holds the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as Chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center, one of the world's leading university-affiliated economics research institutes. He is also the co-founder of Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program that identifies and supports some of the most original minds of the generation.

In 2003, Tyler co-founded the blog Marginal Revolution, which has grown into one of the most widely read and influential economics blogs in the world — a daily touchstone for policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, and curious readers across the globe. Through it, he has arguably done more than any living economist to bring serious economic reasoning into public discourse.

Tyler is the author of more than twenty books, many of them landmark works in their fields. The Great Stagnation (2011) anticipated — almost uncannily — the productivity and innovation debates that would come to dominate the decade. Average Is Over (2013) was a prescient exploration of how technology and talent would reshape work and inequality. Big Business (2019) mounted a bold, data-rich defense of corporations at a moment of rising skepticism. Talent (2022), co-authored with Daniel Gross, drew on years of interview experience to decode how to identify extraordinary people.

His “Tyler Cowen” conversation series — both in print and on his popular podcast Conversations with Tyler — has featured some of the most remarkable thinkers, leaders, and creators of our era, from Nobel laureates to tech founders to novelists.

In technology and business, his guests have included Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Tobi Lütke, Vitalik Buterin, Eric Schmidt, Ray Dalio, and Brian Armstrong. In one memorable episode, Mark Zuckerberg himself turned the tables and interviewed Tyler and Patrick Collison on the nature and causes of progress.

His literary guests have included Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Neal Stephenson, Karl Ove Knausgård, Emily St. John Mandel, Rebecca F. Kuang, and Malcolm Gladwell. And his conversations with major public intellectuals — Noam Chomsky, Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Žižek, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Pinker — have become some of the most-shared interviews on the internet.

Beyond those worlds, he has drawn out figures as varied as basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, tennis great Martina Navratilova, chess champion Garry Kasparov, music producer Rick Rubin, filmmaker Ken Burns, diplomat Samantha Power, and General Stanley McChrystal.

His intellectual range is legendary. Trained as an economist, Tyler writes with equal authority on art and the economics of culture (In Praise of Commercial Culture, Good and Plenty), on cuisine (An Economist Gets Lunch, Discover Your Inner Economist), on economic growth (Stubborn Attachments, Pathologies of Prosperity), and on the philosophy of progress. Few economists have ever combined scholarly rigor with such breadth of curiosity.

His influence has been recognized again and again. Foreign Policy named him one of its “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” The Economist has repeatedly highlighted his work. Bloomberg Businessweek called him “America's hottest economist.” He has served as a columnist for Bloomberg, The New York Times, and other major outlets, and his commentary appears constantly across the world's leading publications. He is regularly sought out by heads of state, central bankers, and CEOs seeking to understand where the world is heading.

A prodigy who was reading at an early age and developed a deep, lifelong fascination with chess, art, literature, and food, Tyler brings to economics something rare: a genuine humanism. He believes economics is, at its best, a tool for understanding how human flourishing happens — and how to build a freer, wealthier, more creative world. His 2018 manifesto Stubborn Attachments argued that sustained, long-run economic growth, paired with a commitment to human rights, should be the central moral project of our civilization.

What sets Tyler apart is not any single idea but the totality of his influence: the students he has shaped, the institutions he has built, the public conversation he has led, and the sheer number of people who think more clearly because of his work. He is a voice of synthesis, clarity, and intellectual courage.