Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen published a new book on the economics of talent, co-authored with venture capitalist Daniel Gross. The title is Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creators, and Winners Around the World, and it came out in May 2022 and has been widely reviewed.
Along with Alex Tabarrok, he published the fifth edition of our Modern Principles: Microeconomics, and also Macroeconomics, with Worth Macmillan. This text is not just a rehash of the other books on the market but rather it attempts a comprehensive statement of micro and macroeconomics from a “GMU point of view.” That book is now actively on the market, in both physical and electronic forms.
He continued as the regular main economics columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, where he publishes a column twice a week. For a full listing and reproduction of these, see https://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/AS6n2t3d_iA/tyler-cowen.
Other
He continued the Conversations with Tyler series, with a new podcast coming out every two weeks. Some of the recent guests have been Marc Andreessen, Barkha Dutt, Thomas Piketty, Chuck Klosterman, Sam Bankman-Fried, Russ Roberts, Stewart Brand, Ray Dalio, David Rubinstein, Amia Srinivasan, Andrew Sullivan, Claudia Goldin, Ed Glaeser, David Cutler, David Deutsch, John Cochrane, Ben Friedman, and many others. The series has received coverage in virtually every major media outlet and has received several million hits on-line, with a rapidly growing trajectory of interest.
He has continued my directorship at Mercatus, and this year our regular budget now runs at about $50. We support numerous faculty in economics, and over 70 graduate students, making us the largest supporter of graduate students at GMU. Our various academic outreach programs bring GMU economists and economics to several hundred graduate students each year.
He also continued work on Fast Grants, at the Mercatus Center, to support biomedical research directed at fighting Covid-19. The purpose of the program is to show that rigorous, refereed grant decisions can be made in a matter of days when the institutional will is there to do so. They have so far made over 260 major grants and raised over $50 million for this endeavor, further details can be found on the website https://fastgrants.org/ and here is a full accounting of the project. Most of our support this year went to what are called “pan-corona-virus vaccines,” designed to protect against all possible strains of the virus.
Blogging
He has continued the daily blogging of economic and other ideas for www.marginalrevolution.com, which is generally considered the leading economics blog. Our readership remains robust, and we have recently expanded our audience to the new site marginalrevolution.bulletin.com, while continuing our old location.
He also has used MR to promote the research being done at GMU by many other faculty members and graduate students, including Daniel Klein, Mark Koyama, Noel Johnson, David Levy, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan and others. It has become perhaps the world’s biggest “window” onto our world.
On-line education
This last year saw the continuation of MRuniversity.com, a site for the on-line teaching of economics, in conjunction with Alex Tabarrok. They now have a dozen or so classes up and running, including Development Economics, The Eurozone, Economics of the Media, The Economy of Mexico, International Economics, and International Finance, among others.
They now have a complete and finished Principles of Microeconomics class up and running, and now Principles of Macro is finished too. We have about 300,000 YouTube subscribers and last year over 12 million unique views.
