John Phipps in The Economist:
At the end of the worst road on the impoverished Honduran island of Roatán lies Próspera, an aspiring libertarian city-state “designed for entrepreneurs to build better”. Last January Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University in Virginia, found himself being ushered into an open-air co-working space beneath the attractive tropical chalet that serves as the city’s headquarters. A few digital nomads stood up to greet him, smoothing down their shorts. One of them began telling Cowen about the regulatory system in Próspera, which is partly autonomous from the Honduran government. Cowen listened politely, then looked out to where two brown birds were hovering above the shoreline. He asked what vultures were called on Roatán. Someone told him. “You use the Nahuatl word,” he replied admiringly.
Dressed in the same tatty blue jeans he’d been wearing all week, his libertarian beard trimmed to a grey muzzle, the 61-year-old appeared before these tanned utopians as a bright star in their intellectual firmament. Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution, is namechecked by billionaires; his books are sold in airports and read in Washington. His grant programmes have been backed by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel.
Whether they know it or not, many tech gurus now subscribe to an economic analysis that Cowen first proposed in the 2010s, when he argued that technology could rescue America from a “great stagnation” that had been keeping its growth rates depressed for almost half a century. It was this argument, amplified by his relentless publication schedule, that helped find Cowen an audience in Silicon Valley and its downstream subcultures. Today, his readers are DOGE staffers.
Yet among acolytes, Cowen is famous not for a single theory but for the broad scope of his intellect. Put simply, he seems to know something about everything: machine learning, Icelandic sagas and where to eat in Bergen, Norway.
More here.
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