Tyler Cowen, America's Hottest Economist

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He has a PhD in economics from Harvard University and holds the Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., where he's taught since 1989. He runs the university's Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, and has published 15 books and over 60 academic articles. In May the American Institute for Economic Research asked academic economists to name their favorite economists under 60. Cowen ranked 16th. Not shabby—he's only five thinkers behind Ben Bernanke, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Cowen is still best known for the blog he shares with Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution. The same survey listed Cowen and Tabarrok's blog as the second-most popular on economics. Greg Mankiw's eponymous blog at Harvard just edged it out; both picked up far more votes than Paul Krugman's New York Times blog Conscience of a Liberal, which ranked third, or Freakonomics, at fifth. That's among economists. According to Compete.com, Marginal Revolution gets more unique visitors than any other blog in the AIER survey's list, except for Krugman's and Freakonomics, both hosted by the New York Times. Cowen and Tabarrok, who also teaches economics at George Mason, started the blog in 2003. There were few economics blogs at the time, and Cowen thought the two might have a comparative advantage; they had collaborated on papers since 1990, and have together published an introductory textbook on economics (as have two of the other top five economics bloggers).

In his posts, Cowen often serves as a kind of agony aunt for intellectuals. On May 9 a reader asked about the best books on American history and culture written by foreigners. Cowen suggested Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand and linked to a two-year-old list of fiction in the Wall Street Journal. In the same week he summarized a book on the origins of World War I, recommended the Chinese food in the basement of the Golden Mall in Queens, N.Y., and asked his readers to name the best pop album that never caught on. Cowen blogs like he reads: prolifically and about pretty much everything.

At the bar at Dulles, he produces David Goldfield's America Aflame, a three-inch-thick hardback on the Civil War. He pats it like an obedient dog and urges me to open a page at random and read a paragraph. "It's clear," he says, "it's about stuff." When we're done eating, he offers me a plastic bag filled with the books he's liberated, tells me that reading is the handmaiden of travel, and heads for security.


When Tyler Cowen was 15, he became the New Jersey Open Chess Champion, at the time the youngest ever. At around the same age, he began reading seriously in the social sciences; he preferred philosophy. By 16 he had reached a chess rating of 2350, which today would put him close to the top 100 in the U.S. Shortly thereafter he gave up chess and philosophy for the same reason: little stability and poor benefits.

He'd been reading economics, though. He figured that economists were supposed to publish, and by age 19 he had placed two papers in respected journals. As a PhD candidate at Harvard, he published in the Journal of Political Economy and the American Economic Review. "They were weird, strange pieces," he says, "but still in good journals, top journals. That cemented my view that I could, you know, somehow fit in somewhere." I ask him what he was like, what made him doubt he could fit in.

"I was like I am now."

"You've always been like that?"

"Always. Age 3. Whatever."

"What did you do at age 3?"

"Read a lot of books."