Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website

is econtalk.org where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast,

find links and other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is

mailaddycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

My guest today is Tyler Cowan, my colleague here at George Mason University. He's the

author of numerous books and articles on all kinds of interesting things. He blogs with

extraordinary quantity and quality at marginalrevolution.com. He's a well-known food and art critic,

and his latest book, at least I think it's his latest, is Good and Plenty, the creative

successes of American arts funding from Princeton University Press. Tyler, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you. I say I think it's his latest because Tyler's so prolific, both in the blogosphere

and print, in hard copy, et cetera. You never know what he's working on, but I'm sure

we'll have a chance to talk about that. And given your extraordinary range of interest

Tyler, you're not an easy man to interview. We'll start with some economics. We'll move

on to art and food. So I asked our listeners out there, put on your seatbelts, and we'll

see where we go. Speaking of seatbelts, I want to start with a question from John Payne,

a listener who writes, I'd like to know what Tyler Cowan thinks are the limits of libertarianism

or perhaps more broadly the limits of markets. Tyler, on marginrevolution.com, you and Alex

Tabarock, your co-plogger, have a delightful feature called Markets and Everything that

we've copied at our blog, Cafe Hayek, and others have enjoyed. Were you talking about

the way that markets are taking care of various problems? I think that's a good thing, a bad

thing. I think markets are good at everything. Do you want to put some limits on? Have a

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