Tyler Cowen on the GOAT of Economics

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2023

⏱️ 95 minutes

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Summary

Who is the greatest economist of all time? In Tyler Cowen's eclectic view, you need both breadth and depth, macro and micro. You can't have been too wrong--and you need to be mostly right. You have to have had a lasting impact, and done both theory and empirical work. If you meet all these criteria, you may just be history's greatest economist. Listen as Cowen talks about his new and freely accessible book GOAT with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Along the way to crowning a winner, Cowen offers original insights into what shaped the theories and worldviews of the greatest economists of all time. Cowen and Roberts also talk about the evolution of economics from a field concerned mainly with ideas to one that mostly grapples with empirical challenges.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is October 30th, 2023, my guest is Tyler Cowan. This is Tyler's 18th appearance on the program. It was last year in May of
0:45.6	2023 talking about artificial intelligence. Our topic for today is his latest book,
0:51.7	Goat, who is the greatest economist of all time and why does it matter?
0:57.5	I want to let listeners listening with children know that this may contain adult themes.
1:02.3	Tyler, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:04.0	Happy to be here, Russ. Thank you.
1:07.0	Your books available online without charge.
1:10.0	It is stunningly, unlike anything I've read by you before. It is wide-ranging in a way that is
1:17.1	different from your other books. It's all of your books are wide-ranging. You're wide-ranging
1:22.4	person, but this is different.
1:24.8	It is a tour to force in its breadth and depth.
1:28.8	It's quite an achievement and on top of that it's embedded inside a ChatGP4 option online with other options to come.
1:40.2	So you can query the book in a different way than say searching it if you had the text.
1:45.3	Tyler, how long did it take you to write this book and how did you come to write it?
1:50.0	I would say it took me 61 years to write the book being 61 years old but it's
1:55.7	Jensis is during the time of the pandemic at the beginning of the pandemic I felt
2:02.0	I needed a project to keep me busy and
2:04.7	have something to do and most book projects or other projects you just couldn't do.
2:09.6	You couldn't travel, you may not have access to the library.
2:13.2	So I thought, what's something I can write based on my own library?
	...

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