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Article about me
How else can one title such a post? Here it is, from New York magazine. Excerpt:
Among this new crowd of economists, Cowen, a 45-year-old professor at George Mason University just outside D.C., is a cult hero, insofar as he co-runs an influential blog called marginalrevolution.com. You don’t need to be an economist to enjoy it. There are only a handful of posts a day, but the range of ideas is awe-inspiring. Cowen weighs in on everything from “wage compression”—when bosses give raises at a rate below productivity gains—to household pets, arguing that “if you must support the life of either a cat or a dog, choose the undervalued cat.” (Dogs’ friendly disposition increases the odds of their being well-cared for by other people, while the natural diffidence of cats makes them more susceptible to neglect).
Here is their selection from the series "My Favorite Things"...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 23, 2007 at 10:02 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
I picked MR for a "five best" list a while back. . .
Posted by: Matthew at Jul 23, 2007 10:38:17 AM
Congratulations! That's a wonderful article about you.
Posted by: jason voorhees at Jul 23, 2007 10:42:58 AM
Please can we have a post on how you ended up having your portrait taken at Mars Bar in the East Village? Did they want to photograph you in a run-down place, and that bar was the most run-down place they could think of? Were you in the neighborhood anyway?
Posted by: Felix at Jul 23, 2007 10:43:48 AM
The magic ingredient, he elaborates, is extreme income inequality, which ensures a large reservoir of cheap labor to grow and prepare the food, as well as a sufficient number of rich people who, being rich, must eat well. Voilà, good food in armored establishments.
This explains so much.
Posted by: j at Jul 23, 2007 10:47:41 AM
Wow, they even used the same word -- polymath -- to describe you.
Posted by: Matthew at Jul 23, 2007 10:48:30 AM
So,
You join Mel Gibson (Mad Max), Don Johnson (A Boy and His Dog), and the entire case of Roocky Horror Picture Show as a cult hero. Perhaps. It will only be so if we can find kids at the Student Union reading your blog at midnight instead of going to the campus theatre.
Perhaps this should be a "markets in everything -- me" column.
Posted by: Allan at Jul 23, 2007 10:53:23 AM
What I want to know is, did your necktie just happen to get caught on the button of your jacket or is that the result of some sly styling by the photographer?
Posted by: Dan at Jul 23, 2007 12:06:10 PM
Sly.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Jul 23, 2007 12:17:11 PM
Nice article. Of course the bit on dishwashing reflects the
recent lit on counting on social norms versus punishing or
paying. So, in an Israeli kibbutz, when they started fining
parents for being late to pick up their kids, more of them
started being late. The social norm to pick them up had
broken down and been replaced by...a market.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Jul 23, 2007 1:26:09 PM
The article is terrific! :-)
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Jul 23, 2007 1:41:52 PM
Barkley you might be interested in what Ariel Rubinstein has to say about that Israeli daycare study.
Posted by: TGGP at Jul 23, 2007 2:26:33 PM
Hmmm.
If we were to draw an indifference curve for our good Dr. Cowen, placing money on the X-axis and fame on the Y-axis, one could argue that Dr. Cowen's marginal rate of substitution of money for fame would result in a decidedly convex looking slope...
Posted by: The Mighty Wizard at Jul 23, 2007 2:28:32 PM
The magic ingredient, he elaborates, is extreme income inequality, which ensures a large reservoir of cheap labor to grow and prepare the food, as well as a sufficient number of rich people who, being rich, must eat well. Voilà, good food in armored establishments.
Then, if you want great food countrywide, all you have to do is have open borders... the crime, and transition to latin-american style corruption in government, are a small price to pay. :)
Posted by: pwyll at Jul 23, 2007 2:44:07 PM
Seriously though, how does that model of good food explain Japan, which (in my opinion) has huge amounts of unbelieveably good food with no cheap labor?
Posted by: pwyll at Jul 23, 2007 2:46:10 PM
But the fallacy is that cheap labor does not assure cheap products any more than expensive labor means expensive products. The relationship may or may not hold.
Posted by: spencer at Jul 23, 2007 2:58:29 PM
TGGP,
Ariel is full of it on this one. Gneezy and Rustichini may have been a bit sloppy,
but the effect has been widely confirmed numerous times and for the Israeli kibbutzes
as well. A quick google of Gneezy-Rustichini will quickly provide a plethora of sources.
pwyll,
Well, the food in Japan is good, but it is not cheap. I think what is going on here is
that Tyler is implicitly being an economist, that is he is looking at some sort of quality
to price ratio. So, very cheap, pretty good (and "authentic") food in one of his favored
places is to be preferred to the more expensive, but in my opinion better, food that one
finds in Japan or France or Italy or wherever.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Jul 23, 2007 6:15:58 PM
Pwyll,
You are right. Japan, New Zealand, Australia, France all have great food and very little of what you can call cheap labr.
Guess you have to believe the Neocons and assume that cheap labor cannot be substituted by capital goods--capital
does not have babies and send kids to school........
Posted by: Robert at Jul 23, 2007 11:48:43 PM
I saw this article on cnn.com, and it seemed analogous to the dish washing example.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/10/01/blackwater.report/index.html
I would be interested in seeing a comparison in the attitudes of private security forces in military environments, and those of US soldiers, with regard to shooting first, etc.
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Posted by: jack at Jan 6, 2008 9:36:14 PM
