Tyler Cowen is the Tycho Brahe of Economics - 3 Quarks Daily<br>Skip to content

William Benzon<br>Tycho Brahe was a significant figure in my family. Why? Because my father’s parents were from Denmark, and Tycho Brahe was Danish. Danes were thus important in the Benzon household, as was Danish pastry (wienerbrød, Vienna bread), the real stuff with cardamom seeds, not the fluff you get in diners. And then there is rabarbergrød, a cloudy translucent rhubarb pudding laced with slithers of almonds. Not to mention Danish layer cake, five thin cookie-like layers alternating with custard and currant jelly topped with a lemon-juice & powdered sugar icing, once a year on my father’s birthday. But I digress.<br>We were told about Leif Erikson, who made landfall in the Americas half a millennium before the Italian. About King Christian X, known for his defiance of Hitler, which – wouldn’t you know? – became embroidered with legend. But most important of all, Victor Borge, an important comedian in mid-century America known for his dry wit and use of music as a comedic medium, which called forth his considerable skill as a concert pianist.

Whoops! I digress.

This essay isn’t about desserts, kings, or even comedians. It’s about a living intellectual, the economist Tyler Cowen. I won’t bother with boilerplate basics, you can find that in Wikipedia. As for his similarity with that long-deceased 16th century Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, we need to have some appreciation for what Cowen has done before stacking him up against the dead Dane.<br>First up, Cowen’s blog. Then we blitz through a list of 59 people he’s interviewed (out of 279 so far), then on to philanthropy, after which we slow way down to look at his current monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. When we’ve gone through that we’ll understand the comparison with Tycho Brahe.<br>Who is Tyler Cowen? The Marginal Revolution Blog<br>Tyler Cowen became director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in 1998 and was awarded the Holbert C. Harris Chair Economics in 2000. With his intellectual legitimacy established, he could concentrate on informing and educating the public. One obvious channel is through books such as Create Your Own Economy (2009), The Great Stagnation (2011), Average is Over (2013), Stubborn Attachments (2018), and Talent (2022), with Daniel Gross.<br>But the Marginal Revolution blog functions as his virtual home base. He’s been posting there every day since he and Alex Tabarrok established the blog back in late August 2003. As of June 13, 2026, there are, by my calculation 39,735 posts at Marginal Revolution, most but by no means all, are Cowen’s.<br>Marginal Revolution, however, is not how I first learned about him. That was through an article he’d published in Slate in April 2006. Among other things, He suggested that shantytowns should be constructed in post-Katrina New Orleans. He observed:<br>To be sure, the shantytowns could bring socioeconomic costs. Yet crime, lack of safety, and racial tension were all features of New Orleans ex ante. The city has long thrived as more dangerous than average, more multicultural than average, and more precarious than average for the United States. And people who decide the cheap housing isn’t safe enough will be free to look elsewhere-or remain in Utah with their insurance checks.<br>Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties.

I thought Cowen expressed a disingenuously romantic idea of the relationship between creativity and poverty.<br>I don’t know when I found my way to Marginal Revolution, but the oldest mention of Cowen on my blog, New Savanna, dates back to May 5, 2010. It follows that I found my way to Marginal Revolution somewhere between those two dates, April 2006 and May 2010. Just when I don’t know. Whenever it was, I began reading Marginal Revolution daily as part of my early-in-the-day check of the internet.<br>To be sure, his center-right libertarian politics are different from my left-liberal politics, but I have little interest in marinating in my own views. That he is an economist is all to the good regardless of the particular flavor of his ideas. I need to be kept aware of matters economic, and zipping through Marginal Revolution is a good way of doing that.<br>But there’s more to Marginal Revolution and to Tyler Cowen than economics. Of the half dozen or so posts a day, one of them will be a collection of links to this, that, and the other. Three or four more will be excerpts (50 to several hundred words) from this or that, with perhaps a paragraph or two from Cowen. These days Alex Tabarrok, his blogging partner, will have a substantial post, generally on some economics topic. Cowen will also have an occasional...