Here he writes about underappreciated economist Eric van den Steen. Tyler is right, Eric van den Steen is underappreciated. His work is fresh and creative and he is venturing into terrain (heterogenous priors) where few dare to tread. Not only that but he is drawing out credible applied ideas from there, not just philosophy. (Ran Spiegler and Kfir Eliaz are two others that come to mind with the same creativity and courage to embrace these models.)
Tyler Cowen is under-appreciated. Not as a blogger of course, he writes the most popular blog in economics and one of the most popular blogs full stop. It may sound strange, especially to readers of Marginal Revolution, but Tyler Cowen is an under-appreciated economist.
Here is his CV. Here is his google scholar listing. Here is the ranking of his economics department. If it were not for Marginal Revolution, very few economists would know who Tyler Cowen is.
But we all read Marginal Revolution. And we all know that Tyler is smarter, broader, more knowledgeable, more intuitive than most of us and our colleagues. If he wanted it to, his CV could run circles around ours. I don’t claim to know why he doesn’t want that, but I infer that Tyler believes he is innovating a new way to be a successful and influential economist without compromising on the very high standards that those of us in the old regime hold.
Public signals like Google scholar cites, and top-journal publications can’t measure his contribution to economics but we measure it privately every day when we read Marginal Revolution. And it deserves to be made public: Tyler Cowen is a great economist.
One doesn’t just accidentally know who Eric van den Steen is, let alone be able to summarize in a paragraph his contribution and its relation to the literature. I barely knew who he was and its my job as a member of Northwestern’s recruiting committees to know. For Tyler Cowen to be able to pick him out of the very many young economists and identify him as the most under-appreciated reveals that Tyler Cowen knows and reads every economist. I believe it is true.
And he understands them better than most of us. Look at what he wrote about Dale Mortensen. And the Mortensen-Pissarides model. Here’s Tyler re-arranging the literature on sticky prices, trade, and monetary policy. His piece on free parking shows a mastery of the lost art of price theory, whether or not you agree with his final conclusion. Look at his IO reading list for crying out loud. Finally, set aside an hour and watch him in his element speaking at Google about incentives and prizes.
So hail T-Cow! Wunder-(not)-kind!
15 comments
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October 21, 2010 at 7:23 am
Tyler Cowen
Thanks for the kind words…
October 21, 2010 at 9:26 am
Andy
Hear, hear! Tyler is probably the most influential thinker for budding economists. He is certainly the most discussed economist at graduate student lunch tables.
March 18, 2014 at 1:27 pm
Nishant
Why are all these foreigner bieneg interviewed donb4t they have any proper english speaking people? In worse case senario you end up having a french accent when finish school!! GREAT ;/And look at Andy Zust and Tom Hofmanns they look completely retarded
October 21, 2010 at 11:20 am
Anonymous
So, given your “job as a member of Northwestern’s recruiting committee”, shouldn’t you try to make offers to those two instead of advertising them to everyone else?!
October 21, 2010 at 11:50 am
Noto
Great post. Keep up the good work. You’re well on your way to being an underappreciated economist yourself 🙂
October 21, 2010 at 2:18 pm
jeff
other things equal, i prefer to be overappreciated 🙂
October 21, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Freddie
This may be the nadir of the endless mutual admiration society circle jerk that is the blogosphere. Jesus.
October 21, 2010 at 5:33 pm
jeff
🙂
October 21, 2010 at 2:57 pm
WillJ
“Tyler is probably the most influential thinker for budding economists.”
He’s certainly the most influential thinker for this budding economist. *points at self* (Don’t worry, Jeff Ely, you’re up there too! 🙂 ) If the human brain is a CPU, Cowen’s is a multiprocessor.
October 21, 2010 at 6:48 pm
Divya
This is the most remarkable piece of writing I have seen yet on this blog!
October 21, 2010 at 8:10 pm
jeff
divya, i can see how you can get bored with garden-variety posts about masturbation, barbicide, and the epistemology of Carly Simon .
October 21, 2010 at 10:11 pm
Brad
It seems like Cowen is playing the long game of economics. The classic model of intellectual production in economics revolves around writing papers for journals, the vast majority of which are forgotten within a few years, if they were ever notable at all.
On the contrary, Cowen seems to prefer to plant the seeds of ideas in as many brains as possible through his blog, which reaches more economists than all but the most important articles.
On the flip side, he’s moved his scholarly production to books, which seem to have a longer shelf life than articles. Books might not be the norm for most economic writing, but seem very appropriate for the more critical and informal kind of economics Cowen trades in.
October 21, 2010 at 11:57 pm
rd
here here .. and he didn’t even link to this .. what a mensch
October 25, 2010 at 4:48 am
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October 29, 2010 at 7:24 pm
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