Thanks to Tyler and Alex for their good nature. They know that this was the sincerest form of flattery.

It is extremely easy to parody MR, especially Tyler because there is so much output and it is all part of his characteristic style. I think that being easy to parody is a great sign of success.

My favorite post was the one about Swedish meatballs because I think of the enumeration style of reasoning as being quintessential Tyler. Little known fact: Tyler Cowen is the reason I am an economist. 20 years ago as an undergraduate adrift I was inspired by his microeconomics course and he convinced me to go to grad school. In that course we learned the enumeration style via his “thought questions” and in fact, looking back, I think we were learning to be bloggers before the channel for that existed. Our final exam question was “Write down a thought question and answer it.” I owe Tyler Cowen a tremendous debt.

Tyler’s reading habits are obvious fodder for parody. I have no doubt that Tyler reads as much as he claims and, while easy to make fun of, his approach to books should be taught to children at an early age. (Start reading everything that might be interesting. Stop as soon as it isn’t. Skip over parts that are boring.) I never was much of a reader before, now I read quite a lot.

FYI, I copied MR’s look by switching to a generic wordpress theme (andreas09) and then modifying the css to get the colors, fonts, and look/feel right. I didnt know anything about css (and the normally helpful Kellogg support team didn’t see this as falling under their job description, not surprisingly) so I had to figure it out on the fly. If anyone is interested I can send you what I did.

And now back to our regular programming…