Top 40 Tyler Cowen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Real cultural diversity results from the interchange of ideas, products, and influences, not from the insular development of a single national style.”

— Tyler Cowen

2. “Understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.”

— Tyler Cowen

3. “The more information that’s out there, the greater the returns to just being willing to sit down and apply yourself. Information isn’t what’s scarce; it’s the willingness to do something with it.”

— Tyler Cowen

4. “Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe...”

— Tyler Cowen

5. “The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility.”

— Tyler Cowen

6. “For many artists fame complements the value of creative self-expression. Ludwig van Beethoven loved composing music, but he probably would have enjoyed it less if no one ever listened to the product.”

— Tyler Cowen

7. “Personal qualities of character such as self-motivation and conscientiousness will reap a lot of gains in the new world to come.”

— Tyler Cowen

8. “The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.”

— Tyler Cowen

9. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that mechanized intelligence can solve a rapidly expanding repertoire of problems.”

— Tyler Cowen

10. “If you have an unusual ability to spot, recruit, and direct those who work well with computers, even if you don’t work well with computers yourself, the contemporary world will make you rich.”

— Tyler Cowen

11. “It’s harder to get outside your own head than you think.”

— Tyler Cowen

12. “Economics is sometimes associated with the study and defense of selfishness and material inequality, but it has an egalitarian and civil libertarian core that should be celebrated.”

— Tyler Cowen

13. “Food is a product of supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.”

— Tyler Cowen

14. “The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?”

— Tyler Cowen

15. “In most of the world, breakfast is an important meal.”

— Tyler Cowen

16. “Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.”

— Tyler Cowen

17. “We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor.”

— Tyler Cowen

18. “Unintended Consequences is full of substance, it is one of the must-read books of the year, and once I finish it I will be giving it a second read through right away.”

— Tyler Cowen

19. “The books that are most likely to be stolen from libraries are books on ethics, especially those that are likely to be read by faculty and advanced students in moral philosophy. Those books go missing at a rate 50 to 150 percent higher than comparable texts not about ethics. And if it is any consolation, books by Nietzsche are among the most likely to be snatched, and another target is Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Again, maybe businesspeople are not the most dishonest group after all.8.”

— Tyler Cowen

20. “Millennials as a generation just don’t seem that interested in grand projects, unless of course you count wired interconnectivity, at which they excel.”

— Tyler Cowen

21. “Americans are in fact working much harder than before to postpone change, or to avoid it altogether, and that is true whether we’re talking about corporate competition, changing residences or jobs, or building things. In an age when it is easier than ever before to dig in, the psychological resistance to change has become progressively stronger. On.”

— Tyler Cowen

22. “Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self-image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them.”

— Tyler Cowen

23. “El Paso is parasitic off of Juarez rather than vice versa.”

— Tyler Cowen

24. “My view of the internet is that it is way overrated in what it’s done to date but considerably underrated in what it will do.”

— Tyler Cowen

25. “Machines have no fear of the unfamiliar.”

— Tyler Cowen

26. “The bottom line is that Germany is still an underappreciated food country. Furthermore, buying bread, cheese, and especially sausage in the supermarket will almost certainly not be disappointing. The best ethnic food in Germany is often from groups that don’t make their way in very large numbers to the United States.”

— Tyler Cowen

27. “This kind of machine-based learning is driven by a hunger for knowledge, not by a desire to show off your talent or to “signal” as we economists say.”

— Tyler Cowen

28. “A particular personality trait that doesn’t come easily to everyone will be needed in a lot of situations: the ability to handle or maybe just ignore the ongoing appearance of stressful situations.”

— Tyler Cowen

29. “The more extreme conservatives will embrace religion and nationalism to a higher degree.”

— Tyler Cowen

30. “Therefore, I wish to say it again: The biggest story of the last fifteen years, both nationally and globally, is the growing likelihood that a cyclical model of history will be a better predictor than a model of ongoing progress.”

— Tyler Cowen

31. “We’ll end up with a society where the people with decent self-control win back a lot of the lost health gains by better behavior.”

— Tyler Cowen

32. “Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.”

— Tyler Cowen

33. “When it comes to ethnic markets, most of the shoppers really are very well informed. Most of the shoppers come from cultures – including China – where food preparation receives a lot more attention than in the United States. These shoppers also are largely immigrants or children of immigrants. Either they come from cultures where most food prices are lower than in the United States, or the immigrants have lower incomes themselves, or both.”

— Tyler Cowen

34. “You might like either the Republicans or the Democrats more than I do, but still something is wrong in today’s politics, even if we don’t always agree.”

— Tyler Cowen

35. “Marcel Proust shut out visitors from his cork-lined room, where he wrote, but he probably expected to be immortalized in the literary canon. Even the most introverted drives and motives are set in a social context and amplified by the potential for achieving fame.”

— Tyler Cowen

36. “Today most of the debate on the cutting edge in macroeconomics would not call itself “Keynesian” or “monetarist” or any other label relating to a school of thought. The data are considered the ruling principle, and it is considered suspect to have too strong a loyalty to any particular model about the underlying structure of the economy.”

— Tyler Cowen

37. “But once again, there is some disappointing news, as the income of the median or typical American household is down since 2000, and unless wage gains are very strong in the next few years, this country essentially will have gone twenty years with wage stagnation or near wage stagnation for median earners.”

— Tyler Cowen

38. “The right wing will be identified with the monied class, even when the left often has more money. And the left wing will be identified as the whiners, even though the right at times whines as much or more. You might say that both sides are monied, high human capital whiners, on the whole.”

— Tyler Cowen

39. “What I would like to vote for is a candidate that is socially liberal, a fiscal conservative, broadly libertarian with a small l but sensible and pragmatic and with a chance of winning. Thats more or less the empty set.”

— Tyler Cowen

40. “The lesson about food is that the most predictable and the most orderly outcomes are always not the best. They are just easier to describe. Fads are orderly. Food carts and fires aren’t. Feeding the world could be a delicious mess, full of diverse flavors and sometimes good old-fashioned smoke.”

— Tyler Cowen

41. “When I look back at the last decade, I think the following: There are some very wealthy people, but a lot of their incomes are from financial innovations that do not translate to gains for the average American citizen.”

— Tyler Cowen

42. “As chain stores rise, there is also a loss of dynamism, competition, and market entry for new ideas and products. Keep in mind that today’s major chain was once a small individual store on a street somewhere. A bit more economic chaos, even if it is inconvenient in the short run, actually tends to be correlated with higher rates of innovation.”

— Tyler Cowen

43. “Firms and employers and monitors will be able to measure economic value with a sometimes oppressive precision.”

— Tyler Cowen

44. “That’s understandable, but it also shows we are a bit intolerant of alien intelligences.”

— Tyler Cowen

45. “Newton expected no money from establishing his originality but rather desired recognition for his excellence.”

— Tyler Cowen

46. “The fourth and final step is that the human isn’t needed much at all because the program on its own is so strong.”

— Tyler Cowen

47. “Overall, the people from the more commercialized societies are much more willing to cooperate outside of narrow kinship circles. The core message is that commerce and advanced market societies tend to breed trust and reciprocal cooperation. It is no accident that such hypotheses were common among eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, such as the Frenchman Montesquieu, and others who were observing the rise of commercial society on a massive scale for the very first time.”

— Tyler Cowen

48. “All of the criticisms one might mount against the corporate form – some of which are valid – pale in contrast to two straightforward and indeed essential virtues. First, business makes most of the stuff we enjoy and consume. Second, business is what gives most of us jobs. The two words that follow most immediately from the world of business are “prosperity” and “opportunity.”

— Tyler Cowen