Tyler Cowen, the Man Who Wants to Know Everything

Once a year, the winners of EV grants are invited to an “UnConference” in Virginia, which is designed as an intellectual petri dish for people to mingle and spawn ideas. Talks are given with no preparation and to no schedule, in randomly arranged discussion groups that you can leave whenever you please. In the evening, buses take groups out to one ... See more

When the pandemic hit, Cowen and Collison, the founder of Stripe, set up a separate grant programme to fund research. The pair had raised and spent millions before larger bodies managed to respond. One large grant went to Anne Wylie, who developed saliva tests for covid-19. Though Wylie was a researcher at the Yale School of Public Health, and atta... See more

In 2011 Cowen published a digital pamphlet in which he argued that since the 1973 oil-price shock, America had experienced a hidden crisis of lost growth that would be resolved only by the development of new technology. He called this period the “Great Stagnation”, and he proposed a cultural solution rather than an economic one: raise the social st... See more

Not long after arriving at George Mason, Cowen read “Sexual Personae”by Camille Paglia, a buccaneering polemic about Western art across millennia. Although he didn’t agree with Paglia’s ideas, he saw this was the kind of book he wanted to write. Within months he was drafting a lively, popular history of markets and high culture. In 2003 he and Taba... See more

He was here, he said, to understand why the drug war was hopeless, and why Honduras had been spared from civil war in recent decades, unlike its neighbours, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

I asked him if he expected answers to these questions.

“Probably not,” he said. “But it structures your thought, and it helps you get to the next question.”

A huge amount of what Cowen did seemed to be encountering other people, and I was often unsure whether this was out of eagerness to learn from them or a more basic need for human contact. Most of Cowen’s good friends seem to be colleagues from George Mason. Some acquaintances I spoke to were in awe of Cowen, but unsure why someone hellbent on extra... See more

Some of Cowen’s theories seem to misunderstand on a fundamental level why people do things at all. Use opportunity cost to your advantage, he enjoins his reader, by scheduling a call halfway through a movie; if you don’t have to reschedule, the film wasn’t worth finishing. Desserts deliver diminishing marginal returns after the first few bites; the... See more

The cab had begun to grind its way up towards the brow of a hill with audible, Sisyphean difficulty. I mumbled something about whether we were going to have to get out. “We’ll make it,” Cowen said firmly. He was talking about how he liked to play basketball at a court near his house. He didn’t mind playing with other people, but most days he was th... See more

EV likes to emphasise its search for “moonshot” projects – high-impact ways of changing the world. Take, for example, Recidiviz, a criminal-justice non-profit that Cowen funded. It has helped free 70,000 parole-eligible people, using data tools, who would otherwise have remained under supervision. Yet if you browse the winning projects, it becomes ... See more