anotherpanacea

Tag: Tyler Cowen

  • Moana, Complacency, and the Enduring Appeal of Steady-State Economics

    Moana, Complacency, and the Enduring Appeal of Steady-State Economics

    (Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with a reading of the political economy of Moana, and you just have to write it down. I regret nothing!)

  • Calm is not Rational

    Calm is not Rational

    I do think those are basically the right judgments about fossil fuels: they are awesome, we should be glad that they existed, and it really sucks that we’re going to be giving them up, but it’s time to take action. That said, it’s not clear why I can’t also feel: Anger that providence does not…

  • The Middle Class is Losing the Race for Second Place

    I think about inequality a lot. But I also think about the middle class a lot, which isn’t quite the same thing. Generally, my sympathies lie with the “least advantaged” or “subaltern,” but I also feel the pull of the American cultural commitment to the middle class. There can be little doubt that we are…

  • Deciding Whether or Not to Tell a Story

    When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach. It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be true…

  • Sentence Lover

    Tyler Cowen writes: I have an irrational fondness for this sentence of Mann’s: The First World War distracted governments from the task of monitoring insect movements. The sentence from Charles C. Mann is quite good, but Cowen’s sentence is better: it encapsulates his exuberance for the written word and for heterodox points of view. (And…

  • Cowen’s Epistemic Portfolio Theory and Flaubert’s Maxim

    A portfolio theory is a way to minimize risk by diversifying one’s commitments or investments, using hopefully countercyclical strategies so that some part of your portfolio is always growing. Tyler Cowen suggests an amusing epistemic portfolio theory: That is, most people have an internal psychological need to fulfill a “quota of dogmatism.”  If you’re very dogmatic…