104 Quotes by Tyler Cowen

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.

Machines have no fear of the unfamiliar.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.