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

Tyler Cowen

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Tyler Cowen
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 21
Blogger
Economist
Pedagogue
University Teacher
Writer
Bergen County
New Jersey
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More quotes by Tyler Cowen

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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
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Newton expected no money from establishing his originality but rather desired recognition for his excellence.
Tyler Cowen
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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
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Social systems proceed by (usually) covering up the brutalities upon which they are based. The doctor doesn't let you get to his door and then turn you away, rather his home address is hard to find. The government handcuffs you so they don't have to shoot you trying to escape. And so on.
Tyler Cowen
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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
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Real cultural diversity results from the interchange of ideas, products, and influences, not from the insular development of a single national style.
Tyler Cowen
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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
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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
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Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.
Tyler Cowen
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I'm not optimistic about reform in many, if any, policy areas at all. I think we'll make further progress by inventing new things that aren't much regulated yet and outracing bad policy. I look at so many policy areas - regulation, regulatory reform, health care reform - it's all failing, we're not making improvements, we're going backwards.
Tyler Cowen
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Apart from the seemingly magical Internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953... The wonders portrayed in 'The Jetsons,' the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass... Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down.
Tyler Cowen
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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
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In most of the world, breakfast is an important meal.
Tyler Cowen
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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
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Beethoven and Michelangelo, who sold their artworks for profit, were entrepreneurs and capitalists.
Tyler Cowen
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Understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.
Tyler Cowen
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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
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We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor.
Tyler Cowen
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If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.
Tyler Cowen
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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