Tyler Cowen, America's Hottest Economist

Andrew Hetherington

By Brendan Greeley

Tyler Cowen sits with a cranberry juice and a pile of books he no longer intends to read. He's at Harry's Tap Room, near the Air France ticket counter in the main terminal of Dulles International Airport, on his way to Sao Paulo. Two days ago he e-mailed me his reading list for the trip—27 books—and I vowed to keep up with it. Already, before he boards, he has assembled a pile of discards. "Unger. I'd say I browsed it. I looked at every page," he says. "There's nothing wrong with the book. It's a good book to stir up leftists." Roberto Mangabeira Unger's The Left Alternative falls with a thud to the table.

Cowen, 49, has round features, a hesitant posture, and an unconcerned haircut. He handles each book as he ticks it off his list. "This I discarded. It appeared to get a good review, but there's no framework, just scattered vignettes. I looked at 20, 30 pages." Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, thud. Cowen's first rule of reading is as follows: You need not finish. He takes up books with great hope and no mercy, and when he is done—sometimes after five minutes—he abandons them in public, an act he calls a "liberation."

In January, Dutton published Cowen's e-book, The Great Stagnation. It has shown up twice on the New York Times' e-book bestseller list. Dutton, a Penguin imprint, will release a hardcover edition on June 9. David Brooks has called it "the most debated nonfiction book so far this year" and leaned on it for a column in the Times. "In terms of framing the dialogue," wrote Kelly Evans for the Wall Street Journal, "Tyler Cowen may well turn out to be this decade's Thomas Friedman." The year is young, but among wonks the book has reached that most coveted of states: It must be responded to.

Cowen thought it was too long for a magazine article and too short for a book, so he suggested that the publisher offer it only as an e-book. The work is priced on Amazon.com (AMZN) at $3.99 for 15,000 words. Cowen gets the sense that Dutton humored him, both on the format and the content. "In a way [neglect] was a bonus," he says. "If this were like the second coming of Harry Potter, everyone would have had an idea about how it should be written." Now most reviews point first to the road it paved as an e-book before moving on to the importance of Cowen's ideas.

The Great Stagnation runs through three centuries' worth of what Cowen calls the "low-hanging fruit" of economic growth: free land, technological breakthroughs, and smart kids waiting to be educated. For developed economies, he argues, none of these remains to be plucked. Yet America, Europe, and Japan have built political and social institutions on the assumption of endless growth. Cowen summarizes the financial crisis in eight words: "We thought we were richer than we were."

It's not that he disagrees with any of the better-known explanations for the crisis—easy credit, flawed ratings—it's that he sees a more fundamental problem, one that can't be fixed with regulation, bailouts, or tax cuts. Cowen thinks that now that America has used up the frontier, educated all of the farm kids, and built a couple of cars for every family, we might be done growing for awhile. The Great Stagnation is a short work, simply written. It avoids any but the most basic discussion of economics, yet also brushes lightly over all of modern history; behind simplicity in style and argument lies a lifetime of intensely productive reading.

Tyler Cowen has read what's listed in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, though not, he concedes, every single last one of the Icelandic sagas. He rereads what you probably haven't heard of, like Anton Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. For the Brazil trip, in case he runs out of new books, he has also brought Neal Stephenson's 1,100-page Cryptonomicon, which he has already read. Fiction slows him down, he says, which makes packing easier. He carries a Kindle but reads paper when he can; he says he's invested too much time on the rhythm of how the eye tracks the page. Several people have told me the same story about Cowen: They have watched him read, and he scans a page as others might scan a headline.

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