Tyler Cowen Is Funny, Scarily Well-Read, Possibly Autistic
In the latest Bloomberg Businessweek, there’s a profile of Tyler Cowen, the economist, professor, food writer, and all-around polymath who blogs at Marginal Revolution. The profile, by Brendan Greeley, does a nice job of showing us Cowen’s human side. Cowen is a voracious reader (as Atlantic Wire regulars may already know), and a prolific writer–Greeley notes that he’s “published 15 books and over 60 academic articles,” including a recent e-book, The Great Stagnation. James Joyner, who blogs at Outside the Beltway, calls Cowen’s output “mindboggling.”
In Greeley’s profile, we get a glimpse of how a mind like that fuels itself. Among other things, we learn:
Cowen bails out of books early and often. Some people start a book and feel obligated to finish it; not so for Cowen. “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.'”
But he still reads more than you. “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 … 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.”
He was a teenage chess prodigy. “When Tyler Cowen was 15, he became the New Jersey Open Chess Champion, at the time the youngest ever … By 16 he had reached a chess rating of 2350, which today would put him close to the top 100 in the U.S.”
More here.
Genius!
I don’t believe in this guy for a second. There are plenty of charlatans around the place.
For example look at this clown: http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/ukrainian-beats-rybka-4-blindfolded/ who claims to have read over 3000 chess books and yet was proven by one site to not even know how to castle!
Cowen said this in a recent interview:
“I was like I am now.”
“You’ve always been like that?”
“Always. Age 3. Whatever.”
“What did you do at age 3?”
“Read a lot of books.”
That to me shows a clear liar. He may have his story more straight than the Ukrainian, but he is probably just pretty normal.
In fact I don’t really believe in the word “genius” at all. Sure there are better brains and poorer brains, just like there are fast runners and slow runners. “genius” seems to imply something much different and much more spectacular, almost a kind of mystical phenomenon.
Mr. Zed, I can vouch for Tyler. He was regaling me with the philosophy and theology of Emanuel Swedenborg as a 12-year-old to my 15 when we belonged to the Dumont (NJ) Chess Mates club. He joined me on the winning “Garden State Chess Association 4” team at the 1975 US Amateur Team East.
As for his attitude to books, it’s much better and more scientific than the prescription of fellow econo-philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who follows Umberto Eco in saying the true measure of an intellectual is the library of books ey owns that ey hasn’t read at all. It seems much more scientific to me to do some initial-segment tasting and maybe random sampling than to ignore a book completely.
Mind you, I have one of Tyler’s books. The title in its familiar short form is 4 letters, all capitals, and two of the letters are “C”. Can you guess it? As a hint, the first part of the title appears above (not in all-uppercase form). I guess it’s high time I returned it…with interest…
That is interesting KWRegan.
I wouldn’t really put a great importance in his reading of Emanuel Swedenborg at that age though. A lot of what people do is dictated by what’s available to them at the time and how bored they are. A lot of 12 year olds are reading adults books, NOT 3 year olds though.
Anyway, I would just like to hear of some genuine great feat before I would call him a “genius”. As most of us are aware, a lot of books and academic papers aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Otherwise I couldn’t care less about how he skims some books and how we’re informed he reads more than we do in a matter-of-fact type of way. Everyone skims through some books at the library or in a bookstore or in the preview of it on Amazon.
The word “genius” is just a convenient label, you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.
Fact is, there are some super-smart people and the difference in IQ does not adequately reflect this unless, perhaps, you assume that above 130 IQ, the scale changes from linear to logarithmic.