Capital Writing: 'GOAT' with Tyler Cowen

This is a Capital Writing author interview. Our guest today is Tyler Cowen. Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University, my alma mater, and he's the author of, most recently, the book GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter? Thanks for being here, Tyler.

Hello, Dominic.

All right, so GOAT might be a term that is sort of unfamiliar to people who aren't sports fans. It's usually used in the context of saying who is the greatest of all time, G-O-A-T, when you're talking about a football player or a basketball player, but you use it to talk about economics in this book.

That's right. One thing I try to do in the book is to write about economics as if I'm a fan. So when we read about movies or sports or music, often we want to read things written from the perspective of a fan. So I thought, why not apply this to economics? So I've loved economics and economists my whole life. And that's what I try to communicate in this work.

And what was it that got you started on that path to economics? Because a lot of people, as I said, you know, they'll be fans in this way of sports or music or movies or things like that. What is it that economics was sort of the channel of that sort of passion in your life?

Well, if that's a biographical question, it started more or less when I was age 13 and I just started reading some economics and some of it actually included National Review. Some of it was from Foundation for Economic Education. It was mostly books I had taken out from the public library. Some of it was Milton Friedman, different textbooks, you know, a year later, like Hayek and Adam Smith.. And I just kept on reading and fell in love with it as a way of thinking.

So, you know, people will say Michael Jordan might be the GOAT of basketball, Tom Brady might be the GOAT of football. You say that John Stuart Mill is the GOAT of economics. That might be a sort of unusual claim that some people wouldn't expect considering Mill as a great economist. What is it about him that made you put him at number 1?

Well, I don't quite say that he's GOAT. I say that he's my favorite of the major contenders. And that's true as a subjective claim. I think the strongest objective case is simply for Adam Smith because he was the first and most fundamental economist. But if you say it's Adam Smith, in a sense, there's no further comparison. And of the different candidates, Smith is in some ways the worst economic thinker. Simply because the others could build on him. What I find appealing about John Stuart Mill is that he builds out a full-blown case for liberalism. I think most of that case succeeds. I think economics is fundamentally something we use to build a better society. And who saw the big picture most clearly, uh, including free speech and limits on government and the value of liberty? Uh, for me, that was John Stuart Mill. So I don't think you can say he was the best economic analyst. Someone like Milton Friedman, among others, clearly would beat him. But nonetheless, he's my favorite. And on rights of women, Mill also is the best economic writer to this very day.

So let's talk about sort of the criteria you set up for how to analyze this. Obviously, you say you're writing from the perspective of a fan, and so your personal biases come in, and you say what those are in each of the chapters. Uh, but what are some of the other things that you're looking at to determine whether an economist should be in consideration for GOAT?

Well, they should have had real-world relevance. They can't have just been wrong about everything. They should have done some micro and done some macro. They should have done theory and empirics. Uh, those seem to me to be reasonable standards, maybe not fully objective, but I think most people could agree on something like those.

Uh-huh. And then who are the economists that you then consider as finalists? You mentioned Mill, you mentioned Smith, you mentioned Friedman, but there were 3 others you mentioned as well.

Well, John Maynard Keynes, I think clearly is in contention. He's not my favorite, but obviously a thinker of major impact. Friedrich Hayek, who was the most right about socialism and central planning. Clearly is in contention. And a bit of a dark horse pick, but I say Malthus, who wrote in the early 19th century on population, and you could say the environment. I'm myself not a Malthusian, but if it turns out that he's right, you know, maybe I've undervalued him as go.

So Malthus sort of is a byword today for being wrong because he was talking about the problems that come in with population growth and basically saying that, you know, society will hit a point where you won't be able to grow enough food to feed people, and so the population won't be able to continue to grow. That turned out to not be right with the Industrial Revolution, with huge advances in the productivity in agriculture and so on. But you, you sort of nonetheless say that there is actually a really good economic analysis in Malthus, even though that central claim might not have turned out to be right.

And I think the third edition of Malthus's book is much better than the first edition. So there's two ways of reading the third edition. In the third edition, Malthus says, well, clearly we can avoid all these problems. Uh, it's just that human beings are not virtuous enough to find the right solution.. And that may end up being correct. It could easily end up being correct. So Malthus is the economist who focuses our attention on lack of virtue. But there's a more general version of the Malthusian argument, which is simply that when you have exponential processes, if they don't all line up in the right way, you're in for big trouble. So today, low fertility seems to be the problem, not high fertility.. But it's still basically a Malthusian argument that an exponential process, like a total fertility rate below 1, just leads you to disaster. And maybe that's the biggest problem we face. So that too would resurrect Malthus in some form. He's not my final pick, to be clear, and I think he was too pessimistic. But the actual Malthus is quite different from, say, what you might think if you read Julian Simon on Malthus.

The virtue point is interesting as well. You say Malthus brought that up, but John Stuart Mill also talked about the need for sort of virtue and intelligence in society, I think is the term he used. And then Adam Smith was concerned with this as well, with how the division of labor might cause problems on that front. But since those more older thinkers, especially older British thinkers, economists have sort of gotten away from considering virtue as an important part of their discipline, but much more empirically focused, much more mathematically focused as well. Do you see that as sort of a regress in economics considering that 3 of the GOAT contenders are concerned with this virtue issue?

Well, I would put it this way. The quality of statistical work today is much, much better than it was in any of these earlier times. Or even 20 years ago. But that said, these other traditions need to make a comeback. Our world has a lot of problems. Our politics is getting more and more screwed up. If we economists don't think more about virtue and politics and liberty and free speech, I mean, we're just gonna lose it all. So it needs to make a comeback. And part of the goal in writing this book was to help it do so and resurrect interest in these questions.

What do you think that looks like for today's economists to be working on virtue?

Well, I think one needs some kind of public presence. So you could write for a— excuse me, write for a magazine, write for a blog or Substack, be on Twitter, have a podcast. Also ideally do research and write books related to ideas of virtue and morals and ethics. It's there in some regards in current economics, but it's also specialized and formalized that it doesn't get crystallized into lessons that people actually respond to. So I think the incentives are for hyper-specialization, and that's where things have gone wrong.

One of the economists that you consider but doesn't make it to be finalist is Gary Becker. One of the things he's famous for is applying economics to areas where it wasn't applied before. So things like economics of crime or economics of the family, things like that. Um, and he does this with, uh, sort of Chicago price theory, uh, as the tool that explains everything. Um, is that— you don't seem to think that that's probably the best way to go about this, but that was something that Becker was doing, and you say economists don't really do anymore, and that he's— his influence has sort of declined since his his death?

Well, I'm a big fan of Becker, but I have some mixed feelings about him. On the plus side, I feel he could have won 5 different Nobel Prizes and deserved them all. But that said, a lot of his approaches are a bit too reductionist for me, that there's something about both the family and crime, the 2 cases you mentioned, that are not just about optimizing behavior. You need some theory about how people Perceive reality and social norms and what they consider to be just. And toward the very, very end of his life, Becker actually himself moved in that direction. But the work he's best known for doesn't really do that. Uh, the main reason I downgrade Becker as GOAT is just, I don't think he's gonna beat out Milton Friedman. No slight intended to Becker. He's, he is one of the true greats. But if you're comparing Becker and Friedman, you know, Milton Friedman is the one who's in the running, I think. And I thought that was a pretty fair judgment.

And one of the reasons you cite for that is Friedman's empirical work, the, you know, The Monetary History of the United States being probably the top example, co-written with Anna Schwartz. But, you know, his other statistical work that he did mostly earlier in his career before he was free-to-choose Milton Friedman, that, that really is the— his, his work that sort of put him in contention for GOAT, right?

And all of central banking today is very different because of Friedman, mostly for the better. And the fall of communism and rise of reforms, Friedman played a big role in. Becker played some role, but you have two major, major areas of significant importance where Friedman is just well ahead of Becker.

And a previous guest on Capital Writing was Jennifer Burns. We talked about her biography of Milton Friedman. You, you mentioned it a couple times in the Friedman chapter. What did you think of that book? I read it. I thought it was fantastic, but I'm just curious what your thoughts were.

I did my own podcast with her. I like her very, very much as a person. I think it's a great book. She's a wonderful scholar. And when my copy arrived, you know, even though it's pretty long, I read right through it. It's just like one of the best books of the last decade. I loved it.

Yeah, I did as well. Like you said, it's like 600 pages, but I felt like I flew through it. Yeah, so going back to your book, there are a couple other honorable mentions as well that were covered and you sort of say why they didn't make it. What were some of those other ones other than Gary Becker?

Well, Paul Samuelson is one of them. He's one of the very, very sharpest of all economists. He had very important contributions in just building out contemporary micro and macro. He was an amazing economic modeler. Uh, but you know, in terms of being GOAT, for me, first, he's too narrow. And I think he was just flat outright wrong on too many things. So he thought the Soviet Union would catch up to the US economy. That to me is a sign of a very bad economic understanding, kind of an unforgivable sin, I might even say. Uh, he disagreed with Milton Friedman. He thought a lot of inflation was some kind of cost push or wage push phenomenon. Even if you think that's sometimes true, I mean, he just lost that debate and he was wrong on a lot of macro and Friedman beat the pants off of him. So I have great respect for Samuelson's sharpness, intelligence, and modeling abilities. But I don't think he makes the final shortlist of the top 6.

One of the things you mentioned in Samuelson's favor, though, is his work sort of building the MIT economics department as an institution. You talk about this with some of the others as well, institution building being one of the things that you were considering for who is GOAT. Why do you think that that is— first of all, why do you think that that's something that's in Samuelson's favor? And then second of all, Why do you think that that was an important thing to consider, considering it's not exactly academic work or about the promulgation of new ideas as much as it is about being good at building an institution at certain places?

Well, it's a big part of your contribution to the world. I mean, think of the people who built up early National Review. If you're assessing their legacy, surely that should count, whatever it was that they did. So if you look at Adam Smith, he didn't build an institution, but if you think of David Hume as more powerful than most institutions, Smith was his best friend and they discussed everything and worked together closely. So that's a big thing in Smith's favor. John Maynard Keynes, you could say he— his attention moved sequentially. But say Bretton Woods, imperfect, but probably more or less the best we could have done at the time. Keynes gets a lot of credit for designing that. Friedman and Becker helped build up University of Chicago, most of all Friedman. Becker stayed there longer. Samuelson in solo and somewhat Modigliani, MIT. So we can have different preferences, like do we prefer Chicago or MIT approach? But trying to, you know, look at it a step back, I think you have to give Samuelson a lot of credit for that because when he arrived at MIT, it was not so impressive a place. And by the time he left it, it was clearly the number one department.

And you say that as a Harvard grad?

Correct. No, I have mixed feelings about my own alma mater. But just people who do things should be greatly respected. Keynes's work at the Versailles Conference. And again, I don't agree with all of it. But it was something very real. He did it, had impact. He managed it very well. I think it definitely counts in his favor.

Keynes, you talk about him as sort of, you know, he was like a thinker that sort of did economics, right? Like he had so much in his work that wasn't necessarily economics. He was interested in so many different things, including, you know, like arts and culture and things like that. Um, you count that as a mark in his favor, sort of his, his, uh, diversity of interests that he had and his ability to sort of dive into all these different academic and intellectual topics.

His essays on biography, I think, are some of the greatest essays ever written in the English language. His book on probability is dense but was important at the time. He has Many scattered essays are economic possibilities for our grandchildren. It's probably wrong, but it raises some very interesting questions like how much are people going to work in the future anyway. He was very perceptive. I think he was uneven as an analyst and not focused enough, but reading through what Keynes did is just typically very interesting. And I say that as someone— I'm not especially Keynesian, As you probably know.

One of the things that you consider as well is whether these people were sort of good people. Uh, Keynes doesn't rate highly on that one. Um, neither does Hayek though. Uh, and, uh, you— why did you think that that was an important thing to mention? Sort of their, their relationships with other people, uh, the way that they treated their family, uh, the way that they thought about, uh, you know, the way that they treated their intellectual adversaries. Who does well on that and who does poorly?

Well, it simply interests me most of all, but I think honestly we all care about it even if we pretend we're going to be detached and scholarly. So why not just be upfront like a fan would be and say, I care about this. I think Milton Friedman has a fantastic record of always being a gentleman, of being politically correct in the good sense, not in the bad sense that that term has come to mean, but he actually seems to have treated people fairly and he was not prejudiced and he was open. And I mean, he was a tough intellectual combatant, but he was a model of a gentleman and a scholar. We know less about Adam Smith, but there's plenty of reason to believe he was the same. And on major issues of his time, such as slavery, where by no means was everyone on the right side of it. Smith was great. Same is true of John Stuart Mill. So Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Friedman in those regards to me get very high marks. And there are very few really black marks on their records in those regards. Not that we know of.

And Hayek, you say, you know, is sort of, he doesn't do well on this because he sort of was kind of cold personally, and there's a lot— there's a memoir that you mentioned that one of his assistants wrote that is not very complimentary of him.

Well, it seems he became a very grumpy old man. Most of his life, as far as I can tell, Hayek behaved quite properly. Maybe he was cold or depressed, but I wouldn't hold that against him, but it does seem he became quite prejudiced and a bitter old Viennese gentleman, I guess. And, you know, is that at all related to possible flaws in his earlier work? I'm not sure, but I think one has to ponder that as a question. And Milton Friedman, who stayed optimistic— Milton was not naive. He knew certain things in the world were going against him. But he always believed in the human ability to reconceptualize and to improve and to, you know, write the course. Maybe that does make him a better person.

So Hayek has a very unusual career in this because he sort of starts off with a lot of work on capital theory and monetary, you know, monetary economics and things like that. By the end of his career, he's very much a sort of social theorist about socialism, about the nature of a liberal society, and things like that. And so there's just so much that Hayek covers. And what turns out is that some of the early stuff he did just, you say, just wasn't that good. But a lot of the later stuff, you know, he's one of the top thinkers in that area in the 20th century. And so how does it, you know, did you find it difficult to parse which parts of Hayek to consider when you were looking at whether he should be the GOAT?

Well, I figured out my own views sort of finally for the first time. I think his key essays on knowledge and information are probably the best economic articles written. His early work on monetary theory and trade cycles, I think it's pretty flawed, but I would call it underrated more than overrated. I don't think it's crazy. It didn't quite work the way he put it out, but I still think there's a lot to it. His later works on political philosophy, Constitution of Liberty, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, I think they're quite interesting. I like them better than most of what I read on those topics.. But I do feel they totally fall flat when it comes to clinching the argument. Hayek is not willing to come out for liberty or rights. He's not willing to come out for utilitarianism. And it becomes this big muddled mess with a lot in there that's interesting. But in some key ways, I think you have to call those books failures.

What about Road to Serfdom? I mean, that was probably his most popular book, and it was published in Reader's Digest. Lots of people who are not academic economists read that book. How does that hold up?

I think it's a great book, much maligned. You need to read it in context. So it sounds very pessimistic, but Hayek wrote much of it during World War II. So to be pessimistic during World War II, while you turned out to be wrong, in fact, it was not the crazy view to hold. So I think that's become a libertarian classic. When I reread it, it really stunned me. How many traditional libertarian arguments seem to come from that book? I think it's very good.

And you said you reread it. You talk about in this book how you went back and reread a lot of things off your shelf that you might not have picked up in a while. You did this starting during COVID right? When you had some extra time to do this sort of thing. What was it that led you to do that and how was that process in writing the book?

Well, I started this book, as you mentioned, during COVID lockdowns. So you could say I had extra time, but more importantly, the library was closed. So I thought, well, I need to write something where I can access most of the relevant materials on my own. Either I owned them or they were online or I could just buy them and I didn't need to travel. And that was this book. I'm very glad it turned out that way. But it was not a book I was planning for a long period of time in advance. It was done in a pretty opportunistic way. I just thought, well, if I work on this, you know, things won't drive me crazy. Let's do this. And then I just started it.

I think that comes across in the book too, is that, like you said, you are writing as a fan. It's very sort of, I don't want to say lighthearted, I don't know if that's the right word for it, but it's not a heavy book. It's not the sort of thing that is going to you know, you're not going to get lost in the argument of it. You have things sort of broken out very, very clearly. The sentences aren't too complicated, and you're just sort of running through and making evaluations of these different works as they come in. And I think that's a really, really interesting way to do it.

Yeah, I thought I wanted to put aside all affectations and stylistic devices that you might find in academic writing and write it a bit the way, you know, you and I would talk about these things.

And one of the things that's unusual about the book is it's online, the whole thing. You could read it for free. And it also comes with an AI chatbot. Can you talk a little bit about that feature and why you decided to do that?

Sure. Let me first tell listeners, to get to the book, you can just Google my name, Tyler Cowen, and the word GOAT.

G-O-A-T.

The website formally is econgoat.ai. Uh, I thought I would make the book free. Anyone can read it. You can download it to your Kindle. But it's the first book ever published in GPT-4. So you can go to the bot and ask the bot questions about the book. So if, say, you don't want to read my chapter on Malthus, you can just say, please summarize the chapter on Malthus for me.. And the bot does that pretty well. And then you can go on and read some other part. Or if I reference something where you don't know the details, so I talk about Keynes at Versailles, and if you don't know, you can ask, well, what exactly happened at the Versailles Conference? Because my book doesn't tell you, it assumes you know, but you can find out. So the bot is like a companion to the book, and it will indeed answer just about any question you can ask it. And it will answer the question in Spanish and Russian. It's a very versatile thing. So Jeff Holmes at Mercatus, he worked with me to help produce the bot. And we're very happy to have done it that way. I think it will be a big thing in book publishing within the next 3 years.

The book was all written by you, right?

Correct. All written by me. None written by GPT or anything else. But you can even ask GPT, like, where do you think Tyler's wrong? Or what would Paul Krugman say about this? And again, the answers are pretty good.

That's impressive. I was thinking of going in after this interview and asking the bot all the questions I asked you and see how the answers compare.

That's a good idea. Or if you just ask it, well, you know, Tyler is critical of Keynes on this point. If someone wanted to defend Keynes, what would they say? So you can always get a different perspective. In that sense, there's an infinite number of referees attached to this book. Even though it did not go through a normal academic refereeing process.

I think it might be a little bit better. Um, I think, uh, one of the things, uh, one of the things that you do in here as well, you're comparing economists from so many different time periods. Um, we mentioned before, you know, about sort of this consideration of virtue that was present in the earlier ones and not in the later ones. What were some other issues that you ran into in making— trying to make, uh, like comparisons between these people that came from such different backgrounds and contexts and different stages of development of economics as a discipline?

Well, it's very hard to compare empirical work across time. So Adam Smith, as I'm sure you know, he wrote a long digression on the price of silver. It seems to me it's actually pretty good, but there's no econometrics in there. I still count it as Smith having done empirical work and it's very much to his credit. But you look at Milton Friedman's Monetary History, which actually by today's standards is itself very simple compared to current econometrics. That to me is very much to Friedman's credit. Malthus has a lot of economic history in his essay on population. I think the quality is pretty mixed. There's a lot of wishful thinking in there about like China and India. He makes a lot of claims that like, it's okay if he was wrong back then, that's understandable, but he feels too systematically wrong in a way slanted in his favor. And I do count that against him a bit. Smith, uh, on the price of silver, I just think he's trying to figure out what was happening. So, uh, that's a metric I use for comparing empirical work across time. When Keynes wrote on India, he looked at a lot of data to try to figure out the best currency system for India. I think that very much improved Keynes as a later economist. That was quite early in his career.

This is a good point that you did in the book as well as bringing up India as sort of a test for these guys. Um, because a fair amount of them wrote something about India at some point in their career, uh, including the, the older ones when India was still a colony of United Kingdom. And so why was it that that was sort of the thing that you chose? And what do we learn about these economists based on what they said about India?

Well, there's a conceptual reason. So none of them were India experts, but I think it's a good kind of quick and dirty test of goat, that if you throw an economist into a new environment and ask that person to figure it out, how well do they do? It's not the final standard, but it's a good gut check on how good an economist they are. And of the 6 finalists other than Hayek, they all did quite a bit on India. Obviously, it's a big, important country, but it gave a relevant way to compare them that, say, I could not have as easily done on China. And I think overall, Milton Friedman on India was excellent. He went there twice in the 1950s. He wrote fairly long memos about India. I don't think they're perfect, but they're really quite good. Uh, he was quite optimistic about India's prospects in the longer run. That's turned out to be correct. He saw the fundamental problem as one of human capital. I think that's turned out to be correct. He saw India was greatly overregulated. That's clearly turned out to be correct. I think he overemphasized how important it would be to give India like his M2 money growth rule. On that, he was wrong, I would say. But, you know, so much more of it was correct and on the mark. And I think that ups Friedman in my eyes because he really was not an India expert, but did very well in that environment. Smith on India is good. Keynes on India, I think, is quite good. Malthus on India is flawed. Mill on India, much as I admire Mill, uh, Mill did not understand how harmful British colonialism was. He thought it would help develop India, but the fact that it was more than anything a means of resource extraction, I don't think he saw clearly enough. And that reflects this real shortcoming in Mill, that his understanding of public choice economics, I think, is not good enough. So he had too much faith and planners of a certain kind, including British imperial planners. So the India test for Mill, it really helps you pinpoint what to me is Mill's main shortcoming, a kind of naivety about power.

J. Smith was really good on this, right? He was opposed to the East India Company as sort of a trading monopoly, and he said this was a bad deal for Britain.

That's right. Now, I'm made a little nervous by one of Smith's comments that he thinks in principle it's fine to give a company an initial monopoly over a territory such as India because they will help develop it. And I'm not sure exactly what he meant by that, but I suspected something I disagree with. But overall, I think Smith has much more good analysis of the East India Company than bad. Malthus worked for the East India Company, as did Mill, which, you know, we cannot neglect to mention. So they, they had a very direct personal stake in this. Malthus trained East India bureaucrats. Uh, what exactly he taught them, I don't know.

Malthus was also a, a reverend. You mentioned that, uh, as well, and you seem to say you think he was sincere in his, his Christianity. Um, how does that affect his, his thinking and his placement as GOAT?

Well, that's a complicated question. It depends on what your own views are. Uh, the other thinkers on this list are all quite secular and either didn't believe in God or maybe were sort of distant deists, but not religious thinkers at all. And that Malthus was a religious thinker, I think, helped orient his attention toward this issue of virtue. So I think for Malthus, it's a plus. That he was a Christian. But at the same time, if all 6 of the finalists had been Christians, I think we'd have a weaker overall list. But I'm very glad there's at least one religious thinker on there. People debate, like, how devout was Malthus? But there's some data from papers, like who his friends were, who he hung out with, and it was to a large extent other clergy. That doesn't prove he was sincerely religious.. But there's no evidence that he didn't believe, and most people back then believed, and there were plenty of clergy who believed. So odds are he was a clergyman who definitely believed in God and in Christ, but it's not clear he believed in all the different particular aspects of church doctrine. I think that's what the literature tends to conclude, and that's struck me as broadly correct.

One of the things you credit to Malthus as well is he did a lot of work that focused on the environment and that focused on poverty, and that these two things were, uh, are sort of shortcomings in a lot of the other finalists that you talk about, that they don't focus on those things, uh, you know, specifically. What do you think, that that was part of his Christian worldview? Uh, you know, God having human beings as stewards of the earth from the environmentalist point of view, and of course all of Christ's commands to take care of the poor.

Absolutely. And Malthus says that himself. If you look at the other 5 finalists, environment is a shortcoming for all the others but Malthus. Now, to be clear, I'm relatively optimistic about environmental issues. I'm by no means a doomsayer, but I think there's a chance Malthus turns out to be correct in some broad way, and then he gets elevated. And in the meantime, he's the star course candidate.

Well, I have to say, I think you snubbed one economist, and I want to make a brief case for that economist. I'm not sure he should have been a finalist. I'm not sure he should have been a finalist, but I think he could have certainly at least been an honorable mention, and that's Ronald Coase. Uh, Ronald Coase was, uh, you know, he was an economist in the 20th century. He did, uh, lots and lots of work on the law and economics, uh, sort of helping to stand up that subdiscipline of the field, which has been very influential in how we view the law in the United States especially, but also around the world. Uh, he's the author of Problem of Social Cost, which is one of the most cited papers in economics. Uh, he's, uh, that was critical of the way that economists, uh, were looking at things at in the middle of the 20th century. He said, look, you guys need to look at the total effect of policy. Uh, it introduced, he introduced concepts of Coasean bargaining, which then other other economists sort of built on after that to create the Coase theorem, that sort of idea, which was very influential as well. The study of regulation, he's a big, a big, a big part of that. He was at University of Chicago for a long time, as was other GOAT contenders. He also wrote Nature of the Firm, which he wrote as an undergrad, and That was one of the things he was eventually cited for a Nobel Prize for. And, you know, even if it might not hold up super well, and I think there are parts of it that don't, the fact that he was already on that level as an undergrad, I think, says a lot about him as a thinker. Why did you snub Ronald Coase?

Well, I agree I should have covered Coase more than I did.. But I can't see making him GOAT above, say, Friedman or Becker, in spite of the very impressive achievements you cite. So it's not about everyone who's great. The book is like, who is GOAT? And I just don't think he quite did enough to be GOAT. Two other people I snubbed, but for somewhat different reasons: Marx and Mises. Whatever you think of them, they're important figures. They don't really come up. Uh, I, it's a very good chance I'll write things on them separately. It's why they're not in this book. I don't think either's goat, to be clear, certainly not Marx. Uh, but they do got snubbed. And, uh, Jevons, Walras, Menger, uh, there's just some more things I'm going to write. So some of the gaps in the book I hope to fill.

What is that future book going to look like, you think?

Well, book is a funny word because once you publish the thing in an AI It's more than a book. Some would say less than a book. I'm not sure what the next thing I do will look like, but I don't think it will be a traditional book. I think it will be some kind of hybrid product. But I want to write more on history of economic thought, and the names I just mentioned are on my shortlist of what to cover. But you know, you start things and sometimes it takes off in your mind and sometimes it doesn't. So I'm not 100% sure about any of those, but that's what's percolating in my mind at the moment are those figures. Marginal Revolution, Marx, and Mises.

Yeah, go ahead.

And Mises, you know, what I'm really interested in are his two books, Socialism and Liberalism. Certainly the Misesians are fans of everything Mises did, but it seems to me in the broader communities those books are grossly underrated. And if I did something on Mises, I would focus on— What about the book on bureaucracy?

Do you think that's underrated too?

Absolutely. Maybe I would cover that as well. I'm less of a fan of Human Action, but even if I'm wrong about Human Action, I feel that gets enough attention of some sort and the earlier works don't. Well, Bureaucracy is not an earlier work.

All right. Well, we look forward to reading that just as we enjoyed reading this book. The book again is called GOAT, who is the greatest economist of all time and why does it matter. Highly recommend it. We'll link to it in the, in the article for this interview because you can read the whole thing online right now if you want to. So thank you so much for being here, Tyler. Really appreciate it.