Celebrating Marginal Revolution's 20th Anniversary

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

Hello everyone and welcome to a special episode of Conversations with Tyler. My name is Jeff Holmes and I'm here in my capacity as a producer of Conversations with Tyler, but I'm here in another capacity as well, as a reader of Marginal Revolution, the economics blog that Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen started in August of 2003. We're recording this in August of 2023, which of course marks the 20th anniversary of Marginal Revolution. So today for the podcast, we will be talking about the now 20-year history of the blog. But first, welcome to the two co-founders of Marginal Revolution. Alex Tabarrok, welcome.

Thanks, great to be here.

Tyler Cowen, welcome.

Thank you for all the great work, Jeff.

And in addition to the co-founders and writers of Marginal Revolution, we're joined by two other longtime readers of the blog, First, Ben Casnocha. Ben is an author, writer, and investor. He's founded and run several businesses, blogged, written bestselling books, and is the co-founder and partner of Village Global, which invests in early-stage startups. Ben, welcome.

Thanks, Jeff.

And Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and one of the most influential thinkers and writers in crypto. Vitalik, welcome.

Thank you.

Okay, to start off, we're here in Chennai, India. We're here for a Mercatus Center conference. And 20 years ago, would you have thought that the growth of the blog would lead to the rising prominence and influence of George Mason Economics, the rising prominence and influence of the Mercator Center, which I work for, such that we would now be sitting here in Chennai, India, running a conference in part because of the success of the blog? What does that say to you?

My original vision was if we were lucky, we would have 5,000 readers.. And I thought it would be mostly academics, people like Timur Kuran, who wanted something more interesting. I didn't understand we would end up in a world where Timur Kuran's wife reads Marginal Revolution. So the reach of not just blogs, but just online writing now, it's maybe Substack or Twitter or whatever. I always knew it was going to happen, but it's gone far past what I ever expected.

There was definitely an inflection point at the very beginning when we started out. Blogging was something that other academics sort of looked down upon, you know, turn their noses down. Oh, you're just speaking to the public. And then maybe about 5 years in, beginning with the sort of the empirical revolution, people like theorists and high-name people would start sending us their papers, like obviously trying, could you, you know, put this on the blog, right? And so that was a real shift in the vibe, as it were.

So speaking of that, I think about different eras of Marginal Revolution, but I think the first era of Marginal Revolution is '03 to '08. It's kind of the rise of new media, podcasting and blogging, and also the rise of popular economics. So a lot of the younger readers to MR may not even be aware of Freakonomics being released in 2005, and there's just this onslaught of popular economics books. Would you agree that that's kind of a distinct era in MR, and what are your thoughts on that time period?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it is part of the rise of popular economics. So we sort of timed that well. There were sort of the grandfathers like Steven Landsberg and people like that. But then with the Freakonomics phenomena, you know, I remember seeing Steve Levitt on The Daily Show and Jon Stewart like, "Freakonomics!" And oh my God, you know, it was very, very strange. But you knew something had changed.

And we covered no macroeconomics then. There just wasn't much to say. There weren't that many interesting debates. That too was part of it.

Ben, you started reading MR in that era. How did you discover Marginal Revolution? What's the story there?

I can't remember how I discovered it, but I remember being struck by the incredible curiosity on display in the blog, but also the relentless optimism that infused all of the posts. And I think what was striking about that era of the blogosphere was how civil and polite it all was. And that's clearly changed a great deal. And I wonder, when you look back on that era, is there a sort of wistfulness for the tone and the camaraderie of the blogosphere? Now it feels like such a toxic social media ecosystem and so much noisier. You've maintained the tone, both of you, over all these years, which I think is really impressive. But is there something about that era that you feel like was different in terms of the other blogs you were reading, the commenters, the quality of the comments and so on?

When I look back to that era, it seems like a golden age, but I suspect if I had to go back and read everyone's posts, I'd be pretty bored. And the people get more to the point now is a good thing. So there is something about Twitter and other social media that encouraged jabs and a kind of nastiness. But I actually prefer the world we're in now. And the fact that you have all these repeated interactions, it made people nicer. But repeated interactions are themselves a little problematic, you know. Like, well, it's not quite collusive, but maybe it's better that it's sharper, even though we remain sunny and optimistic as always. We get to work with each other. Like, that's what they don't have. That's true.

The only thing, it is a little bit sad, but what has been sad actually is that we're almost the last man standing, right? So all of those blogs, as you get older, your friends die. So we haven't quite gotten there. But in terms of blogs, You know, the blogs have just sort of disappeared and faded away, and we are sort of the last ones still remaining from that era. That's a little bit wistful.

Vitalik, Ben, do you consider yourself bloggers?

I mean, I have a blog, so I guess so.

Versus, say, like an essayist or something maybe a little more pompous.

What is the difference?

I don't know.

Paul Graham is an essayist.

Yeah, Paul Graham would be an essayist.

But I would say Vitalik's a blogger.

Interesting. To me, an essay is something you write for in high school in exchange for getting grades. Kids.

Ben, what about you? Do you self-identify?

I do, but I do think there's, you know, when MR started, when I was blogging in 2004, there were RSS readers. You would read every post. You really felt like you had a connection with the person you were reading. It was a smaller community. When Google killed Google Reader, I felt like that was also a distinct end to a chapter in the blogosphere because suddenly all the distribution went to Twitter and Facebook. And you didn't read every post anymore. So I used to consider myself a blogger when I felt like there was a dedicated readership that read every post. But now it feels like you're a publisher on Facebook or something as the identity, and you really have to bow down to those algorithms to ensure that your posts get distribution.

I aggregated a lot of my blogs in those days in Google Reader, but I saved Marginal Revolution as a bookmark because I wanted to check Marginal Revolution. So for some reason, I didn't want it to be in that kind of stream. I wanted to check it as a destination, and I still do, actually.

It's because of the frequency. I mean, I think it's so rare for a blog to publish multiple times a day so that if you click refresh in the browser, you'll actually get new content. You don't have to wait for it to syndicate to RSS.

So we average 4 to 5 a day for most of the history of the blog, and when they come up is timed somewhat strategically. And I think it's why—

Do you pre-publish? You schedule?

Oh, absolutely.

Ah, okay.

The death of the blogosphere. There's just not that many internet sites you can go to that are at all interesting and also not gated. So we've just picked up a lot of people, oh, they've been to New York Times already, or they've been to Financial Times, and how many other places can they go? And they come to Marginal Revolution.

So you optimize postings based on what, like Western reader timezone? Like, so we're in India today. If you were to write something this afternoon, it's the middle of the night, you know, in California, are you thinking about this, the timing of a post?

I spread mine out so they come during the Western workday in North America, but the very first post or two I have come up at 1 AM because this way people in Europe can see it for lunch, but the people waking up, say, at 7 in New York City, that it's been stale for 6 hours, they don't really notice.

Very generous to the Europeans to give them at least something over lunch to read.

I think that is one, as someone who has access to Marginal Revolution's backend, I don't think people, I think their model is you guys write the post and and smash that publish button. And a lot of these posts—

yeah, it's really strange when people ask you, were you up at 1 AM in the morning posting that?

Like, I'm the opposite. I don't schedule. The publish time is the time it's published.

Very good. I was going to ask all of you while we're on this, what are some independent blogs that you still read, or what's your favorite independent blog? Not Substack, right? Like, not the analogs, but like an actual blog blog.

I was gonna say Sway Store Codex, but then I guess it became a Substack.

Ben and Vitalik, obviously, not just being polite. Scott Tyler Cowen, founder. I definitely still read.

Yeah, I mean, Paul Krugman, it's sort of a blog, you know.

It's not a blog anymore, though. It's just periodic columns.

Yeah, periodic columns.

It doesn't sound like a blog anymore.

You guys really have been the last hangers-on.

Correct.

And do you have any plans to change the format? Would you move to Substack or something like that?

We have no plans to change.

Yeah, no. I mean, people ask us periodically to do something else. And should we price it, right? Should we do a Substack model, subscription model, and so forth? But we've always kept it free, always kept it open.

No ads for a long time.

Yeah. And we're happy with that. I mean, that's part of the reason why we're here in Chennai, right? I mean, it's about distributing the ideas. It's about reaching as many people as possible.. And we're just much more interested in doing that than, you know, monetizing something.

But it also, there's a remarkable consistency to the design and layout. And I think I've been giving grief to Tyler Cowen for years on, hey, you might think about, you know, redesigning this portion. And I think the best analogy that I have for MR on the internet is Craigslist. Incredibly successful, incredibly well-trafficked, hasn't changed one pixel in 20+ years. And weirdly, like for as much as people hate on Craigslist's design, there's the familiarity is so rare on the internet today. Like, like companies everywhere hire brand marketers and they can't help themselves to do a brand refresh, you know, every 5 years. And the fact that MR, the same 2 people, same design, same format, same style of posts. I mean, it's kind of stunning in a world of constant change. I think people like take refuge in the MR approach.

Alex, didn't you pick the shade of green from George Mason University green?

Yeah, correct.

Yeah, that's our like little Straussian.

Yeah.

Allegiance to our own school. But people don't know that.

Yeah, George Mason itself has rebranded at least once or twice, I think, in that time.

And you know, the subheadings, "Small Steps Toward a Much Better World." Alex and I argued. So I thought it should say, "Small Steps Toward a Better World," and he thought it should say, "Much Better World," and he was totally right. But it's an important point, actually. Do you agree, Alex?

I'm not sure. I know you like that point.

Just how I like asking people how ambitious How ambitious are you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, small steps toward a giant leap forward would've been better parallelism with the moon, but it would've also had another association.

Yes.

So that was the first era. We were talking a little bit about the first era in Marginal Revolution. The second one I would say is 2008 to 2016. You have the Great Recession, the financial crisis of '08, which after the rise of popular economics, suddenly huge crisis that everyone has to talk about right now. It's clearly the biggest economic issue in the world. And then that leads on to Great Stagnation and how do we bounce back because it was such a long recovery. Again, do you agree that that's the right way to think about that era? And what do you think of that time in MR history?

Yeah, 2008, 2010, the financial crisis, I think, was the peak of the blogosphere. And to me, like, watching in real time people trying to figure out what is going on. And really not having— actually not having a clue. But seeing people like Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, Paul Krugman, Mark Toma, really a bunch of macroeconomists, top people, the very best people, right, in the world were literally in real time struggling to understand what was going on and trading ideas with one another. And we were invited to, you know, the Treasury to talk with Tyler Cowen. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. I mean, that was incredible, right? So the bloggers were talking with top Treasury officials. That made sense because really so few people understood what was going on and everyone was trying to help one another and kind of get different perspectives on it. And so that was really a remarkable time.

That was the era when the blogosphere, or more generally, internet as a tool of intellectual calculation, became developed. The notion that it's a kind of computer of its own, and that if you learn how to play the keys, you could figure out the best sense of what was going on, but not from any one blog. So a lot of MR in those eras, you need to think of it as part of this larger, like, organ of intellectual calculation. And we were a cog in that machine. It's not true now. It wasn't true in the earlier popular economics years, but that's how I think of that time.

Why isn't it true now anymore?

Well, there aren't many other blogs and back and forth between us and Twitter. There's a little of it, but I think you can use Twitter.

So econ Twitter doesn't count?

No, it does. Yeah, but it's not—

So it's migrated. And I think that's— isn't that kind of sad? Because we've moved the long-form format that y'all pioneered on MR allowed for substantive exploration. Do you think the— is the quality of the conversation as good on econ Twitter today?

You get better helpful suggestions. About how to, say, run a particular kind of regression, but the debate is much worse. And econ Twitter has tended to lean somewhat left, and it's less balanced than the older blogosphere was.

The debate is worse, but I would say actually, as we're speaking right now, we're seeing something sort of parallel, not with blogs, but understanding superconductivity, right? And seeing all of these people around the world trying to replicate these Korean results That feels to me very similar to the blogosphere in 2008, everyone trying to figure out, what is this shadow banking system? What is happening to credit? Is this when the banks are still giving out credit? Why are people saying we can't get any money? What's going on? That was like the replication of the superconductivity today.

I believe you started reading MR. So in the second era, '08 to 2016, is that about when you started reading Margin Revolution?

Yeah, sometime between 2010 and 2012. Not sure exactly when.

And how old were you?

Somewhere between 16 and 18. Not sure exactly how old.

What were you reading? Do you remember how you came across Marginal Revolution? Kind of paint us a picture. What was your intellectual—

So this was the time when I was really getting into what was back then the Bitcoin world, because back then Bitcoin was basically the only crypto out there. And it was very closely connected with Austrian economics and libertarianism, rationalism, effective altruism, like that whole bubble of— well, there's multiple important movements in the world. Those whole bubbles of movements, right? And MR was definitely a kind of in the mesh, like it was something that I would see links to from other places. I think I would— I probably would have seen links to it from Twitter as well, though I think my Twitter usage was definitely pretty low back then.

We were one of the first places to report on Bitcoin at all. Someone sent it to me as a link and I didn't understand it. Not just I didn't understand it in a deep way, I didn't even understand it in a superficial way. But I thought, well, this sounds interesting. You know, we're like a forum for new ideas. This is a new idea. Let's put it up.

But you didn't buy Bitcoin at the time.

No.

That's why we're all still here in Shenzhen.

But to see people who began reading us at a younger age and then turn into a Vitalik or something like that, that's one of the biggest thrills we could— Tyler and I— can possibly have. I mean, it's incredible. You know, we have— we've had students at George Mason who come and say, "I've been reading you since I was 12," right? And, you know, now they're getting their PhDs. Yeah, right. That's sort of mind-blowing.

Yeah. No, these things can make an influence. I mean, outside of economics, the other one was I read Aubrey's book on ending aging when I was around 13, and that's definitely stuck with me pretty much forever since then.

Would you say you were more influenced by blogs and internet thinking versus books?

I definitely did all the standard round of books, the internet hive mind, at least the libertarian internet hive mind told you to read back then. Like, you know, I went through my Ayn Rand, went through my Human Action. Well, you know, went through all of the standard good stuff at the time. I like, I definitely, yes, probably moved over to being more blog-driven somewhat later. I think nearer the beginning, like I was more seeking out like one or a very small number of big ideas that would explain a whole bunch of things. And I guess I became somewhat more intellectually pluralist over time.

But I think to Alex's point about the folks who've been influenced, like Vitalik and myself, I mean, I think it's not just the direct influence, but it's also the community of readers. There are so many people who are now close friends of mine who first discovered me via MR, and now in a very offline way, we're good friends. And so there's this like second and third order effect of these communities. And I do think that's what's rare about MR. And Geoff, you've pointed this out, is the richness of the comment section. And it's its own social network. And so the layers of influence, it's not just one degree. It's like the offline communities that get built, the genuine friendships. Have there been any marriages that have come out of it?

There's an MR marriage.

There is an MR marriage.

Kathleen and Eric, who at the time lived in the state of Texas, I think they still do. It turns out it's legal in Texas that if you pledge marriage through backtrack feature of blogging, which goes back, that it counts as a legally binding pledge. And they literally legally married on Marginal Revolution. And I think they met through Marginal Revolution also.

Wow, you guys are like almost beating the blockchain here.

What is the state of their marriage? Are they trending well? Do we know?

I visited them a few years ago. They seemed very happy, but that's a while back now.

Ben opened the door to commenters and readership, so let's go into that right now. If we snapped our fingers and removed the comments section, how would MR change? How would it have dealt, you know, historically, or how would it— if you did it now, how do you think it would change?

You know, I tried doing that for 2 weeks a few years ago, just to be arbitrary, and a lot of people complained to me that they no longer had context for the posts. So my style in particular is to assume the reader knows everything and give them nothing. And they all think it's like Straussian or some secret code. It's not. It's just like, you don't know what I'm talking about. That's fine. But people, readers, use the comments to norm and hone in on what I'm saying. Like to see who gets upset by it, for instance. And when the comments were gone, they felt rudderless and at sea. And I think that was more or less the correct reaction. So the only thing worse than the comments section is no comments section.

I mean, the comments section can be hit or miss. It usually misses on theory. People are not good at that. But you can sometimes find the one person in the world who knows more facts about the issue that you're writing about. The ability of the blog to kind of bubble that person to the top who has this really specific knowledge about this tiny, tiny area of the world, and then you can learn from them, that I think is very valuable. About the comments.

Do you guys read the Twitter responses to the MR posts?

No, I don't.

If I see it on Twitter, I would read it.

But if it's @TylerCowen, I do. But if it's @Margreve, I don't.

Yeah, correct.

Because I just do one click to my mentions.

But we would look on the blog. We look at the comments, but we don't get upset by them.

It's almost become a Reddit-style repository of knowledge as it relates to travel. One of the things that I've learned to do when searching the internet for stuff is just to add the word Reddit to the end of a query to avoid all the SEO crap at the top of the results and just get right to the Reddit on a given topic and for certain travel resources because, you know, how would Tyler know where to eat if it wasn't a blog on the blog about where to eat in some random city in, you know, middle of nowhere? But now after 20 years, both of you have— there's so many these open comment threads about food recommendations, hotel recommendations, things to do in Singapore, things to do in Bolivia, wherever. It's kind of remarkable. And so I found myself years later just going on to MR searching some country or city and using that to guide travel planning.

I do that too. And it might have been my post, but the, the MR search function is the most underrated part of the blog, I think.

And that you call it the MR search function, which is quintessential Tyler phrase that you've been using since the beginning.

So if Marginal Revolution has been going for 20 years, you're posting, you know, 3, 5 times a day for 20 years. So now people jumping in just in the past couple of years, it's almost like The Simpsons. I mean, where do you even start, you know, as a 15-year-old.

Worst blog post ever.

Is there a greatest hits list anywhere?

No, I've deliberately not done that. For one thing, I might change my mind, but I don't want people to feel there's some easy way of skimming the cream. They just have to keep on riding along with us.

Don't make it too easy. Make them work for the insight.

Exactly. So, like, it's not about them. It's about me and Alex.

It's not the blog they want to read.

It's the blog you want to read.

But you have no plans to somehow kind of get out of that flow model and provide kind of the best of or the stock? 'Cause at first it was relatively easy to kind of get the stock of MR. Now it's just a river you've gotta jump in and let it carry you away.

Let people play around with the MR search function.

Maybe we'll do a book or something like that. But, you know, I had looked at this at one point and just to get like a PDF of the blog posts, like sort of read them and see them, It broke all of the— it was just too big. It was just too big. So we had to sort of do it year by year. And, you know, I mean, you think about that, that's like, I don't know, thousands of posts and the whole thing, just to read it all, to find the best posts, it's going to take some time.

Wonder if ChatGPT is going to change it. Like what happens if you type in like, what does Marginal Revolution say about what you do in Singapore, what you should do in Singapore? Does that work? At some point it will.

Yeah, I think some point soon in the next 2 years.

So maybe the MR search function is not as important as we thought it was.

Well, it may become less important, but until then—

But for now it remains the most underrated feature.

And it's still easier to use than, say, GPT-4. It's just right there and it's free and it's pretty quick.

At some point we'll be able to ask, even for a city that Tyler has never been to, we can say, what restaurant would Tyler Cowen like?

No, I've done that. GPT-4 is pretty good at that. I do that actually fairly often. Where would you tell Tyler Cowen to go eat? That's the prompt you need.

This works better for you than for me. I think if I did this, it would just answer, oh, Vitalik Buterin obviously wants to go to a decentralized restaurant.

Or like Eastern European food, right?

It'll take decentralized. It'll say, yeah, I like eating cryptographically verifiable hash.

It'll tell you to go to a chain restaurant.

Yes, exactly.

That's good jokes, guys. I'm really impressed by that. Just off the dome. All right, favorite MR commenters. I'll throw out one notable one, Barkley J. Rosser. He passed away in early 2023. When he passed away, you called him out as a longtime commenter, and I went and looked. He left nearly 4,000 comments on Marginal Revolution, the first in May 2005. And the last in December of 2022. That averages to about a comment every other day for 17.5 years.

He was a very good polymath, super smart, but like every 50th comment or so, he'd just call his intellectual opponent a total moron, followed by some obscenities, and then he'd be back to totally cool.

He needed to get out of his system like all of us. Every 50 comments, you know.

That's right.

What did this guy do? Did he have a job?

Oh, professor.

Yeah, he was a professor of economics, but chaos theory, mathematician. Soviet The Soviet economy, yes.

Well, here's your chance to kind of lift up the best commenters. So who in your mind right now, or throughout the history of MR, who stands out to you as a good commenter? Someone who always—

Right now, sure, is the best commenter. I don't know who he or she is. Probably it's a he, given our comment section. But just a lot of concrete points, especially about the healthcare sector.

About the medical system, yeah. Probably a doctor. Very knowledgeable. Sure is good. Dan1111 or 111, I don't know which one, good. But it definitely changes over the years. Not everybody has come as long, you know, so it changes.

But it's like the intellectual calculation of the comment section. There will be lists of comments and maybe every comment is bad, but actually in the aggregate, you learn a lot from triangulating against it. Well, here's what these people would say.

Well, adding the upvote feature to me was like long overdue, but it substantially improved the quality of the comment section.

Okay.

Right. The Reddit style, like being able to just see the top comments versus wading through it all, I think has been a big improvement.

There's a lot of manipulation though. I think it's an improvement, but I'm not a fan.

Are people coordinating among their friends and family to upvote their comment and manipulate the thing?

They write scripts, I believe.

Wow.

It's possible to do, but it's a sign of how quote unquote serious they are.

People are spending their free time writing scripts to hack the comment section of MR. Wow.

The most critical people are our biggest fans in my view. It's like, "You're bothering to go after us?

I feel really flattered." The opposite of love is not to hate. It's indifference.

That's right.

Exactly.

Very close together.

Exactly.

There are people who are very invested in the maintenance and operation of the Marginal Revolution comments system. So much to the chagrin of some people, you can put any name you want and people who have probably commented maybe as long as Rosser did, want sort of their identity protected. And it really bothers some people when they can't do that and anyone can claim to be who they are. Have you thought about, you know, giving people that, that ability or changing it in a way that it's a little less gameable in that sense?

If people register, it can be hacked or they maybe they don't trust us. So I don't want to force people to have these identities. This is one fellow. Actually, when he was a kid, he trademarked the name Bill. He has IP in the name Bill. And there's another Bill who comes along, violates this guy's property rights. So the first Bill calls the second one Fake Bill, and they slug this out. And first Bill, the guy with all the IP rights to the name, he's convinced Fake Bill is actually equestrian.

And he writes us and tells us, "Look at the posting of the timing and look how it was. It must be." You guys need to get rid of fake Bill. And it's—

there's no grand conspiracy. It's just there are many Bills. Let's go back to eras of MR. Okay, so we did '06 to 2016, and I think the third era of MR is 2016 to 2020, which is the rise of populism, Trump. It's a smaller, shorter period because of COVID and things that happened around 2020. But what about that specific time, both for MR and again, the kind of intellectual discourse online?

It definitely fell. And the thing which marked it to me was actually our most commented— I believe it's our most commented on post was just Tyler's post. And it just said Sarah Palin. That was it. That was it. And that is the most commented. That was the title of the post.

McCain had just picked her.

Yeah, yeah, nothing else.

I didn't, I didn't hear of her. I just wondered, what are you people going to say? I was very innocent on my part.

And the comment section just went nuts. And like, everybody has got an opinion. And it was a little distressing in the sense that that's precisely the sort of thing that Tyler and I don't want to do. But at the same time, if you don't give the comment section an opportunity to speak on the so-called issue of the day, they will take some other post which is on something entirely different and say, but what about Sarah Palin? So you have to give them that outlet.

That's right.

These, these sound like children.

I think we're the children. We're giggling about them. And they may be like disturbed sometimes or just very smart people wasting their time.

But I think in this era of the political discourse, the level-headedness of MR, which sounds both truly reflective of your natures but also an intentional norm that you tried to establish, was as needed as ever, right? The cool-headedness. Even in the Trump era, I can't recall any posts that were over the top in their emotion.

We had some very good think pieces in that era, I thought, both of us.

What is a think piece? Like longer? Like a—

Well, longer, but about politics, but not candidates, about politics at a conceptual level. What is going on here? How can this be happening? Sort of pieces.

Yeah.

I mean, MR's market share of my mind definitely increased during that period. I think I definitely saw other spaces, declining inequality, and MR didn't, to its great credit, which I think was great.

Now, kind of a short-lived era because in 2020, obviously pandemic, and then somewhat resulting from that, though some of this stuff was seeded before, you have these big essays on progress, state capacity, libertarianism, but also, of course, pandemic response. So maybe we separate those two, but COVID and just becoming similar to the financial crisis, similar to other examples like this where everyone's learning in public, everyone's trying to figure out what's going on. What was that like for you two?

We were stuck inside for one thing, so we put out more posts. Lynx would have 10 rather than 5 or 6.

Definitely a strange era. You know, I found myself— I was invited to give this talk. To the White House Domestic Policy and on using incentives to accelerate vaccine development. So I get on the call and turns out that they had invited me and Michael Kremer, who's the number one world expert on precisely this question. And I was very direct, you know, I said, you got to do this, you got to do this. It's when the economy was losing, you know, like $200 billion, $250 billion a month. Right. And so there was almost nowhere you could go wrong, right? So I was promoting an Operation Warp— what turned into Operation Warp Speed, saying, look, you got to spend some money here. You know, I said, look, I'm known as a sort of conservative free market economist guy. I've never said these words in my entire life before, but now is the time to throw money at the problem. And Michael Kremer turned out was in complete agreement, which was good. Gave me a lot of credibility. He is sort of more soft-spoken, but that was good teamwork. And then And afterwards, they invited us, they asked us to write a report. And then Michael got, you know, a bunch of other people like Susan Athey and Chris Snyder, top economist. And we wrote this report promoting something like what became Operation Warp Speed. I have no idea what influence we had, but we certainly put it out there. And so then I became, because of the blog, I sort of became the spokesperson for some of these ideas.

First doses first.

First doses first and fractional dosing. And using incentives, Operation Warp Speed, all that kind of stuff. And then what was peculiar, I think strange, so I had that role and then Tyler started FAST Grants. So we both had this tremendous kind of involvement in one way or another, but in a very different respect.

Yeah, and MOR became a kind of information clearinghouse with other blogs gone. Clearly there was Twitter for the pandemic, but if you wanted one website where you didn't have to scroll or fend off other things. We made that the place to go. It's amazing to me in retrospect how many people have held that against us, because a lot of what we did was just covering different facts.

Held what against you?

That we gave so much attention to the pandemic. They think we're like— But did they interpret it to the fake pandemic?

Oh, I see. Gotcha.

The fake pandemic.

Yeah.

The one where the vaccines killed the people, not the virus. That pandemic. Remember? Yeah.

I hadn't really thought about it in that way, that Marginal Revolution enabled both of you to have applied, you know, real-world responses to the pandemic, but in separate ways.

Exactly.

You guys chose to do your independent thing. You're both on the blog, obviously covering this stuff, getting your ideas out there. But then, Alex, you're much more giving policymakers a very specific idea of something to do. And Tyler goes for, let's get grants out there as quickly as we can.

And Fast Grants raised over $50 million, and most of the donors were MR readers. And I think in part they felt they trusted me in the operation because they had known of MR for so long, and they knew Alex was doing Operation Warp Speed, and it felt very credible.

And I wonder if this is a good time to talk about the differences between the two of you. In the way that you write and the way that you engage with the world because you're co-authors and obviously share so much. But the differences are sometimes amusing to see. So I was telling Alex earlier, I always know when I'm in my RSS reader looking at MR posts that I have to click on the ones where the capitalization is proper in the title of the post because I know Alex will capitalize the words in a post, whereas Tyler will do lowercase, you know, words in the title. Then obviously Alex posts infrequently, longer form, usually Tyler's relentless daily output. Talk about some of the differences between the two of you in terms of how you think, how you write, and are these subtle differences that show up in MR revealing of any deeper difference in your approach to life, worldview, work style, et cetera?

You wrote a post on this, right? Do you remember what you said?

So I said something like, if the post has got, you know, 5 different explanations for the same phenomenon, right, then it's a Tyler post. If it has one explanation, you know, simplifying everything down, then it's an Alex It's an Alex post. If you don't understand what the post says, it's a Tyler Cowen post. If you do understand what the post says and you hate it, then it's an Alex post. I think that rules pretty well. The way I put it is that, yeah, the first thing I do when coming to a problem is strip away as much complexity as I possibly can and get down to what I think is the nut of the problem and try and deal with that. Well, the first thing that Tyler does is think about, let's think about the 5 or 6 or 7 things which could influence this. And then we'll work with those, you know, 7 different things and try and come up with a solution. And so we're very different in that way. But then if you sort of force me to like add in some complexity and, well, what about this? What about this? And this period of time. And then you— and if you were to force Tyler to take away some complexity, which is really hard to do. Okay, so you have to get Tyler, you have to gang up on him with like Bryan Kaplan and Garrett Jones, people at lunch. If you gang up on Tyler and make him strip away the complexity and you make me add complexity, then actually we come to the same place, but from very different thinking styles.

And how about the cadence of the output? I mean, Alex, are you ever tempted or inspired to publish more frequently? Or Tyler, have you ever thought about doing twice a week? Or what's that about, the difference?

No, I have no plan on changing. I think one thing I try to do in many of my posts is to mix moods. So I presented this notion of mood affiliation. People are like optimistic or pessimistic, or they have their loyalty to the mood, and that's usually a cognitive mistake. And I found if you mix moods in a post, you can say things that are entirely correct and people will just get angry. They'll think you're confusing them. You're kind of messing with their minds. And this is deliberate. But I think it's trying to teach people a lesson. You know, once I wrote the book The Great Stagnation. The title, Great Stagnation, okay, but the whole last chapter of the book is about how we're going to get out of it. All these wonderful breakthroughs will be coming because of the internet. No one ever mentions that last chapter. They only take one mood away from a book. So I'm happy with a post if I feel I've sent mixed moods and what I'm saying I think is true and it's going to bug people and confuse them. Then I'm like, yes.

Interesting. It reminds me of the post that I wrote last week on the Worldcoin where I think—

That's a good example.

Right. Like one of the things that happened is that the people who are pro-Worldcoin basically said like, look, you know, the haters are crazy. Vitalik explains it really clearly. And then the people who are anti basically said like, look, here's the section where he outlines what the 4 crazy risks are. And people, you know, it seems like everyone just walked away. Yeah. I mean, I hope some people, and I think lots of people did get interesting information, but definitely many walked away just certain that their existing opinion is correct, which is unfortunately the default response to most writing anywhere.

To answer your question, Ben, it's not about being tempted, me being tempted to write more often. The production function just doesn't encompass that ability. And people, they don't believe Tyler reads as much as he does, but he honestly does. It's true.

I only cover a small fraction of what I read.

That's the funny thing. I mean, it's true Tyler skims, but the way I would put it is this, that he very quickly is able to find something in a book which he doesn't know, and then he reads that section. But this— what this means is that the more Tyler reads, the faster he can read because he just skips the stuff he already knows. And so, I mean, he's just a unique ability, and that he's— I don't— you know, there's nobody else, I think, in the world who can produce as much original, interesting, new content as Tyler. So I'm very grateful for that since I feel I don't have to feed the blog quite as much.

Speaking of reading, let's move to a segment I'm calling Mysteries of MR. So a couple of times, I think from like '06 to '08, you hosted book clubs. There were maybe 2 or 3. There was a Keynes book club on the General Theory, and it just stopped halfway through. Why did it stop?

I'm not sure I remember. I was happy with it. And the comments section on those posts was often quite good.

It stopped at chapter 12, and your last post is basically a long quote of the chapter, you know, an excerpt of the chapter. And then you say, "A lot of insights in here." Chapter 12 is the best chapter of the General Theory.

So maybe I just felt it would be going downhill.

Okay. Not a satisfactory— I feel like I'm the only one in the world who's wondering that. I was participating at the time, and to me it just ended and it was never spoken of again.

Maybe 13 will be coming soon. Who knows?

Why no more book clubs?

The comment section is worse. I think we're also not in an era of that many seminal books. So there aren't books I'm tempted to cover. I think there's a large number of excellent history books coming out, but they don't make sense for book clubs. You need some theory in a book for it to fit into a book club. So if everyone can say something.

What do you think is the last book that was, like, even on the level of, like, things like Human Action or, you know, like the stuff that animated a lot of people in the last century?

I feel there was a 15 to 20 year period, maybe starting with Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, where you have at least 30 or 40 books. And I couldn't remember which was the last, but things like The Red Queen, Selfish Gene, right? And many different— Freakonomics. And everyone had to read all those books to be intellectually literate. I don't think we're in that time anymore.

Yeah, I've definitely found for myself at having a harder and harder time answering the question, "What's the most interesting book that you've read?" So I just mainly read history, and those are interesting, especially if you read them in clusters or clumps.

I'll read about the history of Ireland for 6 to 9 months. But there's not any single book like, "Oh, you have to read this book." And everyone's still trying to write books like the Jared Diamond kind of book. I'm not saying they're all bad books, but I don't think they're really succeeding in grabbing anyone's attention. It feels played out, that genre.

Do you think we're just in like less of a "big idea age" and in more of a "many small ideas age"? Is there a distinction?

The big ideas are things people do, like large language models, Ethereum, and so on, and so on. And those are the big ideas. They're fantastic. But they're not books. In a sense, the books were a poor substitute for the actual big ideas. It's the way I look at it. I'd rather have the big ideas. If superconductivity comes through, how many books is that worth?

So for a long time, you've made the claim that you've never missed a day of posting on Margin Revolution.

It's not a claim, it's a fact.

Please.

I've often wondered if anyone checked that.

I've checked.

Factual. I've checked too.

Yeah.

And it's not true.

What?

Alex, your first post was on August 21st.

Okay. Okay.

There was no post on August 22nd. So Tyler, you hadn't started yet, so maybe you can still keep this claim. But there is one day that I've only been able to find where there is no MR post.

Ah, have there been any close calls? Like, you know, plane got delayed, it's 11:50 PM, post hasn't gone up, or is it, is this scheduling?

It's not actually a thing that we try.

I mean, I've evolved into trying, but I just have had a lot to say.

Yeah.

It's just, yeah. It's just Tyler's natural pace.

Do you have any memory of, you know, so you wrote the first post on the 21st and then Tyler, you just started 2 days later. Do you have any memory of why Alex started first or there was the 2-day delay?

We were doing all these practice posts thinking no one would read them and we would just get up to speed. And then we learned people were writing us like, oh, love your post. It's like, oh, someone read that. Wondering, oh, what did we say yesterday?

And you have to also understand, okay, Tyler is not that good at technology. Okay.

An understatement.

So, so I set the blog up, right? So then I had to, uh, to, here's your password, Tyler. You know, here's how you post. So it took Tyler a week or two before he really hit stride.

No, I still come to Alex with very simple questions. How does this work?

And yet at the same time, you've been a more active user of ChatGPT than probably the great majority of other people.

But I don't think I'm good at the technological side of it. The conceptual side, maybe there are things I grasp because of my background in the humanities, that would be it.

Let's move to probably the last official segment of the conversation, but this is the recurring segments and memes of Marginal Revolution. So I'll throw out a few that I've noticed and Vitalik and Ben, you jump in with any you know. But throughout the history of the blog, there's been these recurring things. Best sentence I read today. A very early one, claims my Russian wife laughs at. I don't know if you remember that sentence.

You won't let me call her Russian anymore. So that's one reason that one disappeared.

Sentences to ponder, shout it from the rooftops, pictures of puffins. And Alex, I don't know how long you've done this, but every— at the end of the year now you do a stats rundown and I've— where you show off the most popular posts of Marginal Revolution. And to me, when I read it, I think this is Alex's way of saying like, I don't write nearly as many posts as Tyler, but I usually have the top ranking post on Marginal Revolution. Is that, is that, am I correct in that? Or is it you're just providing a public service?

Yeah.

It's also to be fair to have the top post, which I don't always do by any means. That's not necessarily a good thing, right? That goes back to, you know, if it's an Alex, if you understand the post and you hate it, it's an Alex post. So those tend to get a lot of comments.

I think the, one of my favorite points of levity in MR is when I think Tyler, you once wrote a post after doing all these assorted links, of course, which is a standby on the blog. One day you just did assorted link and the whole post was just number 1 with a link. I was like, what a clever reversal. But I think it'd be remiss if we're talking about memes, Jeff. I feel like we have to honor the third co-author of the blog who's not here with us in this conversation, but that's Tyrone. And he's, he's given a lot to Marginal Revolution over the years. And just, you know, curious, Tyler, just be honest with us. Where is he? What have you done with him?

He lives in the attic, Tyrone. There hasn't been that much Tyrone in the last 6 or 7 years, and I think the reason for that is the real world itself has become so weird and bizarre that what is a Tyrone post or what is funny in a Tyrone post, it's changed and it's somehow more tragic. And I would like to let Tyrone out of the attic, but I also find it's a lot of emotional energy to write a Tyrone post. Much more than to write a Tyler post, because you have to keep it within certain bounds, but you have to let the juices flow. And that's really hard. It has to be plausible enough, but people should not think, as indeed they shouldn't, that Tyrone's view is Tyler's, because we all know that's never true.

For the uninitiated, Tyrone's worldview or essential style is what? For those who haven't been part of the blog for a long time, they've heard about Tyrone only in the abstract, how would you characterize his—

I'm so close to Tyrone, I think we have to let Alex answer that question.

I mean, I will say Tyrone will come to lunch, but he never announces himself. So the way that Tyrone operates is he will say something outrageous and then everyone will, at the lunch conversation, will try and, I would argue, overcome And then he'll give a lot of good arguments for this. It's very disturbing because then you go home and, oh my God, Tyrone has messed with my mind. You know, what was right? It seems totally wrong and yet the argument seems logically correct. And so Tyrone is a troublemaker. Okay, he's troubled and a troublemaker. So that's what I would say. And Tyrone uses his gifts to do evil deeds. Okay, Tyler uses his gifts to benefit the world. And to create fast grants and emergent ventures and to stimulate all kinds of people. Tyrone uses his gifts to confound people and confuse them and set them on wrong paths. So we want to keep Tyrone pretty boxed.

My father wanted to name me Tyrone. That's where the name comes from. And my mother refused. She's like, Tyrone, that's a terrible name. She held firm. I became Tyler. But it's some kind of modal reality in the David Lewis sense. And every now and then, readers should be allowed to peek behind that curtain.

We should all, I suppose, reflect in ourselves at this moment of who is our inner Tyrone and how do we get in touch with our shadow.

That's part of the point of the post. There you go.

It's actually a tool from, I think, maybe cognitive behavioral therapy to give your negative thoughts a name and say, "Oh, that's Tyrone talking. That's not Jeff." Right. So maybe I'll steal yours.

Yeah.

I feel like Strosianism kind of is a meme in itself.

I think a lot of people misread that. I feel I've expressed forthright opinions on more topics possibly than any economist ever. And it is true that when I write a post, I never or hardly ever explain the references or give links. It's super informationally dense. Partly doing so bores me, partly kind of mess with people's minds a bit. But if they know all the references, it's actually crystal clear. And there's plenty of topics for all— here's what Tyler thinks. And I say it, I mean, hundreds, thousands of topics. And people think I'm the Straussian. I tell people like how to find the Strauss and others.

All right, Alex.

Okay. Some general questions to close. How much time per week right now do each of you spend like directly writing, thinking about the blog?

All of it. But look, writing it takes way less time than people think. Way less.

All right.

Let's say just writing. I don't— writing, like just actually crafting the posts, getting them ready to go.

I don't know, 2 hours a day.

Yeah. I mean, when I write, it does take some time because I think especially when you have a lot of readers and you think, or I think, you know, if I can save a reader a few seconds of time,. And you do the expected altruism sort of calculation where, well, you got thousands of readers, so if I can, you know, a minute for me and saves them, you know, hours.

I don't do that, by the way.

Yeah, Tyler just likes to get it down.

As your audience has grown, is there a sense that, do the stakes seem higher? Are you going to spend more time sort of thinking of reviewing posts, perhaps even self-censoring?

Like, gosh, in the old days I would have published this, but now that I've got all these influential readers, I can't just You've got to resist that, and there's a few recent times where I did resist that, and I'm glad I did. But for me, a key thing is like, can you ever sit there and still giggle? And if that disappears, I feel I'm doing something wrong, but I definitely can still sit there and giggle.

Yeah, I wouldn't say we self-censor. I don't feel I self-censor, but except in the following sense: there's just a bunch of topics that I think the world just does not need to know my opinion. A, wouldn't be useful and wouldn't be useful for them, wouldn't be useful for me. So, like, you know, why bother? So there are things like that.

So obviously—

And what do you think about those topics?

Yeah, I'll tell you.

The floor is yours. So the blog has allowed you to gain so much influence, notoriety. What's kept you at Mason and Mercatus? Have you had offers? What's kept you at this kind of institutional home?

I've had good offers or potential offers, but support for what I'm doing, great people to work with. Alex most of all, but not only, everyone at Mercatus, and where it is. I think it's the best location in the United States to be for a number of reasons, at least for me. It's been great.

You know, I go to economics conferences, you know, you go hear some talks and they're often boring, and then I find myself— it's bizarre, but I find myself— I want to go hear Tyler Cowen's talk or Robin Hanson's talk or Bryan Caplan's. And like, I can speak to these guys every day, right? Why would I possibly do this? And yet it often turns out they're the most interesting people, you know, on the agenda. And, you know, Tyler, like, I can talk to Tyler every single day, but he'll go present at a conference and he'll say things I've never heard him say before. So it's not like, you know, I say Tyler is like a Heraclitean thinker. You know, you can never enter the same waters twice. Because every single day it's something different. What a joy, what a pleasure, what an honor, you know, it is for me to be in a department with just an amazing group of thinkers who stimulate. And, you know, you try and just keep up even a little bit, and it's incredible.

We never get sick of it. And George Mason's a good school for free speech. Definitely.

Yes. We feel supported there.

What are the types of blog posts that you think have generated the most impact in the sense of cultural resonance or influence? Are they like the very prescriptive policy things? Are they the philosophical treatises? What do you think? Is it one post or is it actually more of the chorus?

It's very hard to know, but two things I would say. One is my post on state capacity libertarianism, which is still a good statement of where I am philosophically. I think that's held up well. And when I coined the term, that's the case where I was sitting there, you know, giggling like, "Oh, this term is so absurd, no one will ever use it." So it's just right. And people still use it. But I wrote a post about Emergent Ventures. We're at the Emergent Ventures Winners Meetup, and I outlined the philosophy behind Emergent Ventures. I don't think it's our most read post. I don't think it's our most cited post. But a lot of donors read that post and were persuaded. And without that post, I don't think we would have Emergent Ventures as a large thing. So given how much talent we now have, over 400 winners have come through Emergent Ventures, that's like a super influential post, even though at the surface level it may not look that way.

We try and keep, either increase the Overton window or try and stop the Overton window from shutting down. I think some of the COVID posts like on first doses first and things like that, even though in the United States we didn't do first doses first, but Britain and Canada did. Hopefully I may have had some influence there. But what I think is interesting is that when we did monkeypox, okay, CDC went along with first doses first for monkeypox. So that's what I mean by sort of keeping that Overton window. So even though like no one's going to cite you know, oh, Tavrok said this on first doses for COVID, it made it possible for people to think that this is an idea we should be thinking about. Right. And so the next time it— the virus— a virus came around, you have a bigger pot of ideas from which to pull. And this idea, which once seemed totally radical, now seems, hey, maybe we can try this. So I think that has been—

On First Doses First, there was a major decision maker from an actual country who just sent me a message like, hey, do you guys really mean this? And I said yes. And the next day it happened. No, I'm not saying it happened because of that only thing, but people are really listening to an extent that is scary sometimes.

Well, I think there are two vectors of influence from MR. One is the specific Jeff posts, you know, specific ideas he put forth in the world that had real impact. But there's another vector of influence, which I think is more subtle, but is probably how I would identify being influenced. Because if you ask me, what are the 5 posts that have most influenced me, I probably couldn't tell you the 5. But there's this general mood, a temperament, an approach to the world, a way of thinking about ideas, a level-headedness that kind of like a fish in water after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of posts. Just seep into every aspect of your worldview and way of thinking about the world. And I think that's, that's the really profound legacy of MR to me as a reader. Hard to put my finger on exactly how or where, but I think it's ultimately a much deeper level of influence on perhaps a small, smaller number of people. But it's really, really incredible. And I'm so grateful for that.

Before I close, Vitalik, any general questions you had, other things you're curious about?

So how did it happen that the two of you are on the same blog and Brian and Robin are off in their separate playgrounds? Could things have ended up differently?

I can speak to that, and this is the origin story of MR. Correct me if I'm getting anything wrong, but Alex came into my office one day and he said, "We ought to write a textbook." And I said something like, "That's a great idea, Alex, but first we need to write a blog." and become much better known, and then we'll write a textbook. And without Alex, I wouldn't have done it. And I love Brian, I love Robin, but I wouldn't have done it with them. And whether Alex might have done something with them, he could speak to. And I've supported their writing a lot, but I don't feel it meshes with mine somehow. The thing that Ben just outlined, this kind of cumulative vision of a way to be, I think Alex's take on that is different than mine. But I feel his doesn't interfere with mine and it supports it and complements it. And for Bryan and Robin, it doesn't. And that's why I didn't pick them.

Yeah, I think that's great. We both have pluralist ways of thinking in slightly different ways.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I agree with that. And it's worked well for the blog. You know, Tyler is obviously posting every day and I'm giving people a little bit more of the red meat, which sort of keeps them coming back as well. So I think, and you know, we've done the book, we've done Marginal Revolution University. Together. So we have a long history of projects which have come out pretty good.

We've worked together now 33 years, I believe, you know, well before MR. Yeah, keep that in mind. Yeah, we wrote a whole bunch of papers together.

What would be the reason to end Marginal Revolution?

Death, senility, not superconductivity though.

Would senility actually end Marginal Revolution? I guess a sufficient amount of it would.

Well, you could take away the keys from me, Jeff, from Alex.

Okay, the responsibility lies in my hands. Yeah. Congratulations on entering your third decade of Marginal Revolution. I think I speak for Ben Vitalik and myself and all the readers that we look forward to continue reading and to hearing your ideas and seeing your influence in the world. So thank you, Alex. Thank you, Tyler. Thank you, Ben. Vitalik, and thank you all for listening.

Let's see another 20 years.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen, and the show is @CowanConvoes. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.