Economist Tyler Cowen writes every morning as his top priority, waking around 7 am and blocking his schedule for uninterrupted thinking time. Writing out arguments he disagrees with deepens his understanding and sometimes changes his mind. Most of his writing never gets published, staying on his blog or in notebooks.
Why did you settle on an 11:30 bedtime?
I think on average it's more like 11:26, but that's when I'm tired. Maybe that's a silly answer, but it's a pretty good one.
And what time do you wake up?
It depends on the season, but typically 7:00. And then I wake up a little earlier in the summer, a little later in the winter, right? But not by much. And I write in the morning. First thing I do is go through most but not all of my messages. I don't respond to everyone right away. That would take too much time. But I see where I'm at for the day, and then I start into writing pretty quickly.
So what does that mean, where I'm at for the day? That would imply that you plan your days every single day sort of new. And that there's not a lot of planning going on in your life?
Planning is a tricky word. I would say it's intense, extreme planning, but planning to have a lot of open space. There's an earlier Marc Andreessen essay, which he's now kind of repudiated, where he says, well, the way you should try to schedule is leave open a lot of time and then do important things at the last minute and have big blocks of time for thinking, writing, or for him programming perhaps in his earlier life. And I've still managed to do a version of that, and that works for me. But if I think of writing as the most important thing I do, I do that just every single morning. It depends on the year. Maybe in a lot of years there's 15 to 20 mornings where I just can't write that morning. The most common cause of that would be, in the old days, a 9:00 AM plane flight. And then I won't write that morning, maybe won't write that day, but otherwise every morning write. Total religion, Saturday, Sunday, Christmas Day, my birthday, I don't care, do it. No exceptions. If you write every day, you don't even have to worry about how much you've written. It's going to add up. And furthermore, the regularity of the habit pushes you along a learning curve, so you'll get more done each day. And I'm still moving along that curve.
So I want to dive into that, but let's start by saying that in your writing, one of the things that you do a lot is lay out the arguments of views that you disagree with. Why is that so productive?
You understand the views better. You also start sympathizing with those people more. You begin to realize they might be right and you might be wrong. It makes your own arguments better, and sometimes you'll change your mind. So if you're only just writing out the same tired version of some point that's probably true, uh, you become stupider. So the natural inclination past a certain age, which is not that big a number, is to become stupider de facto. And you do that by saying the same thing, even if it's right. So I've always wanted to avoid that. And I think you asked earlier, like, what are your kind of different special tricks? And the first I said was just having been at it a long time, but I would say that's another one. Like really being willing to entertain and indeed write out different points of view. And a lot of that I do on Marginal Revolution. But some of it is just stuff that never comes out anywhere.
What percentage of what you write do you publish?
I'm not sure. It's become higher. Maybe that's worrying. But a typical book, there's half of what gets published that doesn't make it into the book on average. And I guess I think it's worse, or maybe in a few cases too speculative, which is a different kind of worse, but usually just like too boring or a little trivial or just like wouldn't think it had a chance of being in the top half of the book. And look, people have enough pages of me if that's they want to read all of it. So just giving them more pages from their point of view, I don't think is a high return.
