Tyler Cowen

Economist, blogger (Marginal Revolution), and prolific “talent” thinker who recurs across Kyle’s corpus as a source on talent-spotting, stagnation, and AI’s effect on education. He co-authored Talent (Book) with Daniel Gross, a book on how to identify high-potential people that Kyle read in 2023 (the title is a load-bearing reference for Kyle’s hiring/talent thinking). He is also a foundational figure for Progress Studies: his 2011 The Great Stagnation is the backdrop against which Kyle reads Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation, and the field itself was named in a 2019 Atlantic essay he co-wrote with Patrick Collison calling for a new discipline studying what actually drives progress.

In Kyle’s We Need a Renaissance of Rhetoric research, Cowen is the foil for the “skills” argument about AI in education. His Free Press piece — “Everyone’s Using AI to Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing.” — argues that American education was already in a “profound crisis — the result of ideological capture, political monoculture, and extreme conformism,” and that AI cheating is ultimately good news because using AI well is precisely the skill the future demands; he proposes devoting roughly a third of the college curriculum to teaching AI use. Kyle treats this as the optimistic counterweight in his AI Cheating in Education thread. Cowen’s interests also touch Kyle’s City Building strand.

Context: Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University, co-author of the long-running Marginal Revolution blog, host of the Conversations with Tyler podcast, and chairman of the Mercatus Center’s Emergent Ventures grant program. He coined the influential “Great Stagnation” thesis and, with Patrick Collison, helped launch the Progress Studies movement.

Where this appears

• Talent (Book) — co-authored with Daniel Gross; Cowen’s framework for identifying high-potential people.
• We Need a Renaissance of Rhetoric — his Free Press piece reframing AI cheating as good news and education as already in crisis.
• Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation — his Great Stagnation thesis as the diagnostic backdrop for the book’s argument.
• Progress Studies — co-namer of the movement (with Patrick Collison) in the 2019 Atlantic essay.
• AI Cheating in Education · City Building — adjacent concept threads he anchors.
• Does Anything I Write Matter Anymore? — Noah Smith invokes Cowen’s “writing for the AIs” framing.