Tyler Cowen

Education and early life

Cowen was raised in Hillsdale, New Jersey, and attended Pascack Valley High School. At 15, he became the youngest ever New Jersey state chess champion. Cowen is of Irish ancestry.

He graduated from George Mason University with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics in 1983 and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987 with his thesis titled Essays in the Theory of Welfare Economics. At Harvard, he was mentored by game theorist Thomas Schelling, the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Academic career

Cowen joined the faculty of George Mason University shortly after completing his doctorate and has remained there throughout his career. He holds the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics and serves as chairman of the Mercatus Center, a research institution that promotes market-oriented analysis of policy issues.

His early research focused on the economics of culture, public goods, and welfare economics. Cowen’s 1998 book In Praise of Commercial Culture argued that markets foster artistic creativity by broadening audiences and increasing opportunities for innovation. Later works explored globalization, philanthropy, and the economics of inequality.

Cowen has also written extensively on the economics of cultural consumption and economic growth. His 2011 book The Great Stagnation contended that the U.S. economy’s slower growth stems from a depletion of “low-hanging fruit” such as cheap land, mass education, and technological breakthroughs. The book was widely discussed across media and academia for reframing debates about innovation and productivity.

Cowen’s later scholarship continued this theme in works such as Average Is Over (2013), which predicted that artificial intelligence and automation would widen income inequality, and Stubborn Attachments (2018), a philosophical defense of long-term economic growth as a moral imperative.

In 2018, Cowen founded Emergent Ventures, an incubator fellowship and grant program housed at the Mercatus Center that supports entrepreneurs and researchers pursuing "zero to one" ideas. The program launched with a $1 million grant from the Thiel Foundation. In 2020, together with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and UC Berkeley bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu, Cowen spun off Fast Grants from Emergent Ventures to fund COVID-19 research; Fast Grants ultimately raised over $50 million and awarded 260 grants.

Cowen is a teetotaler, saying he is "with the Mormons" on alcohol, and "I encourage people to just completely, voluntarily abstain from alcohol and make it a social norm".