Episode · Conversations with Tyler · 2023-08-23
Books mentioned on Celebrating Marginal Revolution's 20th Anniversary
When Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen launched Marginal Revolution in August of 2003, they saw attracting a few thousand academic-minded readers as a runaway success. To their astonishment, the blog soon eclipsed that goal, and within a decade had become one of the most widely read economics blogs in the world.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Freakonomics
Freakonomics by Steven D.
Discussed“but things like the right Queen selfish Gene right in many different Freakonomics and everyone had to read all those books to be intellectually illiterate”
Where to get it
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Ending Aging
Discussed“the other one was I read aubry's book on ending aging when I was around 13 and that's uh definitely stuck with me is pretty much forever”
Where to get it
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Human Action
Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, co-edited with Bettina Bien Greaves, is a monumental economic treatise that serves as a foundational text for Austrian economics and libertarian theory.
Discussed“uh always the libertarian inner and I have mine told you to read back then like you know I went through mine rans went through my Human Action”
Where to get it
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General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes is a foundational 1936 economics text that revolutionized macroeconomics by arguing that free markets do not automatically provide full employment or output stability.
Discussed“there was a Keynes book club on the general theory and it just stopped halfway through why did it stop”
Where to get it
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Guns, Germs and Steel
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is a sweeping historical exploration of how geographic and environmental factors shaped the disparate fates of human societies over the last thirteen thousand years.
Discussed“maybe starting with Jared diamond constrips and steel yeah where you have at least 30 or 40 books”
Where to get it
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The Selfish Gene
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is a foundational popular science work that presents a gene-centric view of evolution, arguing that natural selection operates primarily at the level of genes rather than individuals or species.
Discussed“but things like the right Queen selfish Gene right in many different Freakonomics and everyone had to read all those books to be intellectually illiterate”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (1) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“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”