Quotes from Tyler Cowen

Real cultural diversity results from the interchange of ideas, products, and influences, not from the insular development of a single national style.

Today most of the debate on the cutting edge in macroeconomics would not call itself "Keynesian" or "monetarist" or any other label relating to a school of thought. The data are considered the ruling principle, and it is considered suspect to have too strong a loyalty to any particular model about the underlying structure of the economy.

This kind of machine-based learning is driven by a hunger for knowledge, not by a desire to show off your talent or to "signal" as we economists say.

The more extreme conservatives will embrace religion and nationalism to a higher degree.

perhaps we are not as free as we might think in the first place. Given your background, your friends, your family, the books you read, and the movies you watch, how surprising is your vote in a federal election?

Overall, the people from the more commercialized societies are much more willing to cooperate outside of narrow kinship circles. The core message is that commerce and advanced market societies tend to breed trust and reciprocal cooperation. It is no accident that such hypotheses were common among eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, such as the Frenchman Montesquieu, and others who were observing the rise of commercial society on a massive scale for the very first time.

One of the major Lockhart restaurants, Kreuz Market, ships to anywhere in the continental United States.

El Paso is parasitic off of Juarez rather than vice versa.

If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.

The fourth and final step is that the human isn't needed much at all because the program on its own is so strong.

A particular personality trait that doesn't come easily to everyone will be needed in a lot of situations: the ability to handle or maybe just ignore the ongoing appearance of stressful situations.

Markets are not just about the steam engine, iron foundries, or today's silicon-chip factories. Markets also supported Shakespeare, Haydn, and the modern book superstore. The rise of oil painting, classical music, and print culture were all part of the same broad social and economic developments, namely the rise of capitalism, modern technology, rule of law, and consumer society.

We'll end up with a society where the people with decent self-control win back a lot of the lost health gains by better behavior.

That's understandable, but it also shows we are a bit intolerant of alien intelligences.

That's one reason (we'll see more reasons in the next chapter) why locavores have such a misguided philosophy. It overlooks that some parts of the world are running out of water and that trade of food—often long-distance trade—is the best or indeed the only real answer to that problem. Very often, trading across a distance solves more environmental problems than it creates.

Personal qualities of character such as self-motivation and conscientiousness will reap a lot of gains in the new world to come.

three-quarters of today's youth between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are unfit to serve for one reason or another.

The bottom line is that Germany is still an underappreciated food country. Furthermore, buying bread, cheese, and especially sausage in the supermarket will almost certainly not be disappointing. The best ethnic food in Germany is often from groups that don't make their way in very large numbers to the United States.

That's one reason (we'll see more reasons in the next chapter) why locavores have such a misguided philosophy. It overlooks that some parts of the world are running out of water and that trade of food—often long-distance trade—is the best or indeed the only real answer to that problem. Very often, trading across

Americans at the top have become the experts in countersignaling, because they don't feel they have to impress anyone. Everything is now casual, because the new aristocracy of talent enforces all the conformity that is needed. The

In other words, a culture of the casual is a culture of people who already have achieved something and who already can prove it. It is a culture of the static and the settled, the opposite of Tocqueville's restless Americans.

The great adventures of life, the surprise of strangers, of strangeness, of the electric and eclectic moments of happenstance, and also of extreme ambition, are slowly being removed by code as a path to a new contentment. We are using the acceleration of information transmission to decelerate changes in our physical world.

A more recent study showed that of the couples who married between 2005 and 2012, more than one-third of them met online; for same-sex couples, that figure is almost 70 percent. Even

get to the point quickly.