Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at Alvarez and Marsal, SPE Councillor and host of the Econ Thoughts SPE Podcast, spoke with Tyler Cowen, Holbert L. Harris Chair in Economics at George Mason University and Chairman of the Mercatus Center. See his website here.
He is also a prolific author, blogger and podcaster and co-founder with Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution, the influential economics blog. Filippo and Tyler discuss Britain’s persistent slow growth, the uncertain impact of tariffs and policy volatility on investment, and the tension between strong corporate performance and weak labour-market data. Comparing the UK and the US, Tyler argues that regulation has clogged the market’s information system and sapped dynamism, while political risk-aversion has replaced the bold reforming spirit that once defined Britain. In the United States, he sees the same short-termism at work, compounded by fiscal addiction to low taxes and, following recent change in trade policy, tariff revenues, though he remains cautiously optimistic about the economy’s resilience and the revitalising potential of artificial intelligence.
Tyler also discusses one of his latest project, EconGOAT.ai—a free, AI-enabled book (GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? Available here) that asks who might be the “greatest economist of all time.” Using a retrieval-augmented GPT model, readers can query the book itself or debate his shortlist of Smith, Mill, Malthus, Keynes, Hayek and Friedman. He praises Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society as perhaps the finest single paper in economics and argues that Mill best bridges classical and modern liberalism. Browse the book for free to discover who is indeed the Economics GOAT. Looking ahead, Cowen foresees economics transformed by AI and machine learning, predicting a future where experimentation, simulation and teaching are conducted in partnership with intelligent systems. Yet he insists on grounding education in reading, writing and reasoning—“humans working with AI, not replaced by it.” In the closing part of the conversation, Filippo and Tyler also spend some time to remind listeners of the sixteenth-century School of Salamanca and the contribution to the Economics profession of the Neo Scholastics, whom he calls “pioneers of human rights and economics”.
Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University. A dedicated writer and communicator of economic ideas, Cowen is the author of several bestselling books and is widely published in academic journals and the popular media.
In 2022, Cowen and co-author Daniel Gross published the book ‘Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World’. He writes a column for The Free Press and was previously a columnist with Bloomberg View and the New York Times. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, Ethics, and Philosophy and Public Affairs.
Cowen is the founder of Emergent Ventures, an incubator fellowship and grant program for social entrepreneurs with highly scalable ideas for meaningfully improving society.
Cowen graduated from George Mason University with a BS in economics and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University.
