Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen (born 1962) is an economics professor at George Mason University, chairman of the Mercatus Center, co-author of the blog Marginal Revolution — running daily since 2003 — and host of the interview series Conversations with Tyler. Books like The Great Stagnation and Average Is Over made him one of the most read public economists of his generation.

Calling AGI Day

Cowen was an early and unembarrassed adopter of large language models, weaving them into his reading, research, and teaching, and telling students to use them in class. On April 16, 2025, reacting to OpenAI’s o3 model, he published a post declaring “I think it is AGI, seriously” — and shrugging that if the label bothers you, the thing itself should not. Critics, most vocally Gary Marcus, called the claim a fantasy; Cowen did not retract it.

His economics of AI cuts against Silicon Valley as well as against the doomers. He forecasts AI lifting growth modestly — from roughly 2% to 2.5% — rather than the explosive numbers boosters cite, because institutions, regulation, and human habits slow diffusion; as he put it in a Dwarkesh Podcast appearance, the number-one bottleneck to AI progress is humans. He has also argued the biggest social problem of the AI age will be adjustment, not mass unemployment.

Cowen practices what he preaches: he treats current models as smarter interlocutors than most humans on his own specialty, admitting that on microeconomic reasoning the top models “would beat me in a competition,” and has said writers should now write partly for the AIs that will read them.