Tyler Cowen

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. Cowen’s latest project is a generative book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?  Readers are encouraged to use an AI assistant to enhance — or entirely replace—reading the book. 

In 2022, Cowen and co-author Daniel Gross published the 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 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. As a response to the 2020 pandemic, Cowen created Fast Grants, an offshoot of Emergent Ventures,  to swiftly support scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. In total, Fast Grants raised more than $50 million and awarded 260 grants toward critical research.

Cowen is host of Conversations with Tyler, a popular podcast series featuring today's most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between. Past guests include David Brooks, Malcolm Gladwell, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Cowen graduated from George Mason University with a BS in economics and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University.