Tyler Cowen is an economist, educator, intellectual, and fellow member of the commentariat (though plenty more eloquent and prolific than me). He's out with a new book... which he describes as "Not quite a book"

It has four chapters, is about 40,000 words, is fully written by me (not a word from the AIs), and it is attached to an AI with a dual page display, in this case Claude.  Think of it as a non-fiction novella of sorts, you can access it here.  You can read it on the screen, turn it into a pdf (and upload into your own AI), send it to your Kindle, or discuss it with Claude.

This is a 4-part series — corresponding to the four parts of Cowen's "book" — where I share some extracts and comments from the book as I'm making my way through it. You can read Chapter 2 here.

The full book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, is available here:
https://tylercowen.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TheMarginalRevolution-Tyler_Cowen.pdf

(giving it away openly, like Max Hillebrand did for Praxeology of Privacy is very cypherpunky... and also fits exactly with the times, where the value of generated written art or content drops to zero... so creators might as well give it away. I'm on this theme all the time, #796401, #1467035)

Chapter 3: Why Did It Take So Long for the Science of Economics to Develop?Chapter 3: Why Did It Take So Long for the Science of Economics to Develop?

This is an excellent chapter. Apart from two-three moments where Cowen blows smoke up his own arse humblebrags, it's a pretty neat observation for how and why disciplines evolve and come into being if/when they do -- specifically marginalism, and the proper/modern economics it unleashed, took so long (p. 61); it was all out there, ready to be observed and grasped, yet doesn't arrive in the arsenal of human intellectual achievemnets until very recently.

He makes a couple of powerful analogies (to geology, evolution, botany etc) in this chapter about what the intellectual development of various fields requires… dogma needs to be removed, independent wealth to practitioners to maintain their freedom of thought, and communication and debate with fellows of one's field. He speculates about economic growth, about scope, about political debates and regimes, but this one strikes me as crucial:

Pamphlet culture and coffeehouse consumption meant that publication was relatively cheap, readers could be reached, and an intellectual culture of back-and-forth argumentation developed. Some merchants, such as Dudley North and Nicholas Barbon, had enough wealth that they were not merely beholden to a court, church, or king, in their economic writings. (p. 64)

Dialectic, bruh!

I think of economic ideas as hanging in a kind of asymmetric corridor when it comes to their conception, a bit like factoring very large numbers. Once you know what the factors are, it is easy to verify that multiplying one by the other will give you the specified very large number. But if you are just staring at the very large number, as for instance you might be staring at an economic system, you don’t have a very good sense of what the factors are, or in the case of the economy the underlying principles of operation won’t exactly leap out at you. (p. 62)

Ohohoh, economic knowledge is a one-way hash function??Ohohoh, economic knowledge is a one-way hash function??

Amazing. And a pretty good observation in how/why most people's intuitions or everyday knowledge of the economy lead to completely wrong conclusions.

Also, to annoy all the Christians around: Early economists as anti-christians... need to gut that dogma:

Along those lines, a lot of economics seemed to emphasize looking at the final results of action, rather than merely individual motivations, as some variants of Christianity suggested. It is no accident that many of the top economists, including Adam Smith, David Hume, and Jevons were not especially religious and even may have been downright non-believing and impious. By asking people to buy into economic modes of reasoning, you were asking them to consider a whole new way of looking at the world. It should be no surprise that was not accepted either quickly or automatically. (p. 68)

Natural selection was/is obvious in hindsight... but it took forever to come along (Thx Darwin, Wallace et al.) and then generations to become generally accepted:

Theories of evolution and natural selection also are intuitive once you understand them, and they seem virtually inescapable once you are willing to consider them seriously. Yet they are remarkably late in becoming part of general human knowledge, and indeed to this day, according to polls a significant percentage of Americans still do not accept those doctrines. (p. 76)

Analogously, Darwin only stumbled onto his own breathtaking insight via a similar one mirrored in a closely related field — geology, and Charles Lyell:

Just as the development of economics into a full-blown marginal revolution had required the general spread of interest in both mathematics and statistics, evolutionary biology had to wait for a spread of greater interest in geological questions, including about fossils and the age of the earth (p. 77)

...and many didn't instantly celebrate Jevons' achievements:

Worse yet, many argued Jevons was wrong. John Elliott Cairnes, one of the best-known and also best classical economists, wrote a review. He claimed that Jevons misunderstood the classical theory of value and was flat out incorrect in his supposed innovations (p. 80)

Alfred Marshall, later one of the greatest neoclassical economists, also reviewed the Jevons book, but his response was indifferent. This was Marshall’s very first appearance in print, but he didn’t see a huge need to be either a careful reader or sympathetic. Marshall went so far as to write: “We may read far into the present book, without finding any important proposition which is new in substance.” Keynes described the review as “tepid and grudging.” Jevons simply wasn’t succeeding at persuading the broader intellectual world. (p. 81)

"Jevons simply wasn’t succeeding at persuading the broader intellectual world.""Jevons simply wasn’t succeeding at persuading the broader intellectual world."

In the final chapter, Cowen turns to the discipline of economics and what the current LLM/AI revolution means for the practice of being an economist. Spoiler: it's not good.