PRINT-Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University and a co-blogger at Marginal Revolution. He tends to be libertarian in his viewpoints, but he can be "heretical" at times. Nevertheless, I enjoy his unique perspectives, and Create Your Own Economy is one of those unique perspectives.

It is difficult to know where to begin with a review of this book, so I will begin with the subtitle of the volume-- The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. That one is a bit of a head fake for people who come to this book with a monetary expectation. This book is about escaping the monetary and material world we live in and escaping into the virtual world of the internet. In the material world, we have scarcity which is a constant and neverending problem. In the digital world, we have abundance which creates its own problems. Basically, we have a torrent of virtually free culture and information. We face such an overload of free information that it is overwhelming to the cognitive faculties of most people. How do we find order in all this chaos?

Cowen looks to autistics for the answer. The average person overwhelmed by the internet experiences the same thing an autistic person experiences in the world. The autistic struggles but learns to order and arrange his or her world in a much different way than the rest of us. Cowen praises this neurodiversity as holding the key to dealing with our information onslaught. By adopting the characteristics and traits of autistics, we can better handle and adapt to this cultural abundance at our fingertips.

Cowen goes on to describe his own economy, and how he deals with the adundance. His most famous quirk is how he will choose to put down a book or walk out of a movie citing opportunity cost. Because time is scarce, we should not waste it on books and movies that suck. There is always something better, and time spent finding it is better than time wasted on suboptimal cultural experiences. I tend to agree. I usually finish books I start, but I will quit with a movie if I think it sucks.

The rest of the book deals with how others are coping with this problem of cultural abundance, social networking, and the like. All in all, this is a thought provoking volume and was worth the time I spent reading it.



http://www.marginalrevolution.com/

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