Tyler Cowen
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The [...] split between high culture and low culture indicates the sophistication of modernity, not its corruption or disintegration. A world where high and low culture were strongly integrated would be a world that devoted little effort to satisfying minority tastes. Genres that rely heavily on equipment and materials, which I describe as capital-intensive, tend to produce popular art. Genres with low capital costs, which I describe as labor-intensive, tend to produce high art. The movie spectacular with expensive special effects is likely to have a happy ending. The low-budget art film, directed and financed by an iconoclastic auteur, may leave the viewer searching."--In Praise of Commercial Culture (1998) by Tyler Cowen |
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Tyler Cowen (b. January 21, 1962) is an American libertarian scholar and professor of economics at the George Mason University.
Books
Cowen's primary research interest is the culture industry and artworld economics. He has written books on fame (What Price Fame?), art (In Praise of Commercial Culture) and cultural trade (Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures). His newest work, Markets and Cultural Voices, relays how globalization is changing the world of three Mexican amate painters. For Cowen, free markets change culture for the better, allowing them to evolve into something more people want. Other books include Public Goods and Market Failures, The Theory of Market Failure, Explorations in the New Monetary Economics, Risk and Business Cycles, Economic Welfare, and New Theories of Market Failure.
Ideology
Cowen's economic and political ideologies seem to stem largely from his background in the libertarian Austrian School. He has been classified as a "libertarian bargainer" - someone of libertarian ideals who is not so radical that he cannot influence the "currently powerful" (Klein, December 22, 2003). This puts him closer to Friedrich Hayek than an anarcho-capitalist such as Murray Rothbard or an anti-establishmentarian like Ludwig von Mises. In a 2007 article entitled "The Paradox of Libertarianism," Cowen argued that libertarians "should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal." His argument was subsequently criticized by Bryan Caplan, Justin Raimondo, and Christopher Westley.
