PERSON
Tyler Cowen
The economist who predicted—in three prescient books written before the capability threshold arrived—the exact repricing of knowledge work that AI is now performing: the hollowing of the median, the flight of value to judgment, and the institutional bottleneck that will determine how much of the technological potential actually reaches human lives.
Tyler Cowen is the economist who had the map before the territory appeared. In
The Great Stagnation (2011) he argued that developed economies had been coasting on diminishing returns since 1970; in
Average Is Over (2013) he predicted the labor market bifurcation between machine-complementary winners and hollowed-out medians; in
The Complacent Class (2017) he diagnosed the cultural preference for stability over dynamism that would slow adaptation when disruption finally arrived. When the
Great Reallocation of knowledge-work value began in earnest in late 2025, Cowen’s framework—organized around the marginal-revolution insight that scarcity sets prices, not utility—was the sharpest instrument available for understanding what was happening and why. His estimate that AI will boost annual economic growth by roughly half a percentage point is deceptively modest; compounded across decades, it describes a fundamentally different civilization, and the modesty is itself analytical—a bet that institutional bottlenecks will capture