Tyler Cowen Quotes

“Using statistical analysis, small-market teams can compete by buying assets that are undervalued by other teams and selling ones that are overvalued by other teams.”

“Southern Germany is an extremely productive region and we can expect it will become more crowded and also more productive. The top German firms are generating some impressive learning curves.”

“It is rumored that Richard Eng, one of the leading tutor kings, pulls in $1.5 million a year; his face is on billboards, he drives a Lamborghini, and his license plate reads simply 'Richard.'”

“The TSA is experimenting with software that tries to detect, by scanning body language, which plane passengers have hostile intentions.”

“...studies of spelling bees show that the winning spellers are those who not only work hard, but who engage in disciplined forms of study that do not always yield immediate positive feedback.”

“The benefits of the new system are usually invisible, yet the costs hit you in the face.”

“Of course, educational institutions aren't ready to admit how much they share with churches. These temples of secularism don't want to admit they are about simple tasks such as motivating the slugs or acculturating people into the work habits and sociological expectations of the so-called educated class. ”

“Immigration is vital to the future economic vitality of the United States. If that immigration is Latino, as indeed it often is in the United States, the longer-run effect is to build up entrepreneurship and democratic values in the other countries in this hemisphere. ”

“It's the manager who is the scarce input...”

“...the likely future for North America is that of a coherent economic unit where the United States, Canada, and Mexico band together to make major investments in customized robot production and then use these investments to dominate global manufacturing. ”

“If you need to measure it, you’ve failed.”

“As in chess, we can expect to see dramatic gains in the personal and professional lives of people who interpret machine feedback—of all kinds—quickly. A particular personality trait that doesn't come easily to everyone will be needed in a lot of situations: the ability to handle or maybe just ignore the ongoing appearance of stressful situations. ”

“As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a 'pregnancy prediction' score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy. ”

“Outsourcing is still a smaller phenomenon than many people think. Currently imports from China are measured at about 2.7 percent of US consumer spending. Furthermore, for each dollar of imports from China, about fifty-five cents was ultimately spent in the United States preparing the import in some manner. That leaves Chinese imports, measured in terms of true net impact, at about 1.3 percent of American spending. ”

“It's interesting to see how Cleverbot convinces a lot of people that it is human. It doesn't try to respond logically to every query, or to correctly parse every sentence from the human. Instead it tries to mimic how an incoherent or slightly crazed human would converse—or perhaps how a pickup artist would try to dazzle a sweet young thing with banter—as its best chance of doing a passable imitation. ”

“Ask just about anyone in a human resources department, 'What percent of the labor force do you simply not wish to hire, no matter what, no matter how low the wage?' It's quite a few of the applicants, and I can vouch that I have found the same when working as an employer myself. Or look at how many people are turned away by the US military: Drug use, medications, weight problems, bad credit scores, and criminal records make many people ineligible to sign up. According to Arne Duncan, secretary of education under President Obama, three-quarters of today's youth between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are unfit to serve for one reason or another. Three-quarters. Staggering, no?”

“An intelligent machine might come up with a new theory of cosmology, and perhaps no human will be able to understand or articulate that theory. Maybe it will refer to non-visualizable dimensions of space or nonintuitive understandings of time. The machine will tell us that the theory makes good predictions, and if nothing else we will be able to use one genius machine to check the predictions of the theory from the other genius machine. Still, we, as humans, won't have a good grasp on what the theory means and even the best scientists will grasp only part of what the genius machine has done. It would be like trying to explain the Periodic Table of Elements to a five-year-old. Maybe it can be done, but it will hardly serve as an easily grasped, intuitive understanding of what is going on. ”