Tyler Cowen Quotes

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary.

People are talking about the Internet as though it is going to change the world. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to change the way we think, and it's not going to change the way we feel.

During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again.

The Internet creates as well as destroys. Social networks, search advertising, and cloud computing are multibillion dollar industries that didn't exist 10 years ago. They are products of the same force that has rendered the Postal Service's core business obsolete.

The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.

TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.

People are out there saying we have to devalue our properties because of the Internet, but it hasn't even come into play!

In my world view, clearly the Internet is a huge force multiplier for Indian media because it has not crept up on us like something invisible; we've seen it all play out in the West.

We're still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.

We didn't know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there.

We have depressions about every 10-20 years—just long enough for the current generation to forget the last depression.

The Internet isn't just itself a revolution - it sometimes starts them, too.

I believe, 50 years from now, when you write history, one technology that would have changed human civilization is going to be the mobile Internet.

My philosophy is that the digital revolution will make mankind happier and more productive, and that won't change over the next 300 years. If you don't stick to that original philosophy, even perfect control of a bunch of companies isn't going to do you any good.

The Internet removed geography as a significant obstacle that formerly prevented out-of-the-way places from being active players in the New Economy.

I think this is the kind of thing where we're rapidly moving toward an age where most of the populace will be almost unable to imagine life without an Internet component interlocked with it.

In the Great Depression, employment was not low because investment was low. Employment and investment were low because labor market institutions and industrial policies changed in a way that lowered normal employment.

I'm a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet.

Today, we jump into this globalization of the economy and the internet age.

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing."

What would make it very difficult to take society back to a repressive time would be technology. The arrival of the Internet.

I had one typewriter for 50 years, but I have bought seven computers in six years. I suppose that's why Bill Gates is rich, and Underwood is out of business.

My daughter asked me when she came home from school, "What's the financial crisis?" and I said, it's something that happens every five to seven years.