Nehaveigur

I’ve been reading and benefitting from the blog Marginal Revolution for more than a decade. It continues to be one of the most interesting aggregator blogs. I am so intimately  acquainted with its two authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, that I know which of them wrote the post after reading only the first couple of words and without having looked at the name. Both Cowen and Tabarrok are economics professors with broad interests. Politically, the blog is unobjectionable. It has avoided aligning itself strongly with any ideology besides free market economics.

Yet, recently I’ve been visiting Marginal Revolution less and less often. Posts have declined in quality and have become less interesting. This is the case both  for posts that link to other sites and original posts by Cowen and Tabarrok. Increasingly, the two professors are not seeing eye to eye with their readers. Instead of discussing contentious topics in a balanced way, they are frequently one-sided and polemical in a way that is fairly typical of men past their 60th birthday. Their wisdom seems to be decreasing with increasing age. This is apparent both for issues I disagree on and those I disagree on.

This flaw is particularly apparent in Tabarrok’s recent posts. Because he tries very hard to convince his readers of a specific point, he avoids mentioning caveats, subtleties or counterarguments. As a result, his posts come across as sales pitches. The problem with this approach is that I do not wish to be told what to believe. I want honest and trustworthy discourse so that I can make up my own mind.

Cowen’s posts suffer from the same problem, but in a more subtle way. For example, he favors views that minimize the dangers of technologies such as smartphones, social media and AI. I happen to agree with this general attitude, but I find the way he dismisses those who are genuinely concerned lacking true engagement, and as a result, his posts on those topics are less impactful than they could be.