Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is about the beauty of organised structures and how we play them in game-like fashion and how much they entrance us. It’s one way to start understanding the appeal of the web: it’s like this game for us, but it’s also deeply serious and it holds our interest and can be suspenseful.
What about the Herman Hesse?
This is about the beauty of organised structures and how we play them in game-like fashion and how much they entrance us. So it’s about a kind of priestly cult that played a game called the glass bead game, which you can think of as a mix of chess and music and mathematics and much more, and he has compelling descriptions of just how spellbound and into this game people would get. And I think indirectly he was the first person to put his finger on why we so often find the web such fun. It’s like this game for us, but it’s also deeply serious and it holds our interest and can be suspenseful and, even though he’s not writing about the internet at all, this is a literary treatment of what we’re doing now and why we find it so intriguing.
What about the internet do you find so intriguing?
Every day I can learn something new.
What have you learnt today?
I have learnt quite a bit about how the German economic experiment of unification in the 1990s reflects the advantages and disadvantages of fiscal policy. I have learnt a lot on that topic.
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Tyler Cowen is an economist, academic and writer. Cowen is the Holbert C Harris Chair of economics and Professor at George Mason University. He is co-author of the economics blog Marginal Revolution. He contributes to the New York Times, The New Republic and The Wilson Quarterly. Cowen is also general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
