[felipe_ii]

I wonder if this article is an example of the submarine coming to surface (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html).

I say this because back when I used to frequent Marginal Revolution, I found that there was a good deal of self-promotion of Cowen's work in the website - for example, he would link an interesting news story and provide minimal commentary, but then would link his tangentially related research. I understand his incentive for doing this, but the amount of self-promotion was enough to annoy me and make me stop reading.

Years later, I attended a presentation that Cowen gave that was ostensibly on his book the Great Stagnation, but in reality it turned out to be a demonstration of some online learning venture he was bankrolling at the time.

He's a smart and productive guy, no doubt, but my (anecdotal) experiences make me wonder about what is behind an article like this.

[Matticus_Rex]

I think I know the one you're talking about, and he wasn't bankrolling it -- it was just one of his projects through Mercatus. And they had a bunch of course content on the Great Stagnation, which was definitely relevant.

[felipe_ii]

Apologies, I should've really just said that he had a vested interest in it.

Either way, the people that came to the presentation didn't come to hear about the product he was promoting - we wanted, at least I wanted, to hear the ideas in his book. Instead we got the old switcheroo.

[dv_dt]

And Mercatus is in turn has been bankrolled by the Koch brothers. I may be biased but I sort of see Cowan’s part of role as something akin to cross between a PR rep and a economic academic rep for a particular set of views to align with that funding source.

[Matticus_Rex]

Tyler believes what he believes, and would be trying to do what he's trying to do even if no one agreed with him. I've known a lot of people who have worked at Mercatus over the years, and that has been true of all of them (and, surprisingly to many, they're not all libertarian -- Mercatus has funded a lot of people and projects for stuff that doesn't reflect Koch views). Tyler himself is definitely not perfectly aligned with the Kochs' views on things, but he is very effective, which is why he's the president at Mercatus.

The conspiracist right's complex over Soros and the conspiracist left's complex over the Kochs are two sides of the same coin, with their own terrible book-length screeds to match.

[niyikiza]

I wouldn't dismiss his work simply based on that. It's not unusual for blog posts to have notes on how the content is related to the author's other works.