1. Before 1982-1984, and the Swiss experience, I thought fixed money growth rules were a good idea. One problem (not the only problem) is that the implied interest rate volatility is too high, or exchange rate volatility in the Swiss case.
2. Before witnessing China vs. Eastern Europe, I thought more rapid privatizations were almost always better. The correct answer depends on circumstance, and we are due to learn yet more about this as China attempts to reform its SOEs over the next five to ten years. I don’t consider this settled in the other direction either.
3. The elasticity of investment with respect to real interest rates turns out to be fairly low in most situations and across most typical parameter values.
4. In the 1990s, I thought information technology would be a definitely liberating, democratizing, and pro-liberty force. It seemed that more competition for resources, across borders, would improve economic policy around the entire world. Now this is far from clear.
5. Given the greater ease of converting labor income into capital income, I no longer am so convinced that a zero rate of taxation on capital income is best.
6. The social marginal value of health care is often quite low, much lower than I used to realize. By the way, hardly anyone takes this on consistently to guide their policy views, no matter how evidence-driven they may claim to be.
7. Mormonism, and other relatively strict religions, can have big anti-poverty effects. I wouldn’t say I ever believed the contrary, but for a long time I simply didn’t give the question much attention. I now think that Mormonism has a better anti-poverty agenda than does the Progressive Left.
8. There are positive excess returns to some momentum investment strategies.
I don’t know enough about economics to tell how much these meet your criteria for ‘I was wrong’ rather than ‘revised estimates’ or something else (he doesn’t use the exact phrase ‘I was wrong’) but it seems in the spirit of what you are looking for.
It’s still pretty interesting if it turns out that the only clear example to be found of T.C. admitting to error is in a context where everyone involved is describing errors they’ve made: he’ll admit to concrete mistakes, but apparently only when admitting mistakes makes him look good rather than bad.
(Though I kinda agree with one thing Joseph Miller says, or more precisely implies: perhaps it’s just really rare for people to say publicly that they were badly wrong about anything of substance, in which case it could be that T.C. has seldom done that but that this shouldn’t much change our opinion of him.)
Downvoted. This post feels kinda mean. Tyler Cowen has written a lot and done lots of podcasts—it doesn’t seem like anyone has actually checked? What’s the base rate for public intellectuals ever admitting they were wrong? Is it fair to single out Tyler Cowen?
I’ve written before about how when you make an update of that scale, it’s important to publicly admit error before going on to justify yourself or say why you should be excused as basically right in principle or whatever, so let me say it: I was wrong about Head Start.
That having been said, on to the self-justifications and excuses!
And then makes a bunch of those.
Again, this is only one datapoint—sorry for the laziness, it’s 11..12pm and I’m trying to organize an alignment research fellowship atm and just put together another alignment research team at ai plans and had to do management work for it which ended up delaying the fellowship announcement i wanted to do today and had family drama again. Sigh.
Lindsey: Okay, that’s a good answer. In your new book, GOAT, which we’ll talk about more later, one of the criteria you use for judging great economists is that they can’t have been too wrong about too many things. What’s an important thing that you now think you were dead wrong about?
Cowen: Well, there’s so many things. It’s hard to know where to start. But for instance, in 2007, early part of 2008, I definitely thought the banking system was solvent. That was wrong. I then thought it was the result of a real estate bubble. Everyone leapt on that bandwagon. I now think that was wrong. I was wrong big time twice in a row. Given the way home prices have evolved, I don’t think it was much of a bubble. It was maybe a little ahead of its time, but those prices seem to have been validated. So here’s this event that I paid very close attention to and I’m already wrong twice in a row, and maybe I’m shooting for three times in a row wrong. So I don’t know. There are so many judgments of history that unfold slowly. I think it’s really hard to be sure that you are right about something.
Like when shock therapy came for Poland, I thought, “Well, this is clearly the right thing to do.” I think it’s enough years. You can say it definitely worked for Poland. Has it worked everywhere? The places where it didn’t work, was it really tried? Was it possible in those places for it to be really tried? They’re very complicated questions, but I think I would have or not would have but did underrate the Chinese model at the time. But from 2023, there’s a point of view that says, well the Chinese model seemed great for 25 years but now they’re stuck with a dictator and all this terrible statism, and it might still blow up in their faces or cause a world war. So I think I’m wrong there but I could actually turn out to be right
thank you for this search. Looking at the results, top 3 are by commentors.
Then one about not thinking a short book could be this good.
I don’t think this is Cowen actually saying he made a wrong prediction, just using it to express how the book is unexpectedly good at talking about a topic that might normally take longer, though happy to hear why I’m wrong here.
Another commentor:
another commentor:
Ending here for now, doesn’t seem to be any real instances of Tyler Cowen saying he was wrong about something he thought was true yet.
Btw, I really dont have my mind set on this, if someone finds Tyler Cowen explictly saying he was wrong about something, please link it to me—you dont have to give an explanation to justify it, to prepare for some confirmation biasy ‘here’s why I was actually right and this isnt it’ thing (though, any opinions/thoughts are very welcome), please feel free to just give a link or mention some post/moment.
Has Tyler Cowen ever explicitly admitted to being wrong about anything?
Not ‘revised estimates’ or ‘updated predictions’ but ‘I was wrong’.
Every time I see him talk about learning something new, he always seems to be talking about how this vindicates what he said/thought before.
Gemini 2.5 pro didn’t seem to find anything, when I did a max reasoning budget search with url search on in aistudio.
EDIT: An example was found by Morpheus, of Tyler Cowen explictly saying he was wrong—see the comment and the linked PDF below
this is evidence that tyler cowen has never been wrong about anything
In the post ‘Can economics change your mind?’ he has a list of examples where he has changed his mind due to evidence:
I don’t know enough about economics to tell how much these meet your criteria for ‘I was wrong’ rather than ‘revised estimates’ or something else (he doesn’t use the exact phrase ‘I was wrong’) but it seems in the spirit of what you are looking for.
Deep Research found this PDF. Search for “I was wrong” in the PDF.
This seems to be a really explicit example of him saying that he wss wrong about something, thank you!
Didn’t think this would exist/be found, but glad I was wrong.
It’s still pretty interesting if it turns out that the only clear example to be found of T.C. admitting to error is in a context where everyone involved is describing errors they’ve made: he’ll admit to concrete mistakes, but apparently only when admitting mistakes makes him look good rather than bad.
(Though I kinda agree with one thing Joseph Miller says, or more precisely implies: perhaps it’s just really rare for people to say publicly that they were badly wrong about anything of substance, in which case it could be that T.C. has seldom done that but that this shouldn’t much change our opinion of him.)
Btw, for Slatestarcodex, found it in the first search, pretty easily.
Sure, but plausibly that’s Scott being unusually good at admitting error, rather than Tyler being unusually bad.
Downvoted. This post feels kinda mean. Tyler Cowen has written a lot and done lots of podcasts—it doesn’t seem like anyone has actually checked? What’s the base rate for public intellectuals ever admitting they were wrong? Is it fair to single out Tyler Cowen?
It’s only one datapoint, but did a similar search for SlateStarCodex and almost immediately found him explictly saying he was wrong.
It’s the title of a post, even: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/06/preschool-i-was-wrong/
In the post he also says:
And then makes a bunch of those.
Again, this is only one datapoint—sorry for the laziness, it’s 11..12pm and I’m trying to organize an alignment research fellowship atm and just put together another alignment research team at ai plans and had to do management work for it which ended up delaying the fellowship announcement i wanted to do today and had family drama again. Sigh.
Url link for slatestarcodex search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fslatestarcodex.com%2F+%22I+was+wrong%22&t=brave&ia=web
(source: https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/interview-with-tyler-cowen)
Ok, I was going to say that’s a good one.
But this line ruins it for me:
Thank you for searching and finding it though!! Do you think other public intellectuals might have more/less examples?
He has mentioned the phrase a bunch. I haven’t looked through enough of these links enough to form an opinion though.
thank you for this search. Looking at the results, top 3 are by commentors.
Then one about not thinking a short book could be this good.
I don’t think this is Cowen actually saying he made a wrong prediction, just using it to express how the book is unexpectedly good at talking about a topic that might normally take longer, though happy to hear why I’m wrong here.
Another commentor:
another commentor:
Ending here for now, doesn’t seem to be any real instances of Tyler Cowen saying he was wrong about something he thought was true yet.
Btw, I really dont have my mind set on this, if someone finds Tyler Cowen explictly saying he was wrong about something, please link it to me—you dont have to give an explanation to justify it, to prepare for some confirmation biasy ‘here’s why I was actually right and this isnt it’ thing (though, any opinions/thoughts are very welcome), please feel free to just give a link or mention some post/moment.