Tyler Cowen will be the guest of this week’s Metanomics show. He interests me a lot, as he is a financial blogger on Marginal Revolution and I just bought one of his books, Create Your Own Economy,The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.
Metanomics explains:
Tyler Cowen says there’s no call to apologize for virtual worlds. Don’t act as if virtual goods are somehow different or lesser than ‘real’ goods. Don’t act as if autistic cognitive styles are necessarily worse than others. Don’t act as if writing a blog is a less worthy endeavor than traditional academic work. In other words, ‘there is nothing special about ‘meatspace’.
Second Life can be considered a place to learn some lessons which have a far broader reach than just in that one virtual world:
And he proposes that the early lessons being learned in places like Second Life are a prism through which we can understand how personal empowerment and our ability to take control of our own interests, to create our OWN economies, is leading the way to societal change.
Cowen tells fascinating things about framing and ordering. He claims that framing and ordering his friends on Facebook and twitter makes him feel more connected to them. More and more, so he writes, “production” has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor. Ordering is a major topic in discussing what it means to be autistic, and Cowen does a great job analyzing neurodiversity.
Cowen connects autism research with how we value things, how we connect to the world in very diverse ways. In telling stories about diversity he tells a most important story about what it means to be human. He combines insights of great economists and philosophers with contemporary research and insights of how we use social and new media today.
On November 18, 2009 at 12pm PST / 9 pm CET Metanomics host Robert Bloomfield will be interviewing Tyler Cowen. I’m sure it’ll be one of the greatest shows of the year!
Roland Legrand