Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have run Marginal Revolution (MR), the world’s largest economics blog, since August 2003, publishing every single day for nearly 20 years without missing a day. What started as an experiment with no social media to promote it grew into a multi-platform intellectual project spanning a blog, a bestselling textbook, a YouTube channel (Marginal Revolution University), a podcast, and Twitter, reaching millions of readers and students worldwide. The episode explores how they built it, how they think differently as writers and thinkers, and why the project has endured.
The Origins of Marginal Revolution
The blog launched in August 2003, before Twitter, before smartphones, with no way to advertise it. Within days, people commented on the first post, and within weeks they hit 10,000 visitors, which felt enormous at the time.
Tyler’s version: Alex came to his office suggesting they write a textbook; Tyler said yes, but first they should write a blog. Alex didn’t really know what a blog was.
Alex’s version: He suggested they start a blog and predicted they’d become “famous” to maybe 5,000 readers, mostly academics. They vastly exceeded that.
Early on, they didn’t even know people were reading. They posted for practice and discovered an audience was already there.
Tyler’s core motivation is doing what’s fun and intrinsically interesting, which he sees as a competitive advantage because most people don’t find daily writing enjoyable enough to sustain it.
The Two Minds Behind MR
Tyler and Alex think in fundamentally different ways but often arrive at the same conclusions.
Tyler starts with the most complicated version of a story, full of qualifiers and nuance, then simplifies.
Alex starts with the starkest, simplest version, then adds complexity back in.
This difference makes Alex a natural textbook writer: he can understand why students would be confused because he would be confused too. Tyler enjoys confusing people more.
Alex described their dynamic: “Tyler creates complexity and chaos and you simplify and create order.”
A rule of thumb for telling their posts apart: if you’re confused about what the post said, it’s a Tyler post. If you understand exactly what it said and you’re mad as hell about it, it’s an Alex post.
Tyler holds Alex in mind while writing, self-editing to be clearer because he knows Alex will read it. Alex reins Tyler in when contributing to joint work.
Both have developed more distinct modes of writing over time (blog hat, column hat, textbook hat), which was hard when they started.
The Integrated Product Line
MR is not just a blog. It’s an “intellectual blitzkrieg” across multiple platforms: blog, textbook, YouTube (Marginal Revolution University), podcast, Twitter, and columns in outlets like the New York Times and Bloomberg.
The goal is to introduce audiences to each other across platforms, since people consume information differently. You can’t let anything go fallow.
Marginal Revolution University (MRU): The number one economics education site on YouTube, completely free, no ads. Started with bare-bones narrated PowerPoints and a $5 app. Later got funding for professional filming, animation, and sound. Roman Hargrave became the project manager.
Their goal is to be in 25% of American high schools by 2025, but the biggest impact is abroad, especially India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
India is by far their number two market and likely to become number one. When Tyler gives a talk in India, someone always recognizes him as “the MRU guy.”
Subtitles as dual learning: Google auto-generates subtitles in 100+ languages. Students use subtitles in their own language to help them learn English while learning economics. It’s a dual learning process.
The textbook: Everything is written in one voice (Tyler and Alex), not split by author. They choose every picture themselves. It goes through roughly 40 referee reports per chapter. The publisher wants a book no one hates; Tyler and Alex want students to love it. This tension is productive.
The blog feeds the textbook and vice versa. Blog posts explaining economics for years made the textbook better. The textbook drives more readers to the blog.
Writing Process and Discipline
They have never missed a day of posting in nearly 20 years. Every day has four to five posts. There isn’t even a day with only one post.
Tyler treats it like a radio station: it’s there every day, reliably. If you wake up and there’s nothing, you know something’s wrong.
Tyler keeps a stock of evergreen posts to publish on days when he has nothing new. He uses auto-publish at random times (often 1:26 a.m., not 1:30, which is why people think he’s actually awake writing).
Tyler writes many posts he never publishes. Reasons: he thinks they’re wrong, the news cycle passed, he got sick of the topic, or he deliberately holds back good material to leave people wanting more.
Alex learned from Tyler early on the importance of killing your own work: rewriting completely rather than polishing something mediocre. Alex estimates he has 2,500 pages of unpublished writing.
Speed is a core value. Alex does referee reports immediately because he knows he won’t be less busy in three weeks. Tyler responds to co-authored work with extraordinary speed. Both prioritize collaboration first so the other person can keep working.
Tyler reads four to five books a day, which is a key reason MR has fresh, original content. This rate of information intake is what’s scarce in blogging.
What Makes a Post Work
“Dim sum for the mind”: Little bites, short and tight. High opportunity cost readers (busy, intelligent people) benefit even from saving a second or two of reading time.
“Small steps toward a much better world”: The blog’s subheading. They debated including the word “much.” Alex insisted, and it was right. It hints at ambition without being boastful. The sequence matters: small steps first, then “much.”
Be true to yourself. If you’re thinking about something, put it out there. Their most-read post ever was Tyler arguing Shaquille O’Neal was a plausible candidate for greatest basketball player of all time. It worked because everyone has an opinion on rankings, and readers love a chance to take the writer down a peg.
Randomize topics. Posts on niche economics feel intimidating to comment on. Posts about Shaq or Sarah Palin invite everyone in. The Sarah Palin post generated roughly a thousand comments, all theory, very few facts.
Pithy sayings that stick: “A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive” (pure Alex). “See the invisible hand, understand your world” (textbook subtitle). Memorable phrases help ideas travel.
Write from conversation. Both get their best ideas from dialogue with other people, not from sitting alone thinking. Alex advises students with writer’s block to find people to talk to and recognize when an interesting idea emerges.
The Comment Section and Reader Interaction
The comment section has grown to 200+ comments per post, creating two-way interaction with thousands of people weekly.
Comments are high variance: sometimes wonderful, often pessimistic. They’re terrible for theory but great for facts—often the world’s top expert on a niche topic shows up with useful information.
They’re usually not happy when a post gets a huge number of comments. It’s often a bad sign.
Direct emails are far better than comments. About 80% of emails Tyler gets are genuinely worthwhile. He can respond to virtually all of them. This could change if the reader base grows too large and becomes less self-selected.
The blog is a filter: if someone can tolerate reading MR regularly (confused by Tyler, battered by Alex), they’re the right kind of person for projects like Emergent Ventures.
High Context vs. Low Context Writing
Tyler is a high-context writer: he leaves room for interpretation, doesn’t explain everything, trusts the reader to fill in gaps. He cites Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm as an influence—Larry references earlier episodes without explaining them, and that’s fine.
Alex is a low-context writer: direct, sharp, everything laid out.
Tyler sees the high-context filter as a feature: it attracts better readers, better email correspondents, and builds a better social network. “Context is that which is scarce” is one of his favorite sayings.
Readers benefit from both styles. They get accustomed to Tyler’s high context, then get punched by Alex’s low context, and vice versa.
The Role of Television and Film
TV shows have influenced MR more than movies because TV is serial, like a blog. A movie ends; a show keeps going.
Succession: Alex admires how everything is character-driven. Even when the ending surprises you, it was all laid out logically. No lazy plot devices.
Drive to Survive (Formula 1): Every episode follows the same structure—rise of some drivers, fall of others, risk and reward—yet each one is compelling because of craft. MR aims for the same: every day is sort of the same, but a little bit new, with a crafted climax in each post.
Seinfeld: The camaraderie of the group meeting in Jerry’s living room is the feeling MR tries to create. People want to come to “GMU lunch”—the metaphor for the blog’s community.
Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry David’s courage to include unexplained references taught Tyler to trust readers with early MR posts that only 17 people might get.
The George Mason Ecosystem
George Mason University was the perfect home for MR. Not so elite that experimentation would be stifled (Harvard), not so low-status that it would lack credibility.
The department has multiple blogs and a culture that supports this kind of work.
When Tyler visits Harvard or other elite institutions, people are noticeably courting him—a reversal from the early days when blogging was considered low-status in academia.
Tyler’s office is down the hall from Alex’s. They have an informal daily meeting that might last five minutes.
Alex’s kids grew up with Tyler, Bryan Caplan, and Robin Hanson as mentors—people they spent hours with, including playing Dungeons & Dragons. Both of Alex’s kids now have Substacks.
The Core Intellectual Projects
Alex’s core project: Spread good economic ideas around the world. Most of the world hasn’t caught up to Adam Smith. Teaching economics to as many people as possible is the mission.
Tyler’s core project: Show people how to live the life of an infovore—someone who consumes and processes massive amounts of information—with economics as the central focus. He wants to embody a way of living and thinking and put it out there unashamedly for others to iterate on.
The analytical cut of MR: A kind of detachment. They don’t start by taking sides. They approach issues with quirky insights, thinking things through independently. This means they’re never fully on anyone’s side, which paradoxically makes more enemies than being totally against someone. “You’re never really fully on anyone’s side, but you’re partly on a lot of people’s sides.”
They attract readers from many political, religious, and national perspectives because even when readers disagree, they feel their perspective is welcome.
The Internet as Foundation
The internet is the foundation for everything they’ve built and for the future of ideas.
Tyler believes the world still hasn’t fully digested how much the internet is changing things. The power of the written word has never been higher. Openness of discourse has never been greater.
Old-line institutions put PDFs online or run boring Twitter feeds, but they’re missing the fundamentally new norms of discourse that are winning.
MR serves as a launching pad for all their other projects (Emergent Ventures, Fast Grants, etc.). People know to apply because they’ve been reading MR.
On top of the internet, AI and tools like ChatGPT are the next wave. The internet was the foundation of artificial intelligence, which no one predicted.
Advice for Starting a Similar Project
Alex’s advice: “Do it.” But pin down a specific area to begin with. Psychology, for example, is far less unified than economics—it has social, cognitive, and other subfields with little overlap. Economics still has a unified model underneath.
Have something new every day. That’s the hardest part. People should feel that anytime they check, there’s something new.
You probably need two or three people to sustain daily output. Without Tyler, Alex says it wouldn’t be possible for him alone.
They have not missed one day in almost 20 years. Every day, four to five posts.
Why It’s Worth 20 Years
Tyler: He learns from it, meets incredible people, and it keeps him in close collaboration with Alex. It’s still fun and still growing after 20 years. If it were fading, it might be less fun, but it hasn’t peaked.
Alex: It keeps him sharp. University professors get older but students stay the same age, so you have to keep up and stay ahead. The project gives students early on a glimpse of what the life of a professor and a person passionate about ideas actually looks like—even if it’s a super atypical picture, having that picture at all is transformative.
Tyler on why he loves being a professor: “At any point I could go into the chairman’s office and tell him F you.” He never does, but the fact that he could is what matters.
The broader lesson: intellectual curiosity can get you somewhere. That wasn’t obvious to many people until they saw it modeled online. The internet partially saves us by allowing ideas to be debated, shaped, and formed more than ever before.
