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The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy Paperback – January 1, 2010

by Tyler Cowen (Author)

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Previously published as Create Your Own Economy

"Will change the way you think about thinking."—Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind

Renowned behavioral economist and commentator Tyler Cowen shows that our supernetworked world is changing the way we think—and empowering us to thrive in any economic climate. Whether it is micro-blogging on Twitter or buying single songs at iTunes, we can now customize our lives to shape our own specific needs. In other words, we can create our own economy—and live smarter, happier, fuller lives. At a time when apocalyptic thinking has become all too common, Cowen offers a much-needed Information Age manifesto that will resonate with readers of Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, and everyone hungry to understand our potential to withstand, and even thrive, in any economic climate.

Print length

259 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Plume
Publication date

January 1, 2010
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0452296196
ISBN-13

978-0452296190
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is a prominent blogger at marginalrevolution.com, the world’s leading economics blog. He also writes regularly for The New York Times, and has written for Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wilson Quarterly.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Plume (January 1, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 259 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0452296196
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0452296190
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,208,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,328 in Information Management (Books)

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Tyler Cowen

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Tyler Cowen (/ˈkaʊ.ən/; born January 21, 1962) is an American economist, academic, and writer. He occupies the Holbert L. Harris Chair of economics, as a professor at George Mason University, and is co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution. Cowen and Tabarrok have also ventured into online education by starting Marginal Revolution University. He currently writes a regular column for Bloomberg View. He also has written for such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Time, Wired, Newsweek, and the Wilson Quarterly. Cowen also serves as faculty director of George Mason's Mercatus Center, a university research center that focuses on the market economy. In February 2011, Cowen received a nomination as one of the most influential economists in the last decade in a survey by The Economist. He was ranked #72 among the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" in 2011 by Foreign Policy Magazine "for finding markets in everything."

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4.1 out of 5

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Norman DeLisle

A Personal Review of "The Age of the Infovore"

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2010

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"The Age of the Infovore" is economist Tyler Cowen's personal panegyric to the cognitive abilities of people on the autism spectrum, and their critical importance in an age of endlessly flowing and incoherent information. He discovered his place on the autism spectrum when an adult with autism suggested the possibility. He has embraced his neurodiversity and explored it's possibilities and the contributions that people who are neurodiverse make to our society.

The central cognitive dimension that Cowen examines is the drive to create order that characterises many neurodiverse people. This drive allows such individuals to focus on a single arena of the world, and to bring a depth and scope of understanding to that arena that neurotypical people find very difficult. Sometimes the focus seems out of step with the larger society, and sometimes it seems prescient. In any event, it is driven by the internal experience of the person, and the activity brings great meaning to that person, and can do so to others (see how much of our entertainment focuses on collections).

I know in my heart what Tyler Cowen means.

I learned to read at the age of four and got my library card at the age of 6. From that first discovery of an infinite world of knowledge, I relentlessly tried to learn everything. I read whenever I wasn't asleep, and when I wouldn't be punished for it. I read everything regardless of topic. I often carried 2 or 3 books with me as I moved through my world. I won an award at a Catholic elementary school for a poem I wrote that praised science as the ultimate source of knowledge.

I was hooked.

I didn't find my personal focus until, after 21 months in Vietnam, I came to work in a medical clinic in 1970 that supported families with children who had significant brain damage and other characteristics, including autism. I latched on to the idea that I needed to understand change, and most especially intentional change, and I have pursued that understanding for the 40 years since.

Whether my particular obsession will result in anything generally useful remains to be seen. I have used what I learned in my work in human services and rights advocacy to the good of myself and others.

I want to thank Tyler Cowen for bringing dignity to what has always seemed to me a peculiar personal trait, and for his offering of a larger community to all of us with that drive for order. I think the book will have a wide audience of appreciation, but most of all to those who always felt outside the community of the normal, and wondered what good it was to be different.

Tyler Cowen also has a great blog called "Marginal Revolution".

7 people found this helpful

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Nathanb

This is the softcover version of Create Your Own Economy

Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2011

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So this is a little embarrassing. After thoroughly enjoying Cowen's last book about the culture of personalized information and entertainment, I ordered this book thinking it would contain more insights and practical ways to absorb and filter information. I was wrong, it's the same book. Apparently 'Create Your Own Economy' was a poor performing title so they made the paperback with a different name. I now have 2 copies. I'm not sorry about that, since I can now lend out a copy without giving up mine. But I do feel silly for the error nonetheless.

So a brief review of both:

This is a counter-argument to the raft of recent books published that lament the loss of deep thinking that is caused by being able to google everything and be constantly inundated with data. (the shallows, etc) I've noticed this change in myself over the years, how I read many times more information than I ever did but it's in smaller digital snippets. That I do still read books but that is no longer the majority of my information consumption and furthermore I have much less patience to finish books. On the surface, many people would just assume this is a bad thing and means I'm not as deep or critical of a thinker as I used to be. Cowen argues otherwise.

Remember how in grade school we were taught to read every boring word of the entire textbook chapter and felt guilty or were reprimanded if we didn't? Remember how we were taught that it was bad to mark up (interact with) our textbooks? We also learned that you are supposed to read the book cover to cover. I STILL have a hard time feeling guilty about not finishing books that start to become a waste of my increasing scarce attention. Cowen argues that we shouldn't confuse depth of thinking with sticking to one textbook of one subject for hours. He reminds us to let go of those old ways of learning and make it the fun exploration that it should be. I would wager that I know more about world history from reading articles on Wikipedia over the last 3 years in my spare time (maybe an hour per week on average) than all of the total history I learned about in my k-12 'education'. That's precisely due to fragmentation and focused engagement based on MY direction, not in spite of it. This is one of many examples of the advantages of information surplus.

So the book has a lot of positive reasons on why it's not so bad to keep up with many brief information streams than the few that we grew up doing. The other thing the book is about it the autistic spectrum. I now have a better understanding of why I've always been obsessed with certain narrow subjects at every period of my life. I also now see the Autistic in a new light and recognize that I, like the author, certainly have some of those traits. It makes sense to me that most people labeled as Autistic are simply further down that spectrum than the rest of us and that there are certainly a good number of 'high functioning' people that are just not as far along that spectrum. By understanding the extreme cases we can have a better understanding of ourselves.

I would like to see more books about HOW to go about filtering and organizing information that is written specifically for infovores. This is more a 'why' and 'what' book than a 'how' book. But embracing the idea that our current culture of info overload is a fundamental evolution in how we learn and live is a great start.

4 people found this helpful

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Arrowcatcher

Very significant book

Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2013

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This book really changed my viewpoint just as the hype for it suggests. I won't repeat what's in a number of other positive reviews, but I will say that I found it to be one of my top non-fiction reads. I made notes from it.

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Don McGowan

Buy this if you have an autistic child, don't if you don't

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2010

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I have read and enjoyed Tyler Cowan's other books. What's not clear either from the editorial reviews or the other user reviews I've seen is: this book is about (a) how autistic people think and (b) why Cowan thinks it's better-suited to the information economy than non-autistic thought processes. I'm not sure I know how many people can learn to be autistic: I had thought it's something that's hard-wired into your brain. Presumably not being autistic is equally hard-wired. So if being autistic is better-suited for the information economy, what exactly are the non-autistic supposed to do about it? This whole premise seems engineered as a post hoc ergo propter hoc justification for why Cowan is smart and thinks he might be autistic.

That was the question that bugged me while I was reading. Perhaps a bigger point is that the book seems to beg the question: is being autistic actually more-suited to an information economy than not being autistic? Economists usually err on the side of trusting data that shouldn't be trusted; here, Cowan doesn't seem to have a whole lot of data. He just thinks intuitively that it must be right. Again, this could be interesting to some people, so if what I'm describing sounds awesome then you should buy this.

2 people found this helpful

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Ben Taxy

Great read

Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2010

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Original, well-written, thought-provoking. Would have been nice to have more suggestions about how specifically one might improve one's ability to categorize, organize and otherwise succeed. Still, an excellent book.

One person found this helpful

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The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy Paperback – January 1, 2010

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