My intellectual spirit animal Tyler Cowen did a Q&A on Product Hunt. I'm not sure what the Q&A's have to do with Product Hunt's mission, but as always Cowen delivered a wide-ranging, high entropy intellectual joy ride. Some of my favorite questions and responses:

Ben Casnocha

How do you think your career and life would have been different if blogging, twitter, and digital media had be ubiquitous in your teens and 20's? Would you have still pursued an academic path or would you have become a full-time columnist/commentator/speaker earlier on? I seem to recall you saying at one point that you're glad the internet didn't exist early on in your life as it gave you the time to read the classics and develop a substantive base of knowledge.

tylercowen— Professor, George Mason University

@bencasnocha I am glad I was forced to live in "book culture" and "meat space' for my first forty years. Or maybe thirty-five years would have been enough. People these days have lost the sense of information being scarce, and counterintuitively that makes it harder for them to develop profound thoughts. It's like practicing chess by asking the computer right away, all the time, what the right move it. If I were starting today, probably I would not be an academic. The seductions of the on-line world would be too great, I am pretty sure.

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Erik Torenberg— Product Hunt
you mentioned Travel is more beneficial than reading. Is this almost always true? Does one of travel or reading have more diminishing marginal return than the other?
tylercowen— Professor, George Mason University
@eriktorenberg well, you have to go somewhere good and go with an open mind. But most places are good if you visit them in the right manner. Reading has strongly diminishing returns once you have, say, read half of Bloom's list in *The Western Canon* and achieved a reasonable understanding of some of the social sciences.

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Cole Unger
@tylercowen Underrated or overrated: professionals in America working ever-longer hours per week?
tylercowen— Professor, George Mason University
@ungercole it depends at what age. Do it for the first stage of your carrer, for sure. A lot of the alternative ways of spending time are overrated! Who wants to go out drinking? Not I. After that, see how you like it. Clearly it's not for everyone but in some key ways I think it is underrated. It is sometimes worth pushing yourself to some limits.
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Haris H.
Counterfactual: the US never builds the Interstate system. Are we better off today (more urbanization, railroads, less carbon dependence & its side effects) or were the gains from increased mobility large enough to offset costs? Will this still be true in 50 years? 100?
tylercowen— Professor, George Mason University
@kingharis Huge gains, most of all social. USA could never have been such a railroads country, just look at population density. Carbon is a global problem, we are only a small part of it. Think how backward the American south would still be today without interstates.

Cowen recently linked to my post on Cuisine and Empire and it was one of the highlights of my month.