Become a Cultural Billionaire

As I mentioned earlier, I read the first half of Tyler Cowen's new book, Discover Your Inner Economist, on Saturday. One of my favorite parts was where Dr. Cowen discussed the value of becoming a "Cultural Billionaire" in which you learn to appreciate art, books, and culture as much as anybody. (Something Dr. Cowen examplifies.) Cowen's argument is that if you can learn to appreciate art in a deep way, you are better off than a billionaire who owns many pieces, but doesn't fully learn to appreciate them.

Here is an article in New York Books on Dr. Cowen's book and becoming a Cultural Billionaire:

What is most pleasurable about Marginal Revolution, though, is the heavy dose of cultural opinion and advice dispensed by Cowen. He is a world-class polymath who whips through graphic novels and 816-page bricks like Africa: A Biography of the Continent, listens to everything from Bach to Brazilian techno, searches out exotic cuisines all over the world, and still finds time to travel to remotest Mexico to update his collection of amate painting. For him, deep immersion in culture defines the good life, and his readers get the vicarious benefits.

With Discover Your Inner Economist, Cowen attempts to put serious economics in the service of self-help. He starts by arguing against money as the prime shaper of human behavior. “The critical economic problem is scarcity,” he says. “Money is scarce, but in most things the scarcity of time, attention, and caring is more important.”

The best sections of the book concern tactics for maximizing one’s cultural consumption, or what amounts to imitating Cowen. He lists eight strategies for taking control of one’s reading, which include ruthless skipping around, following one character while ignoring others, and even going directly to the last chapter. Your eighth-grade English teacher would faint. But the principle here is valuing the scarcity of your own time, which people often fail to do. It works for movies, too—Cowen will go to the multiplex and watch parts of three or four movies, rather than just sit through one. Why wait for a highly predictable ending when a fabulous scene might be unfolding in the movie playing next door?

Cowen also offers advice for how to defeat the boredom that, despite our best intentions to be culturally literate, overtakes many of us minutes after we enter an art museum. How do we deal with this “scarcity of attention”? Pretend to be an art thief, he suggests—in every gallery, pick one picture that we’d like to run off with. Sounds juvenile, admits Cowen, but it “forces us to keep thinking critically” rather than daydream about the snack bar.

Read the whole thing and, while you're at it, read the book too!