Tyler Cowen

Like, there were no tech jobs with billionaires.

Finance was a low-paying field, like when I started choosing a career.

It was not a thing.

There wasn't this fancy Goldman Sachs.

It was a slow, boring thing.

Programmers were weird people in basements, like maybe, who knows, you know, that bad stuff.

And then, like an economist, you would earn, like back then, maybe $40,000 a year.

Like two people, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, had outside income.

And you had no expectation that you would ever earn more than that.

And I went into this with all of that, like relative to that, I feel so wealthy.

Just like, oh, you can sell some books, or you can give a talk.

I don't know, I just feel like I am...

a billionaire now, and if anything, I want to become what I've called an information trillionaire.

I'm not going to make that, but I think it's a good aspiration to have.

Just collect more information and be an information trillionaire, like Dana Gioia has that same goal.

He and I have talked about this.

I think that's a very worthy goal.

It was either economics or philosophy.

And I saw back then, this would be like the late 1970s, it was much harder to get a job as a philosopher, though not impossible, the way it sort of is now.

And they were paid less and just had fewer opportunities.