In a recent blog post, Tyler Cowen wrote “I think of myself as commanding only a limited English-language vocabulary.”
I am very skeptical of this claim.
Cowen has a Ph.D. from Harvard and higher education is positively correlated with vocabulary size. Cowen is also a famously fast reader of complex academic texts. I do not see how such a reading speed would be possible without good sight reading knowledge of a very large vocabulary.
Here is Cowen’s advice for reading fast.
And here is his trip to The Strand with Michael Orthofer.
peakmemory 
Tyler Cowen’s blog is one of my favorites too. As far as his “limited vocabulary”, I think he’s onto something: there is an “optimal level” of number of words one should know in order to communicate persuasively …