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 