*GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?*

I am pleased to announce and present my new project, available here, free of charge.  It is derived from a 100,000 word manuscript, entirely written by me, and is well described by the title of this blog post.

I believe this is the first major work published in GPT-4, Claude 2, and some other services to come.  I call it a generative book.  From the project’s home page:

Do you yearn for something more than a book? And yet still love books? How about a book you can query, and it will answer away to your heart’s content? How about a book that will create its own content, on demand, or allow you to rewrite it? A book that will tell you why it is (sometimes) wrong?

To be clear, if you’re not into generative AI, you can just download the work onto your Kindle, print it out, or read it on a computer screen.  Yet I hope you do more:

One easy place to start is with our own chatbot using GPT-4, and we’ll soon provide custom apps using Claude 2 and Llama 2. In the meantime we’ve provided instructions for how to experiment with them yourself.

Each service has different strengths and you should try more than one. You’ll see the very best performance by working with individual chapters using your own subscription to ChatGPT, Claude, or a similar service. The chapters can be read independently and in any order. Ask the AI if you’re lacking context. Try these sample questions to start.

You can ask it to summarize, ask it for more context, ask for a multiple choice exam on the contents, make an illustrated book out of a chapter, or ask it where I am totally wrong in my views.  You could try starting with these sample questions.  The limits are up to you.

Here is the Table of Contents:

1. Introduction

2. Milton Friedman

3. John Maynard Keynes

4. Friedrich A. Hayek

5. Those who did not make the short list: Marshall, Samuelson, Arrow, Becker, and Schumpeter

6. John Stuart Mill

7. Thomas Robert Malthus

8. Adam Smith

9. The winner(s): so who is the greatest economist of all time?

The site address is an easy to remember econgoat.ai.  And as you will see from the opening chapter, it is not only about economics, it is also a very personal book about me.  No Straussian here, I tell you exactly what I think, including of my personal meetings with Friedman and Hayek.  If, however, you are looking for a Straussian reading of this project — which I would disavow — it is that I am sacrificing “what would have been a normal book” to the AI gods to win their favor.

And apologies in advance for any imperfections in the technology — generative books can only get better.

Recommended.