Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist

I picked up Tyler Cowen's "Discover Your Inner Economist" by chance at a friend's house & could not stop reading it. Among the 'poponomic' books I've recently read (e.g. "Freakonomics", "More Sex Is Better Sex"), I find it to be the most entertaining, concise & provocative. It distinguishes in the variety of engaging topics covered (I particularly love the chapter "The Dangerous and Necessary Art of Self-Deception", with the opening sentence of 'Delusion is one secret to a good marriage', followed by concise reasoning & examples); & more importantly, with the genuine goal to enable readers with fresh perspectives to lead a satisfying and happier life.

This book reminds me of Stephen Hawking's "A brief History of time." Great authors can always make abstruse stuff understandable to even illiterate.

It's a fast and easy read! The info is definitely worth the cost of time and money in other words: high ROI!

Reviewers dismissing "Discover Your Inner Economist" as another "Freakonomics Clone" (Aug. 3 WSJ, for example) fail to recognize what distinguishes Tyler Cowen's book from the rest. While the top priority of other so-called "Pop Economics" writers is to prove that economics can relate to the real world, Cowen's greatest priority is helping his readers, and economics is one mean to this end. Applying economics can be more art than science, he explains. Study of this art is generally lacking in the economics profession, and Cowen uses a variety of sources to fill this void. The end result is a practical, insightful, and often hilarious self-help book that utilizes the full power of economic reasoning and also teaches readers how to cope with its limits. The book is also distinguished in the breadth of fulfilling topics it covers. While Freakonomics mostly details academic papers of Steven Levitt unlikely to improve one's daily life, Cowen never constrains himself to his own research. You will not find a single academic paper written by Cowen in the book's references, though plenty of mentions for his blog Marginal Revolution. He respects a wide range of sources, whether they be academics, journalists, or other bloggers. His prose jumps quickly and often abruptly between topics, but this freer style allows him to efficiently expose the reader to a wide variety of ideas. At times the academic in me screamed for more rigor in some of his arguments, but ultimately I feel the book was better off as written. The book provides only the detail necessary to make a point, and this allows for 221 pages of light and invigorating reading. By producing such a variety of advice, Cowen ensures some reader disagreement, but the book is better for it. No one buys Chicken Soup for the Soul expecting every single anecdote to be life-changing, and this book needs to be approached the same way -- and unlike most other self-help books, this one is always entertaining. My impression is that if readers ignore or forget 99% of the book's specific advice a month after they've read it, the lifelong benefits of a few tips can be worth the price. And for readers that learn to apply Cowen's thinking throughout their daily lives, this book becomes a cornucopia. I expect readers will respond most favorably to Cowen's sections on art and food, as these are where he shows the most passion and relies the most on his personal experience. His arguments for broadening horizons -- becoming a "cultural billionaire" in his words -- are the most convincing. The chapter on self-deception made me feel much better about myself, as I feel I utilize "necessary" self-deception and avoid "dangerous" self-deception. (Or is this feeling another example of my self-deception?) I anticipate readers will differ widely in which advice affects them the most. The only way to find out is to read the book yourself.

Philip Wicksteed chose as the epigraph to his The Common Sense of Political Economy a quote from the German philosopher/poet Goethe that states: "We are all doing it: very few of us understand what we are doing." Wicksteed explains: "In the ordinary course of our lives we constantly consider how our time, our energy, or our money shall be spent. That is to say, we decide between alternative applications of our resources of every kind, and endeavor to administer them to the best advantage in securing the accomplishments of our purposes or the humouring of our inclinations." It was Wicksteed's goal with his book to develop a consistent system of political economy from reflection on and careful study of the everyday conduct of human beings. HINT: to see the upshot of his analysis see Vol. 1, p. 183ff -- we can debate the merits of his position if you want. In a fundamental sense all really great teachers of economics follow Wicksteed in making a fundamental appeal to the common sense rendering of economic decision making. Agreed that we may not be the lightening calculators of pleasure and pain that Veblen chastised in neoclassical economics, but we are not hapless dolts either. Individuals, independent of whether they have ever had formal training in economics, choose, and in making their choices they consider alternatives. Mistakes are often made, emotions cloud assessment, and the alternatives are sometimes murky, but individuals strive to make the best decisions that they can given their situation. We are all doing it, but few of us know what we are doing. One of the primary jobs of the economics teacher is to alert students to the intuition of economic reasoning, and on the basis of that intuition help the student see the broader systemic effects (or as Wicksteed put it, develop a "consistent system of Political Economy". Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist delivers on this Wicksteedian mission better than any other recent entry into the world of popularizing economics. Freakonomics doesn't really develop economic intuition, but shows how statistics can reveal interesting relationships in the world. The Undercover Economist does better than that, but doesn't really get at the foundation of economic intuition --- the choice decision of the individual. I am a fan of this genre of economic writing, but I am absolutely thrilled to announce that my colleague Tyler Cowen's book is the best of the lot. I first met Tyler in 1984. I was a first year graduate student at GMU, and Tyler was a first year graduate student at Harvard. He came back to visit GMU to see Ludwig Lachmann give a workshop talk --- I believe it was a draft of his book, The Market as a Process. The conversation went from bulls and bears to fix and flex price markets and to challenges to the equilibrating tendencies of the entrepreneurial market. I believe it was on that occasion that prior to the seminar Tyler and I happened to be in the same office space