Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Tyler Cowen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 2008

Freakonomics revealed much about our society. Now, one of America’s most respected economists reveals how individuals can turn economic reasoning to their advantage in their daily life—at home, at work, even on vacation. Tyler Cowen explains how understanding the incentives that work best with each individual is the key to successful and satisfactory daily interactions—from getting the kids to do the dishes to having a productive business meeting, attracting a mate to finding a good guide in a foreign country. Discovering your inner economist, Cowen suggests, can lead to a happier, more satisfying life. What better carrot could you ask for?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Perhaps mindful that the procession of Freakonomics-inspired pop-economics books is becoming a blur, blogger Cowen aims to not hit the reader over the head with economic principles. Indeed, in his chatty disquisitions, economics often recedes into near invisibility. Few readers will hold it against this charming guide on how to get more of the good stuff in life. An engaging narrator, Cowen offers idiosyncratic strategies for appreciating museum art, for building family trust and cooperation, for writing a personal ad, for reading classic novels that seem boring on first inspection, for surviving torture, for properly practicing self-deception and for most effectively giving to beggars in Calcutta. In the book's most passionate and practical chapter, on food, Cowen explains how, with planning and tactics, we can eat much better meals at home and in restaurants, here and abroad. Throughout the book, the author's advice is less counterintuitive than simply surprising (he argues that the committed foodie should look to regions where some people are very rich and others are very poor). Even if you don't agree with all of Cowen's cheerfully offered opinions, it's a pleasure to accompany him through his various interests and obsessions. At the least, you'll pick up some useful tips for what to order at upscale restaurants. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“Fast, furious, and fun, with great examples of how to apply economic thinking to nontraditional subjects.”
—Stephen J. Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics

“Engaging [and] useful.”
—The Washington Post

“His creativity is a gift.”
—Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors of Freakonomics

“[An] economist who’s a wonderfully entertaining writer but also a deeply humane thinker…will…show you how thinking better can actually help you live better.”
—James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Plume (May 27, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0452289637
• ASIN: B001OMHUVU
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #300,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes, a bunch of appetizers does not make a meal, August 11, 2007

By 

Paul Sas "Paul Whitmore Sas" (Berkeley) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist (Hardcover)

Tyler Cowen is an economist, aptly self-described "curious intellectual nerd polymath," and a gifted blogger. His new book is the only one I've ever pre-purchased through Amazon. This in itself is a tribute to Cowen's capacity to mobilize appropriate incentives: He secreted a second blog, and advertised on Marginal Revolution that access was available only to those who wrote to say they'd pre-purchased a copy of DYIC. I spent this afternoon reading the book, and my overall impression is that "Sometimes, a bunch of appetizers does not make a meal." Because Cowen's brain brims with creative ways to approach life from an idiosyncratic angle, his blog has marvelous little jags, lists, apercus gleaned from his vast reading. This book is not quite a blook, but it would have greatly benefited from a co-author whose strength was more inclined to thoroughness. While he admits that his habit is to "stop writing just a bit before I have said everything I want to. I find it better to approach the next writing day 'hungry'..." (123), I was left hungry for more detail or resolution on almost every topic. As a troubling example, he introduces the concept of the "Me factor", and deploys it in several instances, but the only explanation provided was this very skimpy account, that focusing "our attention on ourselves ... is in fact our favorite topic. Me, me, me. ... [T]he 'Me factor', as I will call it." (52-3) There are tons of ideas broached here, and the chapters on Art and Food are particularly stimulating. The defense of self-deception felt self-indulgently sketchy, and the final account of how to deal with torture piffles into "Quite simply, it is hard to show other people, in a convincing manner, that we are telling the truth. In the meantime, file this problem under 'Difficult to Solve' and stay out of the wrong cities." (104). If truth in subtitles were enforced, it should be noted that Cowen offers very little to help survive your next meeting, nor do his thoughts on motivating your dentist inspire much confidence.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lacking a Thesis, September 18, 2007

By 

Jason Wilcox - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist (Hardcover)

This book falls into a trap several recent best sellers have (Blink comes to mind): books that are just random collections of interesting ideas or stories. Like Blink, Cowen advertises a thesis that is supposed to run throughout the book. However, after the first couple of chapters the idea of discovering your Inner Economist is basically discarded. Instead, Cowen throws around interesting ideas that are of varying degrees of interest, shallow and short. The Inner Economist continues to make cameos, but only so Cowen can stroke the reader's ego with comments similar to "Of course, you and your Inner Economist already knew this."

The book is still worth reading. But go in understanding it will not change the way you think and is a compilation of observations more than anything else. Also understand it doesn't measure up to the leader in the collection-of-economic-observations genre: Freakonomics.

28 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Ugh!, November 7, 2007

By 

Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist (Hardcover)

Cowen gives readers three principles for distinguishing good economics from bad:

1)The Postcard Test - It should be possible to take a good economics argument and write it out on the back of a moderate-sized postcard.

2)The Grandma Test - Most economic arguments ought to be intelligible to your grandmother.

3)The Aha Principle - If the basic concepts are presented well, economics should make sense.

Unfortunately, Cowen violates these less than stunning principles. The book rambles, communicates little if anything about economics, has no integrating thread, and is boring. My guess is that he simply decided to get on the "Freakonomics" bandwagon. If so, it's long past time to move onto another fad.