Customer Reviews

The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A fun, easy read, but with some serious flaws. Written in a chatty question-and-answer format.

Notably, many of the answers Franks gives are incorrect, obviously thought up by himself without any research. For example, in the chapter on Product Design, he asks the question "why is milk sold in rectangular containers, while soft drinks are sold in round ones" he posits several business-economics answers about costly retailer shelf space, about how a round beverage container's shape might better accommodate a customers' hand, but never states the principle and overwhelming reason- that a container for anything under pressure should be spherical or cylindrical according to the laws of physics and math, for maximum economy of manufacture. A square soda can would require, I'm guessing, at least a half pound of aluminum to hold its square shape perfectly against the internal pressure of a typical soda. So it is about economics, but the economics of container design, not of the other forces as he guesses.

Anyway, this sort of guessing pops up periodically in his answers, and reduces the effectiveness of his arguments. I wish he had asked his colleagues in the engineering and science departments to proof his manuscript.

On the other hand, there is much good stuff here. One chapter, that of Arms Races and The Tragedy of the Commons, is excellent, introducing important phenomena that many people aren't aware of and that are severely damaging our society. He has written on these topics before in his prior books Luxury Fever and The Winner Take All Society.

Despite its flaws, still a fun read. Just don't take all his answers to be perfectly correct. It's more like a late night BS session with your buddies.

At first glance at the bookstore I thought the book would be a variation on the theme of recent popular economic books such as Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. I purchased the book anyhow and am now glad that I have done so.

The book indeed is like Freakonomics in that its purpose is to reveal the economic rational behind everyday matters. It is different from Freakonomics in that it follows a "top-down" approach: each of the book's chapters corresponds to a basic economic principle (for example supply and demand for a chapter, and signals and asymmetric information for another) that is explained via real world examples. So if one can say that the goal of Freakonomics was in reaching the bottom reason/motive of particular phenomena, it can also be said that the goal of The Economic Naturalist is to elicit fundamental economic principles through questions and answers. In this sense the book is more educational.

As noted earlier, the book is a sequence of questions and answers. An answer generally spans the length of a page. There is no central narrative as can be expected from a book adhering to such format. However I found the examples as a collective to be more value than the sum of each. That a single principle underlies various and seemingly disparate phenomena is what creates such value.

There were a few question-answer pairs that I felt either not informative or not convincing (an example question: "if attractive people are more intelligent than others, and if blondes are considered more attractive, why are there so many jokes about dumb blondes?"; corresponding answer: "if blondes are indeed perceived as being more attractive, then being blonde may create attractive opportunities that do not require heavy investments in education. The perception that blondes are less intelligent than others may thus stem less from any innate difference in their mental abilities than from the fact that they rationally choose to invest in less education."). Apart from such examples, which there were only few, the questions posed were fascinating, and the author's exposition clear.

The author points out that economic education is hindered by the usage of arcane nomenclature. He thus purposely steered away from using professional jargon, and in my opinion has been successful at this effort. However I wonder if the book would have been better if related nomenclature were described after the explanation of each underlying principle -- that would have provided a nice bridge to existing literature.

I admire Frank's attempts to teach economics through narratives rather than graphs/charts, and credit him for his use of informal concepts like arms races and leaving money on the table. But in the process, he's also teaching his readers two unfortunate lessons: (1) everything can be explained economoically and (2) it doesn't matter if your theories are correct. With respect to the latter, he rivals evolutionary biologists in their favoring of speculative narrative over evidence. It's all "maybe the reason is this" and "it could be that." Examples:

-In explaining why 'we' leave tips for some services and not others, he ignores the lack of tipping in other countries. Perhaps Frank could conjure up some economic explanation here, but this isn't a book which ultimately care about answers. The stories are apparently enough.

-In an example involving taxicabs and rain, Frank's conclusion is that cabbies are acting against their financial interests. If this is permitted to happen -- and it should be -- then what are the ramifications for the rest of the book? Maybe you CAN leave money on the table. But Frank quickly remembers he's an economist and never again questions economic laws.

--He suggests that laws requiring children to attend kindergarten by a certain age are enacted to prevent parents from holding their kids back, giving them unfair advanatages of being the oldest/biggest/smartest kid in class. Really? I'd love to see this tested in the real world.

I don't even want to talk about the embarrassing final section on personal relationships ("why is coyness considered an attractive attribute?").

I'd hoped this book would be a collection of enlightening economic explanations of puzzling phenomena. That is in fact what it purports to be, and while reading it it sometimes feels like that, but mostly it's too shallow to be really satisfying.

The book is organized as a bunch of questions about Stuff in the Marketplace (Why does X cost more here than there? Why do Zs come in round containers while Ws come in hexagonal ones?), each with clever economically-based answers.

The problem is that the answers, while clever and facile, are pretty much entirely speculative, just-so stories without any real evaluation of whether or not they're the right explanation. "It might be because C!" Well, okay, but is it?

While it's fun to see smart people make up plausible economic explanations for puzzling things, I find it ultimately unsatisfying that the book stops there. It would of course take more work to try to verify the armchair guesses, but without that verification the whole thing ends up feeling sort of pointless. I'd much rather read about clever economic explanations that turned out to be *correct* than ones that are merely cute and/or plausible.

This book needs a new title, "Answers to Stuff You've Wondered About Without Economics". The book presents interesting questions, such as "Why are taxis in NYC yellow?", but the explanations have nothing to do with economics. For example, the answer to the above is that there were some illegal cabs operating, so NYC forced all cabs to be the same color and yellow was the common color at the time of the new law. Hey, that's neat to know but no economics involved. Each question is given slightly under one (small) page for a response and so this is more of a history/trivia lesson than anything to do with economics. I ended up reading the first 5-10 explanations and then flipping though the rest of the book, putting it down after about 90 minutes total.

The Economic Naturalist is well written and informative, exploring many day to day circumstance through the lens of economic theory. On the way, Frank provides a painless and vivid introduction to key principals in economics.

That said (and probably because much of the material was provided by students taking classes in economics) all the explanations were economics explanations and mildly left economics at that. As an example, when explaining why 49 states don't make radar detectors illegal, Frank says that a few powerful manufacturers of radar detectors exert outsized political influence. Powerful manufacturers? The radar detector industry is tiny. In fact, Federal law preempts state efforts to ban radar detectors.

Elswhere, in a few cases technical and engineering considerations explain better than economics.

While some examples are interesting demonstrations of how past practice and economics come together, too much of this book attempts to force fit economic principles into "most likely explanations" by the author of the articles. This becomes quite repetitive and the explanation being not too convincing.

There doesn't seem to be enough interesting material to sustain an entire book because half way through we are fed obvious insights and simple reasoning. Last I heard Cornell is a pretty good school but this product is more like stories told by some guy at an office party.

I have read "Freakonomics" and "Naked Economics" in the past 6 months and thoroughly enjoyed them. I was hoping to get more of the same with this book. It caught my eye because it is nearly the exact same color as "Naked Economics" (Hmmm, I wonder if the economic naturalists would care to speculate on products that intentionally look similar to better-known products...) and I was hoping to get some more economic enlightenment.

Sadly, the book reads a lot more like an extended session with Yahoo! Answers than anything else. It's interesting, but there are times when you have to wonder why anyone would be wondering these things and there are times when you have to wonder if he actually ran these answers by anyone else in another department at Cornell to see if the economic answer was right or if another answer was correct.

For example, he talks about Germany having a high unemployment rate as compared to the U.S. He mentions the fact that Germany has better unemployment benefits as the only factor for Germany's higher unemployment rate.

Historically, there are two reasons for the higher unemployment:

#1) Germany is still in the midst of absorbing East Germany which has a higher unemployment rate than the former West Germany.

#2) Macroeconomics teaches that, in the short run, you can avoid a higher rate of inflation by holding back GDP growth in a variety of ways that tend to cause more unemployment (sorry economists of the world, but that's the easiest way I can explain it without causing eyes to glaze over for non-econ-minded folks). Germany is deathly afraid of high rates of inflation since runaway inflation occurred during the Weimar Republic in the Post-World War I Germany and that is seen as having been one of the things that brought Hitler to power.

I'm sure great unemployment benefits help, but that is not the only cause for the problem.

**********

It's a quick read, often light and breezy. But, there are better reads out there that do it better.

To learn more about basic economics, I suggest "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan.

To learn more about offbeat topics and how economics applies to them, I suggest: "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner.

Had I only read the customer reviews before ordering this book...

The book is lacks depth and is full of flaws, the most apalling being the paragraph on Hindu movies. This is equvalent to the assumption that Russians speak Orthodox, English speak Anglican, or the people in Israel speak Jewish.

In some way it reminds of Bill Bryson's books: wittily written, but scientifically useless.