Customer Reviews

Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

When a book is titled "Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting", what should a consumer reasonably expect from a book for their $23 (list price)?

I am not yet a parent, but may be taking that plunge soon. So I was looking for a primer. Not easy answers, but a fresh take on looking at the problems of parenting. I suppose I got this from the book in some respects, but I was still left wanting.

My main beef is that when the author uses an economic term, such as game theory, option value, or the like, I expected a bit more in the way of a definition of the term and an explanation of how it works, so that I could compare it to the specific parenting anecdote in the way that Gans (presumably) does himself. Instead, he rushes past the "learning" moment for the reader and gets back to whatever story of poopy diapers or sharing toys he had started. This may make for an amusing and quick read, but after I had finished the book (in about 4 hours - it is not the densest 200 pages you'll come across) I had felt like I had not really learned anything. I had enjoyed my time with Gans and his kids, and I may have seen some evidence of his differing take on parenting, but I was not made to understand the mechanics of that different view in any meaningful way.

In the end, this book reads either like a blog (I gather this was the genesis of much of the material) or like a sort of less-funny Dave Barry column (a comparison that Gans invites in the text). Do I like blogs? Sure, if they're well written. Do I like Dave Barry? Certainly. But were these the things that I wanted from a book called "Parentonomics?" Not really.

In the end, this book is not worth its list price in my opinion. There is plenty of material online which approximates its value, while charging either nothing or merely placing ads on the screen. In paying for a book like this, I would want something expert and which can't be replicated by anyone but the author - a layperson's guide to economic concepts, and their application to problems of parenting. Instead, I got something like the "making of" or the "deleted scenes" from such a production. Amusing, perhaps. But intellectually nourishing, no.

This book is all sizzle, no steak. I give it three stars for being an enjoyable read, but cannot give it five stars since it did not meet my expectations for the purpose of the book.

I started this book as bedtime reading Friday night & finished it Saturday afternoon. I'm not a parent, but an uncle who learned much from it & was LOL at numerous times. His Child #1 is very much like my niece. I'm a law professor who has a background in economics also. I'll require this book in Business Basics for Lawyers next academic year because of it's being a great, fun introduction to incentives, strategic thinking, externalities, agency problems, public goods, optimal punishment, real option value, property rights, reputation, & credible threats among other fundamental notions in microeconomics. There's even some macroeconomics in a discussion of structural versus frictional messes. Any aunt, parent, or uncle will find much insight & humor in this book's vignettes. Anyone that has taken economics will also find many familiar ideas & concepts. But what is best about Parentonomics are the universal stories that every human being can relate to, having been a former child.

I love to read books that present subjects with which I'm familiar (i.e. parenting) from perspectives with which I'm not (i.e. economics, aside from Macroeconomics 101). Because of that, I was eagerly looking forward to receiving and reading this book. I found the experience overall satisfactory, but the insights were not quite as striking or universal as I would have liked. The book, I think would be much better served by fewer professional reviewers implying it's some kind of parenting manual. It's not. Gans himself does not pretend it is. It isn't an economist's take on parenting as much as it is an economist's take on his own parenting, with a few generally applicable ideas.

Take it as memoir rather than a manual, and it's a fun read. Gans has an easy, conversational tone that works well with his topic. You get a sense of him and his family as people--particularly his children, whom he presents insightfully. The book is often amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, once in a while slightly preachy...for the most part, it was a pleasure, but of a modest sort. It's not a bad way to pass a few hours, but it's not a particularly compelling one (to my own experience), either.

I never though I would actually enjoy a book on economics but I found this dad's take on the economics of parenting quite clever and entertaining. What's particularly amusing about this book is that many of the author's insights remind me of some of the things that went through my mind when I was a young father.

If you're looking for a book on how to budget for parenting, you can skip right over this one. The same applies for real parenting advice. This book is really all about anecdotes and funny lightheartedness as the author explores the many unexpected pitfalls in which parents often find themselves.

Despite my disclaimer, there are some pretty clever ideas in here, and the book is certainly good entertainment value if nothing else. This book is a great metaphorical grain of salt, best when sprinkled on the laps of proud new parents at a baby shower!

Parentonomics, an attempt to view parenting through the discipline of economics, with incentives, has some terrific moments. His discussion of how incentives affect birthdays, of how babies in the US are especially likely to be born the last week of December due to health care deductibles and the dependent tax deduction, while in other countries births tend to be pushed away from that week, is intriguing. His account of child payments in Australia, where there was a huge spike in births on July 1, 2004, the day the payment increased, is amazing and a bit terrifying. This is where Gans is at his best.

His attempts to use examples from parenting to explain economics are somewhat more successful than when he turns it the other way, trying to explain or understand child behavior in terms of economics. He talks about "negotiating" with a baby ... and while this can be useful to a point, sometimes I felt he missed that babies and young children are not rational actors, with neurology quite a bit different from adults. Or maybe he didn't miss it, but chooses to downplay that for the purpose of the essay. It's meant to be all in good fun for the discussion, but I have personally seen many adults (including me) fail to appreciate that there are real physical reasons why a child will not respond to incentives in the way an adult thinks of them, and get frustrated. A frustrated parent is an unhappy parent.

Gans' writing is amusing, and he is at his most interesting when he's talking about game theory and economics and about more general issues than when he's generalizing out from his own kids. It took me a while to finish the book, but on the whole it was enjoyable, and there are some passages that I expect to refer back to frequently.

As a parent of toddler twins, I have come to realize how much of my life with the girls is shaped by economic principles. A lot of the stories in this book struck home with me. I am particularly aware of the dangers of incentivizing - you don't always get what you expect.

The book is a quick read, another reviewer describes the style as bloggish. I tend to agree. The economics here is light - as this book seems intended for bleary-eyed parents who have a few minutes to read between feedings.

I wouldn't exactly recommend this as a straight advice book - it isn't. It's more a series of personal anecdotes and observations. However, parents will find them appealing, and will definitely get a chuckle out of much they read here.

This book promises to illustrate economic principles through the author's personal experiences in parenting. The author does describe his experiences in a humorous and engaging manner, and he does occasionally toss out economic terminology. But I don't feel that I learned much from the book, and I got bored with it after a while. The book didn't teach much about economics, and the descriptions of parenting will I think seem pretty commonplace to anyone who has kids.

If you don't know much about parenting and are about to take the plunge, the book might be useful as an amusing introduction to what you are in for. And if you are a new parent, it might be nice to know that you are not alone in the things that you are going through and have a few laughs about them. But if you are hoping for some profound insights into parenting based on deep results from economics, you will be disappointed.

Incidentally, regarding the obvious intended comparison with Freakonimics: I learned more from the latter book, although I still felt that it was overrated and didn't have enough content to justify writing a whole book, as opposed to a couple of magazine articles. Just in case that helps you calibrate my review. The present book was based on a blog, and I think it is rare that one can make a really good book out of a blog.

You might look at the title and think "What do parenting and economics have to do with each other?". And if you read this book, you'll find that the answer is just as you thought: not very much.

While Parentonomics is an enjoyable read, there's an underlying theme that you'll notice almost immediately. The "economist" twist is almost interchangeable with any somewhat technical profession. So the anecdotes "through the eyes of an economist" are seemingly contorted to be as such.

It wouldn't be terribly difficult to have "Enginarenting: An Engineer Dad Looks at Parenting" winding up as basically the same book, if you substitute economic information with engineering information.

That's not to say that the book is inherently bad or uninteresting -- but I really don't understand the comparisons and contrasts made with Freakonomics, given that the former is a book about being a parent which happens to be written by an economist, and the latter is about economics written by an economist.

Parentonomics gives you a very round view of things to consider with children. Breaking parenting down into small chunks like, planning, delivering, sleeping, eating and so on was very interesting and easy for a new parent to ready just what they had time to read (since we all know how busy first time parents can be).

The only chapter that I thought needed more 'meat' was the travel chapter. Having raised two children overseas and making long distance trips from places like Perth, Australia to Middle America, I realized that I might have more experience on this chapter so it seemed to not offer much value. But the other chapters did offer things to think about and interesting ways to look at typical parenting money issues.