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This is a good book that I wanted to be a great book but that wasn't. Many reviewers have commented that the book claims to be about how to use economics principles to help your decisionmaking only to show that in fact using economics principles often works at cross purposes to your decisionmaking (example: how paying your child to do chores makes them less likely to do them). To my mind this *is* showing how to use economics principles to make your decisions: it's explaining that sometimes you shouldn't do it.
So far, so good. Where the book lets off is where it stops being insightful like that. You can't review a book without reviewing the other books in its genre - the Washington Post review of this book in the Amazon page spends half the time comparing it to Freakonomics. On one level that's not fair because a book should stand or fall on its own. On the other hand, nothing exists in a vacuum and where the author himself references Freakonomics in his own book you can get a bit of a pass for doing it in a review too. As I've pointed out and as the author does as well, unlike Freakonomics, this book purports to tell you not just where economics principles can help but also where they hurt. In that case he has to get this right too. And I don't feel he did. Continuing the example: if paying your daughter to do the dishes means she won't do as good a job and will instead look for a better-paying job, is that a bad thing? Depends what you're trying to motivate her to do and what result you're seeking. It's that last analysis that Cowan doesn't give enough here. Freakonomics told you its motivations, and what would be motivated by following economics principles. Cowan doesn't tell you what you lose or what you gain by abandoning them. He should have.
- Paperback: 245 pages
- Publisher: Plume; Reprint edition (May 27, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0452289637
- ISBN-13: 978-0452289635
- Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Average Customer Review: 56 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#511,564 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4353 in Happiness Self-Help
- #1980 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions
- #5745 in Success Self-Help
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