Review - Discover Your Inner Economist

I have been reluctant to review books I read on this blog (this seems to be my day to admit what I don't do here), probably because I'm reluctant to admit that not everything I read is a Great Book or a deep non-fiction tome. To heck with that, I think I'll just go ahead.

I wanted to like Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist (DYIE) by Tyler Cowen. Professor Cowen is a major contributor to the entertaining economics blog Marginal Revolution, which is an interesting blend of the trivial and important (Professor Cowen pretty much writes about everything that intrigues him, so you will get links to serious economic studies and to other blogs writing about the best national flags).

But a reader of a blog can pick through the things of importance to him/her, and, if interested, can focus on the serious economic matters. A reader of a book has less ability to do this.

Freakonomics is the best-known example of pop economics, a book that actually became a best-seller. It did so, however, by taking only surface techniques from the world of economics and applying them to various interesting situations (the most famous of which is the contention that legal abortions led to lower crime rates). I found Freakonomics disappointing the same way as I did DYIE, largely because of a sense of frivolity that underlies the proceedings.

Perhaps the worst aspect of DYIE is that it doesn't even live up to the subtitle (yes, I know the author rarely creates the subtitle or even the title, but I'm reviewing the package, not the author's intentions). In every case where a problem is difficult, e.g., the three in the subtitle, the discussion ends with the recognition that these problems are difficult and, perhaps, intractable. For example, the two pages or so on motivating one's dentist include a few ideas, then conclude that they won't work and you wouldn't be able to tell if they did. (Cowen spends even more time on what is apparently a real-world problem of his, getting a 16-year-old to do the dishes. His solution: rather than imposing punishment for not doing them, talk to the teen and help her understand that she's a vital part of the family and doing dishes is for the family [or something like that]. He then acknowledges that this probably won't work.)

The title isn't very useful either. Several times as Cowen urges the reader to reveal the Inner Economist that beats within us all, he admits that family harmony may not withstand public revelation, so keep it to yourself.

On the good side, as in Freakonomics, there are some entertaining anecdotes and ideas. Cowen is far more interesting when writing about food, though the connection to economics is, at best, tangential.

There are actually a couple of problems in these kinds of books. First, there is a belief running through them that the reader can control situations by providing proper incentives. In DYIE, that comes up in suggestions for "surviving" the next meeting, in which a laundry list of improving long, boring meetings is discussed at length. Of course, in the real world, in which most of us go to far more meetings than we run, we have no control over the agenda, the activities, the length. And that's the problem, we don't control the incentive structure, so we can't use them to improve anything.

Second, the attempt to humanize the dry "science" of economics more often trivializes it. Economics has abjectly failed in the things it purports to do, controlling world economies, explaining individual actions. Since those problems are in a real sense to big to explore, the desperate researcher turns to junk, attention-catching items and applies the tools of the science to them. They're not the right tools, which these books ably demonstrate.