|
Loading... The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmasby Robert H. Frank
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No matter how much you want this to be Freakonomics for biologists, it's not. ( )This book seemed like it would be a really interesting glimpse of the economics of daily life, but instead it reads like a re-tread of the "Imponderables" series, and a little drier than most at that. Having enjoyed Freakonomics earlier this year, Ithought this book might be similar. Dr. Frank presents a collection of ecnomic questions followed by explanations, collected by his student. Sample questions include "Why are round-trip airfares from Kansas City to Orlando cheaper than round-trip airfares from Orlando to Kansas City" and "Why is text-messaging more common in Asian countries than the U.S?" followed by an economist's reasoning. A fun read, although not as quirky as Freakonomics. not quite as brilliant as Freakonomics and Your Inner Economist is however quite charming because the questions examined come from the uninitiated (Frank's students) and reveal a quite broad range of issues. To me (an uninitiated) the most interesting part of the book was the discussion of the very unexpected places where one find applications of price discrimination and discount theory. no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 046500217X, Hardcover)Why do the keypads on drive-up cash machines have Braille dots? Why are round-trip fares from Orlando to Kansas City higher than those from Kansas City to Orlando? For decades, Robert Frank has been asking his economics students to pose and answer questions like these as a way of learning how economic principles operate in the real world--which they do everywhere, all the time.Once you learn to think like an economist, all kinds of puzzling observations start to make sense. Drive-up ATM keypads have Braille dots because it's cheaper to make the same machine for both drive-up and walk-up locations. Travelers from Kansas City to Orlando pay less because they are usually price-sensitive tourists with many choices of destination, whereas travelers originating from Orlando typically choose Kansas City for specific family or business reasons.The Economic Naturalist employs basic economic principles to answer scores of intriguing questions from everyday life, and, along the way, introduces key ideas such as the cost benefit principle, the "no cash left on the table" principle, and the law of one price. There is no more delightful and painless way of learning these fundamental principles. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||