Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0525951237, Hardcover)
One of the most respected behavioral economists in the world and coauthor of the “best economics blog in the universe”* offers an essential guide to success in a radically new hyper-networked age. How will we live well in a super-networked, information-soaked, yet predictably irrational world? The only way to know is to understand how the way we think is changing.
As economist Tyler Cowen boldly shows in
Create Your Own Economy, the way we think now is changing more rapidly than it has in a very long time. Not since the Industrial Revolution has a man-made creation—in this case, the World Wide Web—so greatly influenced the way our minds work and our human potential. Cowen argues brilliantly that we are breaking down cultural information into ever-smaller tidbits, ordering and reordering them in our minds (and our computers) to meet our own specific needs.
Create Your Own Economy explains why the coming world of Web 3.0 is good for us; why social networking sites such as Facebook are so necessary; what’s so great about “Tweeting” and texting; how education will get better; and why politics, literature, and philosophy will become richer. This is a revolutionary guide to life in the new world.
(retrieved from Amazon Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:19:13 -0400)
Wikipedia in English
The book is nowhere near as well focused as his last one, Discover Your Inner Economist. The actual discussion of creating your own economy frequently submerges for discussion of the traits of autism, often in a very speculative mode that makes me wish he’d taken the time to do some research (or at least suggested an explicit direction of study for someone to undertake) rather than vaguely wondering at length— for example, in the chapter titled Autistic Politics, he does not make a single reference to a political opinion or insight from any actual autistic person. The early parts of the book, where he has concrete examples and counterarguments for the ”Google is making us stupid” hypothesis, are the best section. (