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The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Basic Books
Category: EBooks
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $5.96 (37%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 8696
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Dewey Decimal Number: 330
ASIN: B0014XUCPK
Publication Date: May 21, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 Frank October 4, 2008
An easy read that explores the economic explanations behind everyday enigmas. There are no equations, graphs, and very few numbers. It's an accessible book that is geared towards a general audience.
The book explores questions such as: why can men rent tux's but women cannot rent wedding dresses, why are there never any cabs when it's raining out, why is there a light in the fridge but not the freezer, why are seat belts required in cars but not school buses, why are people likely to return cash to a store when given too much change but not a piece of merchandise for which they weren't charged....and so on.
An easy and amusing read.
A question that was left out September 1, 2008
Q: Why does a book like "The Economic Naturalist" or news outlets like BBC or San Francisco Chronicle make serious mistakes when dealing with names and facts from poorer countries ?
A: That was a trick question. The key word is in the query itself - "poorer". Otherwise why would the author and his editing team think that there is a language called "Hindu" (page 47) or there is a movie called "Gol Mol"! I can't think of a single person calling Hindi as Hindu, so that mistake is downright ignorance, laziness and bad research. The movie name should have been "Gol Mal", but that is a bit more pardonable. As for the world view generally prevalent in the supposedly enlightened world this title (I may have forgotten the exact wording) from "The Onion" (my favorite news source) sums it up best - "Another ten thousand brown people killed somewhere in the world".
A Mixed Bag August 26, 2008
The arresting title grabbed my attention as I was browsing a small bookstore in Delhi. Perfect reading for my plane ride I thought, and that's exactly what it served. Many of the questions are thought provoking and make you want to sit back and reason them out yourself, before reading on. Others are not and seem like fillers. Chances are that some of your guesses are as good as or better than the author's, but not always so. The responses lack depth at times and may reflect inadequate breadth of thinking. The book would have been a better product if it had been reviewed by other subject-matter experts, like scientists and evolutionary biologists. The Indian edition has a subtitle that reads, Why Economics Explains Almost Everything. This is an insult to other fields, whose insights and explanations are liberally used here under the rubric of economics.
The book does redeem itself in other ways. It is entertaining and offers easy material for animated conversations with others. My father and I jointly pondered some of the questions over dinner one night and I observed him thinking in ways I had not noticed earlier. The book also deploys many anchor concepts in economics that include: the important notion of opportunity cost (that is clearly illustrated here); the massive impact of cost structures, like fixed and marginal costs, in market pricing; the role of regulation and subsidies in product and pricing decisions; the tragedy of the commons; the possibility of arbitrage that eliminates differential pricing; and others. Get the ideas, lose the formulas and pontification.
 Interesting Perspective July 21, 2008
This is an enjoyable read. The author presents and answers unusual economics questions and as the book goes by you, perhaps inadvertently, learn to think a bit like an economist. That is the author's intention, i.e., the economics does not have to be all charts and equations.
Entertaining but of questionable value (history/econ teacher's review) June 15, 2008
I have read "Freakonomics" and "Naked Economics" in the past 6 months and thoroughly enjoyed them. I was hoping to get more of the same with this book. It caught my eye because it is nearly the exact same color as "Naked Economics" (Hmmm, I wonder if the economic naturalists would care to speculate on products that intentionally look similar to better-known products...) and I was hoping to get some more economic enlightenment.
Sadly, the book reads a lot more like an extended session with Yahoo! Answers than anything else. It's interesting, but there are times when you have to wonder why anyone would be wondering these things and there are times when you have to wonder if he actually ran these answers by anyone else in another department at Cornell to see if the economic answer was right or if another answer was correct.
For example, he talks about Germany having a high unemployment rate as compared to the U.S. He mentions the fact that Germany has better unemployment benefits as the only factor for Germany's higher unemployment rate.
Historically, there are two reasons for the higher unemployment:
#1) Germany is still in the midst of absorbing East Germany which has a higher unemployment rate than the former West Germany.
#2) Macroeconomics teaches that, in the short run, you can avoid a higher rate of inflation by holding back GDP growth in a variety of ways that tend to cause more unemployment (sorry economists of the world, but that's the easiest way I can explain it without causing eyes to glaze over for non-econ-minded folks). Germany is deathly afraid of high rates of inflation since runaway inflation occurred during the Weimar Republic in the Post-World War I Germany and that is seen as having been one of the things that brought Hitler to power.
I'm sure great unemployment benefits help, but that is not the only cause for the problem.
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It's a quick read, often light and breezy. But, there are better reads out there that do it better.
To learn more about basic economics, I suggest "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan.
To learn more about offbeat topics and how economics applies to them, I suggest: "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner.
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