Download or read book Discover Your Inner Economist written by Tyler Cowen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-05-27 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America’s most respected economists presents a quirky, incisive romp through everyday life that reveals how you can turn economic reasoning to your advantage—often when you least expect it to be relevant. Like no other economist, Tyler Cowen shows how economic notions—such as incentives, signals, and markets—apply far more widely than merely to the decisions of social planners, governments, and big business. What does economic theory say about ordering from a menu? Or attracting the right mate? Or controlling people who talk too much in meetings? Or dealing with your dentist? With a wryly amusing voice, in chapters such as “How to Control the World, The Basics” and “How to Control the World, Knowing When to Stop” Cowen reveals the hidden economic patterns behind everyday situations so you can get more of what you really want. Readers will also gain less selfish insights into how to be a good partner, neighbor and even citizen of the world. For instance, what is the best way to give to charity? The chapter title “How to Save the World—More Christmas Presents Won’t Help” makes a point that is every bit as personal as it is global. Incentives are at the core of an economic approach to the world, but they don’t just come in cash. In fact, money can be a disincentive. Cowen shows why, for example, it doesn’t work to pay your kids to do the dishes. Other kinds of incentives—like making sure family members know they will be admired if they respect you—can work. Another non-monetary incentive? Try having everyone stand up in your next meeting if you don’t want anyone to drone on. Deeply felt incentives like pride in one’s work or a passing smile from a loved one, can be the most powerful of all, even while they operate alongside more mundane rewards such as money and free food. Discover Your Inner Economist is an introduction to the science of economics that shows it to be built on notions that are already within all of us. While the implications of those ideas lead to Cowen’s often counterintuitive advice, their wisdom is presented in ordinary examples taken from home life, work life, and even vacation life… How do you get a good guide in a Moroccan bazaar?

Download or read book The Great Stagnation written by Tyler Cowen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Download or read book An Economist Gets Lunch written by Tyler Cowen and published by Plume. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading economist, “who may very well turn out to be this decade’s Thomas Friedman” (Wall Street Journal), illuminates the state of American food today. Tyler Cowen, one of the most influential economists of the last decade, wants you to know that just about everything you’ve heard about how to get good food is wrong. Drawing on a provocative range of examples from around the globe, Cowen reveals why airplane food is bad, but airport food is improving, why restaurants full of happy, attractive people usually serve mediocre meals, and why American food has improved as Americans drink more wine. At a time when obesity is on the rise and forty-four million Americans receive food stamps, An Economist Gets Lunch will revolutionize the way we eat today—and show us how we’re going to feed the world tomorrow.

Download or read book The Complacent Class written by Tyler Cowen and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the trend of Americans away from the traditionally mobile, risk-accepting, and adaptable tendencies that defined them for much of recent history, and toward stagnation and comfort, and how this development has the potential to make future changes more disruptive. --Publisher's description.

Download or read book Talent written by Tyler Cowen and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The art and science of talent search: how to spot, assess, woo, and retain highly talented people. How do you find talent with a creative spark? To what extent can you predict human creativity, or is human creativity something irreducible before our eyes, perhaps to be spotted or glimpsed by intuition, but unique each time it appears? Obsessed with these questions, renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better. Cowen and Gross guide the reader through the major scientific research areas relevant for talent search, including how to conduct an interview, how much to weight intelligence, how to judge personality and match personality traits to jobs, how to evaluate talent in online interactions such as Zoom calls, why talented women are still undervalued and how to spot them, how to understand the special talents in people who have disabilities or supposed disabilities, and how to use delegated scouts to find talent. Talent appreciation is an art, but it is an art you can improve through study and experience. Identifying underrated, brilliant individuals is one of the simplest ways to give yourself an organizational edge, and this is the book that will show you how to do that. Talent is both for people searching for talent and for those who wish to be searched for, found, and discovered.

Download or read book Average Is Over written by Tyler Cowen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned economist and author of Big Business Tyler Cowen brings a groundbreaking analysis of capitalism, the job market, and the growing gap between the one percent and minimum wage workers in this follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Great Stagnation. The United States continues to mint more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever. Yet, since the great recession, three quarters of the jobs created here pay only marginally more than minimum wage. Why is there growth only at the top and the bottom? Economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen explains that high earners are taking ever more advantage of machine intelligence and achieving ever-better results. Meanwhile, nearly every business sector relies less and less on manual labor, and that means a steady, secure life somewhere in the middle—average—is over. In Average is Over, Cowen lays out how the new economy works and identifies what workers and entrepreneurs young and old must do to thrive in this radically new economic landscape.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics written by George F. DeMartino and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-04 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over a century the economics profession has extended its reach to encompass policy formation and institutional design while largely ignoring the ethical challenges that attend the profession's influence over the lives of others. Economists have proven to be disinterested in ethics. Embracing emotivism, they often treat ethics a matter of mere preference. Moreover, economists tend to be hostile to professional economic ethics, which they incorrectly equate with a code of conduct that would be at best ineffectual and at worst disruptive to good economic practice. But good ethical reasoning is not reducible to mere tastes, and professional ethics is not reducible to a code. Instead, professional economic ethics refers to a new field of investigation-a tradition of sustained and lively inquiry into the irrepressible ethical entailments of academic and applied economic practice. The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics explores a wide range of questions related to the nature of ethical economic practice and the content of professional economic ethics. It explores current thinking that has emerged in these areas while widening substantially the terrain of economic ethics. There has never been a volume that poses so directly and intensively the question of the need for and content of professional ethics for economics. The Handbook incorporates the work of leading scholars and practitioners, including academic economists from various theoretical traditions; applied economists, beyond academia, whose work has direct and immense social impact; and philosophers, professional ethicists, and others whose work has addressed the nature of "professionalism" and its implications for ethical practice.

Download or read book Cultivating Conscience written by Lynn Stout and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the science of unselfish behavior can promote law, order, and prosperity Contemporary law and public policy often treat human beings as selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards. Yet every day we behave unselfishly—few of us mug the elderly or steal the paper from our neighbor's yard, and many of us go out of our way to help strangers. We nevertheless overlook our own good behavior and fixate on the bad things people do and how we can stop them. In this pathbreaking book, acclaimed law and economics scholar Lynn Stout argues that this focus neglects the crucial role our better impulses could play in society. Rather than lean on the power of greed to shape laws and human behavior, Stout contends that we should rely on the force of conscience. Stout makes the compelling case that conscience is neither a rare nor quirky phenomenon, but a vital force woven into our daily lives. Drawing from social psychology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, Stout demonstrates how social cues—instructions from authorities, ideas about others' selfishness and unselfishness, and beliefs about benefits to others—have a powerful role in triggering unselfish behavior. Stout illustrates how our legal system can use these social cues to craft better laws that encourage more unselfish, ethical behavior in many realms, including politics and business. Stout also shows how our current emphasis on self-interest and incentives may have contributed to the catastrophic political missteps and financial scandals of recent memory by encouraging corrupt and selfish actions, and undermining society's collective moral compass. This book proves that if we care about effective laws and civilized society, the powers of conscience are simply too important for us to ignore.

Download or read book Economics Made Fun written by N. Emrah Aydinonat and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best-selling books such as Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist have paved the way for the flourishing economics-made-fun genre. While books like these present economics as a strong and explanatory science, the ongoing economic crisis has exposed the shortcomings of economics to the general public. In the face of this crisis, many people, including well-known economists such as Paul Krugman, have started to express their doubts about whether economics is a success as a science. As well as academic papers, newspaper columns with a large audience have discussed the failure of economic to predict and explain ongoing trends. The emerging picture is somewhat confusing: economics-made-fun books present economics as a method of thinking that can successfully explain everyday and "freaky" phenomena. On the other hand, however, economics seems to fail in addressing and explaining the most pressing matters related to the field of economics itself. This book explores the confusion created by this contradictory picture of economics. Could a science that cannot answer its own core questions really be used to explain the logic of everyday life? This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology.

Download or read book Springboard written by G. Richard Shell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wharton professor Richard Shell created the Success Course to help his world-class MBA students answer two questions that aren’t as obvious as they seem: “What, for me, is success?” and “How will I achieve it?” Based on that acclaimed course, Springboard shows how to assess the hidden influences of family, media, and culture on your beliefs about success. Then it helps you figure out your unique passions and capabilities, so you can focus more on what gives meaning and excitement to your life, and less on what you are “supposed” to want.

Download or read book The Age of the Infovore written by Tyler Cowen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-06-29 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previously published as Create Your Own Economy "Will change the way you think about thinking."—Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind Renowned behavioral economist and commentator Tyler Cowen shows that our supernetworked world is changing the way we think—and empowering us to thrive in any economic climate. Whether it is micro-blogging on Twitter or buying single songs at iTunes, we can now customize our lives to shape our own specific needs. In other words, we can create our own economy—and live smarter, happier, fuller lives. At a time when apocalyptic thinking has become all too common, Cowen offers a much-needed Information Age manifesto that will resonate with readers of Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, and everyone hungry to understand our potential to withstand, and even thrive, in any economic climate.

Download or read book Predictably Rational written by Richard B. McKenzie and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mainstream economists everywhere exhibit an "irrational passion for dispassionate rationality." Behavioral economists, and long-time critic of mainstream economics suggests that people in mainstrean economic models "can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the will power of Mahatma Gandhi," suggesting that such a view of real world modern homo sapiens is simply wrongheaded. Indeed, Thaler and other behavioral economists and psychology have documented a variety of ways in which real-world people fall far short of mainstream economists' idealized economic actor, perfectly rational homo economicus. Behavioral economist Daniel Ariely has concluded that real-world people not only exhibit an array of decision-making frailties and biases, they are "predictably irrational," a position now shared by so many behavioral economists, psychologists, sociologists, and evolutionary biologists that a defense of the core rationality premise of modedrn economics is demanded.

Download or read book Who Cooked Adam Smith s Dinner written by Katrine Marcal and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you get your dinner? That is the basic question of economics. When economist and philosopher Adam Smith proclaimed that all our actions were motivated by self-interest, he used the example of the baker and the butcher as he laid the foundations for 'economic man,' arguing that the baker and butcher didn't give bread and meat out of the goodness of their hearts. It's an ironic point of view coming from a bachelor who lived with his mother for most of his life—a woman who cooked his dinner every night.The economic man has dominated our understanding of modern-day capitalism, with a focus on self-interest and the exclusion of all other motivations. Such a view point disregards the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning and cooking. It insists that if women are paid less, then that's because their labor is worth less.A kind of femininst Freakonomics, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? charts the myth of economic man—from its origins at Adam Smith's dinner table, its adaptation by the Chicago School, and its disastrous role in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis—in a witty and courageous dismantling of one of the biggest myths of our time.

Download or read book The Rough Guide to Economics written by Rough Guides and published by Rough Guides UK. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From first economic principles to the financial crisis The Rough Guide to Economics takes you through the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 and its resulting global problems and explores economics right from its foundations to the present day. Issues caused by the recent financial crisis continue to dominate news across the world and if you want to gain a clear understanding of how economics are central to your world, the Rough Guide to Economics is the ideal no-nonsense guide for you. It explains everything you need to know about monetary policy, inflation, international trade and all the major topics within economics. With the election not too far off it also provides clear-cut information on government tax and spending decisions. You'll discover how economics can illuminate topics as diverse as globalization and development, climate change, and poverty. You'll even be able to see the relevance of economics to topics closer to home such as friendship, smoking and K-pop, and how findings from psychology have influenced economic thinking. Whether you want to learn about economics for work or studies, need a handy reference, or want a clear understanding of the effect of economics on your world, the Rough Guide to Economics is the book for you, with no knowledge of mathematics required. Now available in ePub format.

Download or read book Love Entrepreneurs written by Phil Nicks and published by Philip Wylie. This book was released on 2008 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Temptation written by Daniel Akst and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-12-27 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " This elegantly written and useful book . . . describes how, for millennia, human beings have struggled to rein in desire." -USA Today At a time when the fallout from reckless spending and unrestrained consumption is fueling a national malaise, Daniel Akst delivers a witty and comprehensive investigation of the central problem of our time: how to save ourselves from what we want. Temptation reminds us that while more calories, sex, and intoxicants are readily available than ever before, crucial social constraints have eroded, creating a world that sorely tests the limits of human willpower. Referencing history, literature, psychology, philosophy, and economics, Akst draws a vivid picture of the many-sided problem of desire-and delivers a blueprint for how we can steer shrewdly away from a campaign of self-destruction.

Download or read book The Science of Fear written by Dan Gardner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the scientific causes of irrational fear offers insight into the brain's role in causing people to experience and react to fear, in a report that explains how heightened fear in the post-9/11 world is dangerously intersecting with biologically driven responses.