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The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Almost Everything | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert H. Frank
Publisher: Virgin Books
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £2.97
You Save: £5.02 (63%)
New (28) Used (5) from £2.88
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 2482
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0753513382
EAN: 9780753513385
ASIN: 0753513382
Publication Date: April 3, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. Shipped from UK Mainland. Delivery is usually 2 - 3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
A nice magazine article June 26, 2008
Bit of a let down, really a series of short pieces - some of which had an 'Ahhaaa' moment, most of them didn't - Shame really.
 Long and superficial June 19, 2008
While it is admireable that there is a positive tendency from economists to make economics "more popular", this book largely misses the target, and in fact risks making economics irrelevant. While pretending to explain basic economic concepts by way of examples, too many of the examples turn repetitive and/or represent pure common sense. Some of the examples also have little/if anything to do with economics.
It is a pity, since it feels the author(s) look down on the capacity of the reader to understand economics.
If you have a basic grasp of economics, you can quickly bypass this book which swims in superficial and common day examples, since it will become very repetitive after just a few pages.
 Excellent for its down-to-earth lack of pretensions June 16, 2008
After reading Levitt's "Freakonomics" and Harford's "Undercover Economist" I was attracted to this book when I came across it. Yes, there's some overlap with both of them and yes, in some places either Levitt or Harford is better. Where this book scores, however, is that you can take it in small bites and have a good mull over what it says a bit at a time.
As another reviewer has noted, the book is based on questions that Frank's students have posed and answered, in varying degrees of depth, but always from the economist's perspective. The result is a collection of questions and answers, all relatively concise, and all showing economic thought at work. And the book pretends to be no more than that.
Criticism that it is too shallow or not based on empirical research IMO misses the point. The book's purpose is to demonstrate the application of economic thought to questions about everyday economic observations. The answers are cogently presented without any pretence that they are the last word - and this alone is welcome in a field whose more psychotic schools of thought have a hubristic track record of basing theories on patently false premises.
The important thing about this book is that it seeks to make its readers *think* about the things it discusses. IMO, it succeeds admirably (and it certainly made me think a lot). As a former student of economics, I'd confidently recommend it as a taster for students considering whether to take economics as a major subject.
More power to Frank and his students. I hope he writes a sequel ("More from the Economic Naturalist"?) that addresses topics not included in the original.
A bit too repetitive June 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The author is right when he says that most economics text books make the subject almost inaccessible by putting too much emphasis on mathematics and statistics ... many of the books I came across in my student days certainly did just that.
"Freakonomics" was breath of fresh air and very much confirmed that economics doesn't have to be rocket science. Since then a number of books of a similar nature have appeared on the market, but I have yet to come across one which brings the message home as well as "Freakonomics" does.
What lets this particular book down - apart from being just another "Freakonomics" copy - is that it only seems to go over the same examples again and again. To make matters worse many of the chapters are not really covered sufficiently in depth, and as a result a lot of the conclusions and relationships explored end up coming across as being a bit too casual.
If you have already read "Freakonomics" then just leave it at that. If you haven't then give this one a miss and go straight for "Freakonomics" instead.
Entertaining and educational, ideal for beginners June 14, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Its supply and demand, of course; "Freakonomics" established the market for popular economics paperbacks and this is one of several such books that have appeared recently. The pedagogic approach is very different from Levitt and Dubner's research-based original, though. Frank is an economics lecturer and despairs that students, even when they study economics, don't end up understanding much about it. Shockingly, surveys suggest maybe all those graphs and equations actually confuse ex-economics students. They often perform worse in answering everyday economically-related conundrums than the general populace! What this says about the competence of his teaching colleagues or the quality of the expensive undergraduate economics textbooks that pile up in university bookshops is left to the reader to decide.
Franks' approach is to ask his students to explain questions he puts to them (or they come up with) which represent little case studies of socioeconomic interaction. Why is there a light in your fridge not your freezer? Why do mobile phones cost less than their replacement batteries? Why do some bars offer free peanuts? Why are CD and DVD boxes different shapes? Why do women wear high heels? And so on. By pondering these, students should start to understand the basics of economics. All great fun and you genuinely end up beginning to "think like an economist", soon even challenging Frank's own sometimes simplified answers (...surely the aim of any pedagogic text). There is some theory underlying it but, as an ex-economics student myself, I thought a few graphs might actually have helped explain some concepts.
Nonetheless, cost-benefit analysis, opportunity cost, the tragedy of the commons, price-sensitivity, market segmentation and "behavioural economics" are some of the ideas entertainingly explained through example. The "economic naturalist" is therefore focused on fieldwork rather than abstract theory, but there is perhaps more to the title than that. Frank also draws, through for example the case of the elk's excessive antlers the link between evolutionary biology and economics and suggests that Darwinism was in part based on the ideas of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations".
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