Hmm, as I mentioned in How to Know If You’re A Geek, I bought Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen a few nights ago. Busy with meetings, I only managed to start and finish reading this a few hours ago (I don’t do books in more than 2 sittings, I lose interest after that).

To be frank, I was quite disappointed as I read Discover Your Inner Economist. I have been reading (and back-read every old post of) Marginal Revolution for about 2 years already, and to my initial dismay, Discover Your Inner Economist feels no different from reading the blog. In fact, plenty of the material from the blog is rehashed in the book, albeit with greater degrees of detail. That was frustrating (especially when you expect to find new material at 4 a.m.) and I almost had the incentive to put down the book and read the online version (i.e. Marginal Revolution) instead.

But the book is not all that bad. If you haven’t read the blog before, or if you’re not subscribed to its RSS, then yea, it’s a fun fun read. In fact, I did get a few good chuckles out of it too (so true about meetings and late dinners and RSVPs.). I officially retract my statement that economists cannot write well (but Ronald Coase is still in the list - who uses buttermilk and butter as analogies???!)

As I read along, the book became less and less boring. Instead, I found Tyler to be an exceedingly good writer. You see, I’m the type of reader who constantly asks questions as I read (and come up with possible retorts), but Tyler’s writing style is such that he temporarily leaves the questions unanswered and then answers those questions (and retorts that I had in mind) to later of the chapter. I would say, he ties it up all in a neat little package (or that he has a good editor).

James Surowski mentioned Tyler Cowen to be ‘…an extremely humane author’. I have to agree with that once I got into the chapter on sin. Again, though, the old nagging feeling of rehashes comes back. And this is why: Tyler rehashes his ‘Markets in Everything’ posts on MR into the book (and now there is a dedicated site to it, by Michael Cleverly).

Tyler is a man who doesn’t have his moral compass screwed up (those of you idiots who think people who study economics are selfish capitalist pigs whose moral compass is only whatever the market dictates, Tyler Cowen will prove you wrong). He will often tell you not to use a market (which is an economist’s instinct) for sake of better outcomes. Like what some of my commenters mentioned in my $200 Bribe or $300 Fine article, abandon the economics, and do what your heart tells you is right (though in defence, that article was written for fun, like all economic articles on my blog).

The chapter on food particularly resonates with me, as I am a food lover too. Heh, in fact, the way he searches for good food is similar to the way I look for good food - though he did give some additional economic insight that I never bothered to think about - rent as a factor for good food. Then again, I grew up in Malaysia, a place full of hawker stalls (read the book to see what he actually says about it), LOL, so no complaints there.

I do have something to say about Chinese food waiters who ‘recommend’ the best though. Tyler mentioned that they’d ‘…[recommend] chicken with broccolli instead of chicken kidneys in XO sauce’ because westerners signal that they do not know much about chinese food. Not entirely true. I’ve had this problem many times too. I’d speak mandarin (plus I’m Chinese myself) and they’d still give the same crappy recommendation. I think it’s more of the waiters not being trained to recommend (Tyler mentions you should leave if you couldn’t get a recommendation in a posh restaurant, most Chinese restaurants in Australia, thankfully are not posh).

Thankfully though, I have the ability to read the Chinese menus, which I can say, is different from the english menu about 90% of the time. Most of the time, the chinese menu will include a description of how the food is cooked (the English word ‘fry’ can be translated to about 5 different kinds of frying techniques in Chinese, so ‘Fried Fish’ can mean 5 different methods of cooking the fish)

But as far as visual art goes, I’m not the type of person who’d languish around art galleries. I personally find visual art a hassle (hypocritical considering I actually run an art site, and I make movies as a hobby, but that’s because I’m mainly conceited and narcissitic - i.e. I only like my own stuff), and will only visit galleries if I have plenty of free time.

Discover Your Inner Economist reads more like a self-help book (without sounding too preachy) than a pop-economics book ala Freakonomics or The Undercover Economist (though I’d argue that TUE feels like Introduction to Economics To Normal People). There are many gems to be found in this book, and I’d have to wholly agree with Surowski. Tyler is a humane author, who understands the niceties of culture, of morals. I once thought about doing a paper on the economics of culture (well, basically modelling culture using economics), but I think Tyler is already an authority on that, and there’s no way any paper I write will ever compare up to whatever he has.

All in all, I find Tyler’s previous book, Creative Destruction (about globalization) - a book I mistakenly got as additional reading for my business econ subject last year (heh, not everything with the word “creative destruction” has to do with the Schumpeterian entrepreneur) - better than this, well, at least has more powerful arguments than this. Yes, this is light reading, and you can argue that Tyler’s writing style improved, but I find that the many rehashes from the blog a bit of a rip-off (afterall, I did spend 90 bucks on this book). I’d say this is one of the two good non-academic books I read in the past year to date
And now, I wonder if I already knew his secret blog (I am guessing it’s about food) before I even bought the book. Hmm. If I did, it’s thanks to an interesting web-scraping tool I have. LOL. Time to test the effectiveness of my program then.

p.s.: They should really start banning subtitles in books. Really. Or I should write a book called Book Title: Subtitle: Sub-subtitle: Sub-subsubtitle

p.p.s.: I think Jurassic Park’s graphic effects still hold up by today’s standards

p.p.p.s.: GMU seems to be coming out with a lot of interesting stuff. I had fininsed reading and digesting Robin Hanson’s combinatorics market design paper before I started DYIE.

Cool? DiggDel.icio.usTechnoratiFeedsterFurl
RSS feed for comments on this post  |  TrackBack URI for this post