I don't always agree with him in my heart, BUT my brain has a hard time arguing the ideas he puts forward. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. Read the book and then think about what is in it. Put some of the techniques he teaches into looking at the problems we see in today's economy.

He deliberately avoids discussing the weight of human life, health or rights and their place in economics. Why a society demands the safety of people in hazardous situations is not completely attached to an economic cost is something he avoids commenting on. This book enforces the view that economists see everything in material cost (dollars, resources, production) without appropriately giving any importance to the unseen costs (happiness, quality of life, satisfaction) of economic policies. He helped me learn some economic theory, especially in the second half of the book, but he has also planted some dubious arguments and social theories. When it comes to the discussion of societal problems, he presents economical solutions as "common sense" but denies the reader any counter-arguments or reasons as to why they have not been implemented. There is evidence that people respond significantly to incentives even in situations where we do not usually imagine their behavior to be rational. Apparently psychologists have discovered by experiment that when you hand a person an unexpectedly hot cup of coffee, he typically drops the cup if he perceives it to be inexpensive but manages to hang on if he believes the cup is valuable. I will provide you with some of the insights and questions that I faced while reading and I would be more than happy to have discussion on any of these:-

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I have to give this book a three since I did learn something, although I really hold it in remarkable contempt. For the first time ever while reading an economics book, I felt like I understood the contempt held for the 'dismal science'. My obsession with economics is starting to become a bit of a problem. Here is an example of actual post-coital dialogue between me and my girlfriend: I remember the late 1970s and waiting half an hour to buy a tank of gasoline at a federally controlled price. Virtually all economists agreed that if the price were allowed to rise freely, people would buy less gasoline. Many noneconomists believed otherwise. The economists were fight: When price controls were lifted, the lines disappeared. Let me mention a third response as well. Ehrlich did not just make up the number 8; he arrived at it through a sophisticated analysis of data. Skepticism is fine, but it is incumbent on the serious skeptic to examine the research with an open mind and to pinpoint what step in the reasoning, if any, he finds suspicious.) I wish I could say that this was a clever fiction I devised to make a point and a joke, but I’m nowhere near that clever.)

People respond to incentives" sounds innocuous enough, and almost everyone will admit its validity as a general principle. What distinguishes the economist is his insistence on taking the principle seriously at all times. This is not just the worst book masquerading as an introduction to economics I've read - it's a textbook example of the kind of malicious tunnel vision logic that causes people who've taken a bad quality econ 101 course to go around extolling the virtues of the perfect free market with the typical disdain that half knowledge and bad actors bring when they maliciously try to wow interested novices into a field they might have little to no experience in - but using 'logic' will bamboozle the reader into aligning with the author's rather crazy and fringe ideas about political theory, policy and human behavior. I’d recommend The Armchair Economist to anyone with an interest in economics, but I would caution: Landsburg is cranky, curmudgeonly, opinionated and rude. Delightfully so. I think he and I would get along very well, even if we don’t agree on everything, which we don’t. He knows far more about economics than I do, and I wouldn’t presume to suggest otherwise. But I know enough to recognize the difference between economic fact and economic opinion. He supplies boatloads of both, and presents them very well. If you’ve already gone through all the Freakanomics titles, and this has stimulated your own personal aggregate demand for more popular works of economics, I think you’ll find this entertaining and educational. Take it all with a grain of salt, though. And while you are at it, eat some more fiber. P.S. Since I joined GoodReads, I’ve tried to make a habit of reviewing everything I’ve read more or less right after I finished it, if only as a reminder to myself of what it was and what I thought of it. For the most part, it’s proven to be a pretty good discipline, and I’ve enjoyed it, and in the process, encountered some fascinating fellow readers in the world, so bonus points there, and now just you shut up about the narcissism of it all, if you please.Most of economics can be summarized in four words: "People respond to incentives." The rest is commentary. After this slight digression into the challenges of empirical research, let me return to my main topic: the power of incentives. It is the economist's second nature to account for that power. Will the invention of a better birth control technique reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies? Not necessarily -- the invention reduces the "price" of sexual intercourse (unwanted pregnancies being a component of that price) and thereby induces people to engage in more of it. The percentage of sexual encounters that lead to pregnancy goes down, the number of sexual encounters goes up, and the number of unwanted pregnancies can go either down or up. Will energy-efficient cars reduce our consumption of gasoline? Not necessarily -- an energy-efficient car reduces the price of driving, and people will choose to drive more. Low-tar cigarettes could lead to a higher incidence of lung cancer. Low-calorie synthetic fats could increase the average weight of Americans. The extensively revised and updated edition of Steven Landsburg’s hugely popular book, The Armchair Economist —“a delightful compendium of quotidian examples illustrating important economic and financial theories” ( The Journal of Finance ).

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-02-28 14:03:56 Boxid IA1766901 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Now this is critical because this explains the real monetary value of walking along the beach. Non-economists might gag that this activity has a value, but it does. I could have done anything with my time, like work, but I chose to spend it in this particular manner, and that is worth something. So if enjoying nature means something, there could theoretically be a dollar value attached. In fact, there often is. My friend Judy owns a fat pad in Marin county (which she got for a song from a person shortly thereafter indited for international drug smuggling...but that story is for another time :-) Anyway, you would be hard pressed to find someone who loves nature more...for walking in it...swimming in it...and merely knowing it exists. But it does have a value. I don't know the number, but I would imagine that if a suitably ludicrous offer was made for 40 acres in Marin, that love of nature could be quantified. This insight, the fact that value must be attached, as hard as it may be, to non nuts-and-bolts numbers is true....and valuable...and then completely ignored as evident by the aforementioned millionaires example. The extensively revised and updated edition of Steven Landsburg’s hugely popular book, The Armchair Economist—“a delightful compendium of quotidian examples illustrating important economic and financial theories” ( The Journal of Finance). I have discovered that when I tell noneconomists about Peltzman's results, they find it almost impossible to believe that people would drive less carefully simply because their cars are safer Economists, who have learned to respect the principle that people respond to incentives, do not have this problem. Why money is good?-->There is one instance shared by the author in which he and his wife fight over the movie to be watched while having dinner. They come up with a novel solution to decide which movie will play and the method of selection will create a win-win situation. Both of them allotted an amount of money to their choice of movie. Whichever amount will be higher will win and that movie will be played. Here's the catch, the winner will have to pay the smaller amount to the loser. The decision has been reached upon by the simple logic that how much monetary value does one attribute to the movie or how much money are you willing to lose to watch that movie. Novel, isn’t it?

I think this book stands out from many other popular economics books because it goes more deeply into the typical topics. Also, the book contains topics not normally found in popular economics books, like the Coase Theorem. I had to reread this section because the Coase Theorem was difficult for me to grasp. How can this be? Are not many murders crimes of passion or acts of irrationality? Perhaps so. But there are two responses to this objection. First, Ehrlich's results indicate that each execution prevents 8 murders; it does not indicate which 8 murders are prevented. As long as some murderers can be deterred, capital punishment can be a deterrent. The second response is this: Why should we expect that people engaged in crimes of passion would fail to respond to incentives? We can imagine a man who hates his wife so much that under ordinary circumstances he would do her in if he thought he had a 90% chance of escaping execution. Perhaps in a moment of rage, he becomes so carried away that he will kill her even if he has only a 20% chance of escaping execution. Then even in the moment of rage, it matters very much whether he perceives his chances to be 15% or 25%. Even before the regulations went into effect, any economist could have predicted one of their consequences: The number of auto accidents increased. The reason is that the threat of being killed in an accident is a powerful incentive to drive carefully. But a driver with a seat belt and a padded dashboard faces less of a threat. Because people respond to incentives, drivers are less careful. The result is more accidents. Lccn 2011051923 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 (Extended OCR) Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Old_pallet IA17340 Openlibrary_edition Recommended to my wife as Freakonomics’ better predecessor ( Armchair Economist was originally published in 1993), Landsburg describes his work as “a chronicle of what [he] learned at lunch” (p. viii). Now, even granting the University of Rochester economics professor latitude befitting his choice of lunchtime companions, I was heartily disappointed to discover that the text indeed lives down to the author’s own humble description.