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Masterly approach to economics
Review by ERROL OH
The Return of the Economic Naturalist: How Economics Helps Make Sense of Your World
Author: Robert H Frank
Publisher: Virgin Books
IT is always great when an expert is able to offer simple yet insightful prose on a difficult subject. And economics is definitely a field of knowledge that cries out for clued-in communicators who can slice and dice the abstract and the obscure into appetising morsels of information and opinion for public consumption.
Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell University, clearly knows his stuff, but more importantly, he has found an engaging format to present his thoughts.
As a columnist with The New York Times, he tackles issues and developments in economics using an approach that started out as a teaching tool. Frank realised that the best way to master an idea is to write about it, and that is the basis of the “economic naturalist” writing assignment in his introductory economics course.
The students are told to “use a principle, or principles, discussed in the course to pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behaviour that you personally have observed”.
He explains in this book, “Learning economics is like learning a language. Real progress in both cases comes from speaking. The economic naturalist papers induce students to search out interesting economic stories in the world around them. When they find one, their first impulse is to tell others about it.
“They are also quick to recount interesting economics stories they hear from classmates. And with each retelling, they become more fluent in the underlying ideas.”
Frank does pretty much the same with the pieces compiled in The Return of the Economic Naturalist, asking questions on how economic principles operate in the real world, and offering answers. In this book, he mainly focuses on our responses to economic choices.
The majority of the content is drawn from instalments of his weekly NYT column that appeared between 2005 and 2008.
This is different from the first book of his economic naturalist writing, The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas, published in 2007, whose original material largely addresses questions inspired by student essays.
Because the articles in The Return of the Economic Naturalist were written with newspaper readers in mind, more often than not, they are succinct and broadly relevant. The book’s format helps too, making it easy to haphazardly sample articles if the reader does not fancy going through them all in sequence.
The 58 articles are organised into 12 chapters. Each chapter kicks off with an introduction to the theme that ties together the articles chosen for the chapter. And each article is preceded by a paragraph setting out the context of the selection.
Although the core of the book is his take on aspects of behavioural economics, Frank is eclectic in his choice of other subjects. Some of the chapters cover disparate areas such as healthcare, economics education, energy and the environment, the income gap and trailblazing economists.
And many of the questions are the kind that grab your attention and make you ache for the answers. How do ethical people survive? Why do brides buy and grooms rent? Will children’s books eventually disappear? Does having rich neighbours make you feel poor? Should those who borrowed too much be punished?
The value of Frank’s work is in the reasoning that he applies in coming up with the answers; let it not be forgotten that the articles express his views. He may be more of a skilful debater than an original thinker, but he does readers a favour by distilling unfamiliar and complex hypotheses into easy-to-digest food for thought.
By using questions as titles of his articles, Frank positions himself as the man with the answers. Considering the clarity of his writing and his knack for choosing intriguing questions, it does not matter if readers do not agree with him. It is enough to just gain from his passion for teaching and our joy of learning.
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