A phone call with Bob Frank, author of ‘The Economic Naturalist’

One of my favourite things to do is to talk to the people who write the books I love, often they are hard to reach, others are surprisingly easy, some of them are hard to talk to, others are some of the nicest folks you could hope to have a conversation with, Bob Frank is very much the former and the latter, it took a while to reach him but it was worth waiting for, he has the quality I like best (and I mentioned it already in the review I did on his book ‘The Economic Naturalist’) – namely the ability to talk about complex ideas in plain language.

I called Bob at his house in Ithaca and below are the contents of some of that conversation.

KD: Bob, you have said before that you feel economics has gotten too numerical, that taking that direction can sometimes provide absolute ‘truths’ that simply are not what they seem, so where does the art come into it? Where …

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The Economic Naturalist, Robert H. Frank (book review)

Robert H. Frank of Cornell University wrote a great book called ‘The Economic Naturalist, why economics explains almost everything‘, it has been an absolute winner of a read, and kindly Robert (Bob) took a phone call from me to talk about his book (more on that later).

Regarding the book, it is excellent if you are not actually into economics, because it takes everyday things and tries to use economic foundations for explaining them, the questions are simple every day occurrences and the answers are often surprising!

Here are a few simple examples, ‘why are cans of fizzy drinks round and milk bottles are square’, ‘why do animal rights activists throw paint at women in fur but not bikers in leather’, ‘why do taxi drivers stop working early on rainy days’, ‘why are plane tickets purchased at the last minute more expensive’, and many …

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