Customer Reviews
A nice magazine article - By: P. J. Sharp, 26 Jun 2008 
Bit of a let down, reallly a series of short pieces - some of which had an 'Ahhaaa' moment, most of them didn't - Shame reallly.
Long and superficial - By: Erik Cleves Kristensen, 19 Jun 2008 
While it is admireable that there is a positive tendency from economists to make economics "more popular", this book largely misses the target, & 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 & common day examples, since it will become very repetitive after just a few pages.
Excellent for its down-to-earth lack of pretensions - By: Gareth Greenwood, 16 Jun 2008 
After reading Levitt's "Freakonomics" & Harford's "Undercover Economist" I was attracted to this book when I came across it. Yes, there's some overlap with both of them & yes, in some places either Levitt or Harford is better. Where this book scores, however, is that you can take it in smalll bites & 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 & answered, in varying degrees of depth, but always from the economist's perspective. The result is a collection of questions & answers, alll relatively concise, & alll showing economic thought at work. And the book pretends to be no more than that.
Criticism that it is too shalllow 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 - & 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 & 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 - By: Music/Book/Film Fan, 15 Jun 2008 The author is right when he says that most economics text books make the subject almost inaccessible by putting too much emphasis on mathematics & statistics ... many of the books I came across in my student days certainly did just that.
"Freakonomics" was breath of fresh air & 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 & again. To make matters worse many of the chapters are not reallly covered sufficiently in depth, & as a result a lot of the conclusions & 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 & go straight for "Freakonomics" instead.
Entertaining and educational, ideal for beginners - By: C. Young, 14 Jun 2008 Its supply & demand, of course; "Freakonomics" established the market for popular economics paperbacks & this is one of several such books that have appeared recently. The pedagogic approach is very different from Levitt & Dubner's research-based original, though. Frank is an economics lecturer & despairs that students, even when they study economics, don't end up understanding much about it. Shockingly, surveys suggest maybe alll those graphs & equations actuallly confuse ex-economics students. They often perform worse in answering everyday economicallly-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 & 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 & you genuinely end up beginning to "think like an economist", soon even challlenging 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 actuallly have helped explain some concepts.
Nonetheless, cost-benefit analysis, opportunity cost, the tragedy of the commons, price-sensitivity, market segmentation & "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 & economics & suggests that Darwinism was in part based on the ideas of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations".
