The Importance of Being Tyler Cowen Redux

I bought and started Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist. My review in short: it's mediocre. My impression is that the book is short on teaching and reasoning and long on recommendations for behavior. In the parlance of writers it tells too much and shows too little. Part of this, I believe, is that Cowen himself wrote it. If he'd had a ghostwriter or a better editor, we might've gotten a book that shows us more.

My next complaint is that the book doesn't build a small set of surprises or insights. There's too much in the book for it to give one an aha. Again, a good editor would have understood that too much information is as bad as too little. The pace at which the book moves through different topics left me feeling that I hadn't really been satisfied on the previous point before being dragged to the next one.

As a final criticism, I found the book lacking in references. The endnotes were even thinner than I had feared. I know something about some of Cowen's many topics and needed some of the references to counterbalance my own views. More importantly, I really would have liked to follow some of the research that interested me.

To be fair, the book is worth more of your time than many books. But of course, most books are below average. Well, at or below the median anyway.