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.

Iraq and the Sunk-cost Fallacy

The OpEd section of the USA Today has an editorial about the sunk-cost fallacy and the war in Iraq. First, while this editorial isn't the first place to point out our sunk-cost reasoning on this matter, I still think it's well done. Second, it does a good job of teaching us about the sunk-cost fallacy, which we all fall prey to on a regular basis.

Link to article

Epistemology Naturalized

Maybe I'm a bit slow, but reading this paper, I realized that economics has inherited Quine's program of naturalized epistemology.

Microeconomics and so-called neuroeconomics are both an attempt to understand human judgment (as opposed to choice) under uncertainty. Interestingly, I argued some time ago that Quine's suggestion was doomed to commit, essentially, the naturalistic fallacy.

In short, I'm becoming persuaded that I was mistaken.

The Importance of Being Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen is a member of the venerable economics department at George Mason. He's got a book entitled Discovering Your Inner Economist. It's due for release tomorrow (2 aug 2007). Here's a fascinating and glowing review from New York Magazine online.

There are a number of reasons that I thought this deserved a blog entry. First, the book sounds great. Second, the economics department at George Mason is a marvel--a distinguished department within a small, good--though not great--university. The department is home to two Nobel Laureates and one future Nobel Laureate, Larry Iannacconne. Finally, Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution Blog is a favorite of mine.

I'll include some stuff from the book in later posts.

WSJ Editorial--Laffable

So, maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but this graph seems ridiculous to me.

Last week (7/13/2007) a WSJ editorial used this Laffer-curve diagram to support the claim that the US needs to decrease its corporate tax rates in order to increase its revenues. I don't want to argue the merits of this view. I merely want to point out that the data on this graph would be better with a straight-line correlation--with Norway, and possibly Luxemborg, being outliers. In which case, the point would be that the higher the taxes the greater the revenue.