Colloquium: Discover Your Inner Economist
Tyler Cowen
In Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist, economist Tyler Cowen asks what economics says about the practices of everyday life. Can it help us order from a menu, visit an art museum or induce our children to do the dishes? Sometimes, it can.
Incentives are at the core of the economic approach to the world, but our incentives don’t just come in the form of cash. Pride, self-image and recognition all matter as well, and we fail to understand incentives if we see money as the only, or even the primary, reward or penalty in life.
Discover Your Inner Economist stretches mainstream accounts of how to understand human behavior. When do monetary incentives and friendship intersect, and when do they clash? To what extent do we behave only to look better in the eyes of others? Is self-deception necessary to motivate ourselves every morning?
The book has a strong civic-minded element and asks how our lives intersect with broader public purposes. What is the best way to give scarce resources to the poor and the needy? When is charity likely to be effective, and when are we simply giving away money to feel better about ourselves?
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and is the Director of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy. He is the author of In Praise of Commercial Culture and Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures.