The Economic Naturalist, by Robert H. Frank
Fun speculation, but no more than that
(Review posted 9 Mar 2008 17:18:17)

Review posted on Amazon, three stars out of five.

I'd hoped this book would be a collection of enlightening economic explanations of puzzling phenomena. That is in fact what it purports to be, and while reading it it sometimes feels like that, but mostly it's too shallow to be really satisfying.

The book is organized as a bunch of questions about Stuff in the Marketplace (Why does X cost more here than there? Why do Zs come in round containers while Ws come in hexagonal ones?), each with clever economically-based answers.

The problem is that the answers, while clever and facile, are pretty much entirely speculative, just-so stories without any real evaluation of whether or not they're the right explanation. "It might be because C!" Well, okay, but is it?

While it's fun to see smart people make up plausible economic explanations for puzzling things, I find it ultimately unsatisfying that the book stops there. It would of course take more work to try to verify the armchair guesses, but without that verification the whole thing ends up feeling sort of pointless. I'd much rather read about clever economic explanations that turned out to be correct than ones that are merely cute and/or plausible.