‘Naturalist’ helps to demystify economics

Economics has always had something of a problem defining itself. One economist, Jacob Viner, even offered the explanation that, “Economics is what economists do.”

Viner’s smarty-pants explanation was not totally inaccurate, of course, for economists have notoriously written their own job descriptions – often in self-flattering terms. John Maynard Keynes’ definition of an economist comes out something like a philosopher-king who is also saintly and good at math.

But even if economics is what economists do, we have to accept that they don’t do everything well. And one of the things they don’t do well at all is teaching. Economics is usually near the top of the list when college students are asked to name their least favorite courses.

Economics courses are worse than unpopular, though. In fact, they are worse than ineffective. They are counter-productive. In the 1960s college faculties were stunned by the results of an economics examination that revealed college seniors who hadn’t taken an economics course scored higher than the ones who had.

Here we are, 40 years later, facing much the same situation. A very recent test of how well students understood a fundamental economic concept – opportunity cost – came out pretty much the same as in the 1960s: Students who hadn’t taken an economics course scored more than twice as highly as those whose minds had apparently been scrambled in Econ 101.

Professor Robert Frank has decided to take a new approach. He is the H. J. Louis Professor of Economics at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and has come up with an unusual and fascinating new book about economics.

What is so different about the book is that it is based on stories rather than the charts, graphs, and equations of the usual economics texts. While Frank is the co-author (with current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke) of a widely used standard economics text, he believed that there had to be a better way to get basic economics principles across to students.

He decided to use a narrative approach, using stories based on questions asked and answered by his students over the years. In his economics class he had assigned short essays, to be written in conversational style, on practical economics principles that could be observed in “some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed.”

While the student essays, especially the best among them, could stand on their own, Frank rewrote them all so that the book “spoke with one voice.” The result is “The Economic Naturalist” (Basic Books), a collection of narratives illustrating and explaining the economic principles that lie behind the kind of things we might wonder about. Why do soft drinks come in cylindrical containers while milk cartons are rectangular? Why does men’s clothing come in measured sizes (33 waist, 34 length trousers, for example) while women’s clothing comes in numbered sizes (a size 8 dress or size 10 slacks)? (Answers are at the of the article.)

The narrative form has been used effectively to convey some of the most important principles in human life. We can only wonder what our lives and human history would have been like if Socrates had been obsessed with charts and graphs, or the authors of the Old and New Testaments really liked equations.

Frank’s reliance on the questions raised by noneconomists, especially those in a graduate business program, provides both the energy and the fun of this book. They ask the questions that interest and puzzle them, the same questions that any of us might raise about why things are done the way they are. The idea that he thought their questions, essays, and answers were important enough to be interested in, and to save, is evidence that his students over the years were a very fortunate group.

In “The Economic Naturalist” Frank raises and addresses hundreds of questions about everyday life in the 21st century and how economics affects it. The careful reader and even the browser will come away from this book with the joyful affliction of a lifetime: Thinking like an economist. It works for me.

James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes “Business 101” monthly for the Snohomish County Business Journal.

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