This is a podcast for the Library of Economics and Liberty, econlib.org, e-c-o-n-l-i-b-d.org.

I'm Russell Roberts of George Mason University, and my guest today is Don Cox of Boston College.

Don, tell me a little bit about what's going on with your life and the economics you're learning out in the field.

Okay, well, this weekend I was doing a little field work. I took my son to a birthday party.

My son's two and a half, and it was Jenny's birthday party. She just turned three.

Oh, maybe 15 kids there, so I got to observe how many? How many?

Nothing in the wild. How many kids? About 15. 15, two to three year olds?

Yeah, and this is pretty amazing actually because there's a big long table set up

up, places for everyone, very highly organized, at least that was the intent.

But a few things started falling apart at the seams, and the thing that stuck out in my mind

was that I saw one parent trying to browbeat his crying child into eating cake

and it just didn't add up for me.

Well, that must be a first.

A parent trying to eat cake. Trying to convince a child to eat cake.

What was it, broccoli cake or spinach cake? What was it?

It seemed like regular. Actually, it was vanilla and chocolate cake with vanilla frosting.

And it looked pretty good, but it just didn't add up.

And I started thinking, okay, there's going to be a couple of economics equations that we could

write down and we could nail exactly why this really doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

And so I started thinking about how Econ 101 just might help people become better parents

by helping them think about simple ideas about incentives.

You sure you want to share those with our listeners? I mean, those are pretty valuable,

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