Robert Frank on Dinner Table Economics

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2016

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

How can you learn to think like an economist? One way is to think about what might be called dinner table economics--puzzles or patterns that arise in everyday life that would be good to understand. Robert Frank of Cornell University and author of The Economic Naturalist talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a number of these puzzles including why grooms typically rent tuxedos but the bride usually buys her gown, why bicycles can be more expensive to rent than cars, the effects of the price of corn on the price of pork, and why scammers who invoke Nigeria keep using the same old story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:09.2	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.7	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find
0:18.7	links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.7	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done
0:25.8	going back to 2006.
0:28.2	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org.
0:30.7	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.0	Today is December 8, 2015, and my guest is Robert Frank, the Henrietta Johnson Lewis Professor
0:43.0	of Management and Professor of Economics.
0:45.9	According to Johnson Graduate School of Management, it's the author of many books.
0:50.6	Bob, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:52.9	Yeah, nice to be on with you again, Russ.
0:55.8	Now if all goes as planned, this episode will be released on January 4, 2016.
1:02.8	And as we have in the past, we're surveying e-contalk listeners to find out more about
1:06.6	you and to let you vote for your favorite episodes of 2015.
1:10.8	So head over to e-contalk.org, e-contalk.org, and in the upper left-hand corneal, find
1:17.0	a link to the survey.
1:18.0	Now, for today's episode, with Bob's cooperation, we're going to try to something a little different.
1:24.4	We're going to reprise, revisit, and we hope extend an episode we did very, very long
1:29.7	ago back in 2007, which was based on his book, The Economic Naturalist, a book I really
1:37.0	enjoyed.
	...

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