Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Robert Frank, the Henrietta Johnson-Lewis Professor

of Management at the Johnson School at Cornell University. His latest book is the Economic

Naturalist in search of explanations for everyday enigmas. Bob, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks for having me on, Russ. Your book, The Economic Naturalist, is a series of puzzles with

explanations drawn from the economic way of thinking. It's about the economic way of thinking applied

to everyday life. But the book has an unusual origin. It's based on your teaching and your ideas

about economic education. And you're not a big fan of the standard undergraduate economics class.

Tell us why not and how that affected the book and how you teach your class.

Well, you know how we teach the introductory course normally. There's a big encyclopedic text

with every idea that's ever been written about, crammed into it. And then professors try to work

through as many of them as they can in the semester's time. A lot of it's couched in the form of

equations and graphs. And students don't much like it. They take these courses because I think

they're seen as a stepping stone to careers that pay well. But what we've discovered now is

if you give introductory students, ones who've taken this traditional course, a test that probes

their knowledge of basic economic six months after they're done, they don't score any better than

people who never took the course at all. It's a real scandal. I mean, if you think about performance

at that level in an industry that spends hundreds of millions of dollars on its service, you know,

there would have been malpractice suits filed long since. It's for some reason something we get

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