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 Tyler Cowan, my colleague here at George Mason University.

Tyler blogs with Alex Tabarock at marginalrevolution.com. His latest book, just published by Dutton, is

Discover Your Inner Economist. Use incentives to fall in love, survive your next meeting, and

motivate your dentist. Tyler, welcome back to Econ Talk. Thank you for having me back. So, Tyler,

our topic today is your book, Discover Your Inner Economist. Now, I'm sure there are some

of our listeners who might prefer to leave their inner economist undiscovered, but I think you have

something more or a comforting in mind than they might imagine. Tell us about one's inner

economist. What do you have in mind? By inner economist, I mean the notion that all of us are already

making economic decisions every day. We're weighing benefit in cost. We're trying to match means

to ends. So, we're behaving in the framework of economics in any case. But if we're willing to be

just a little more self-reflective, sometimes a little more self-critical, a little more self-aware,

then we can improve how our inner economist behaves and get a better result. That's the central

premise of my book. Now, when you use the word economics and economists, you don't mean just

financial matters, of course. That's right. Economics, I view, is the science of the logic of

choice. Matching means to ends, making better decisions, thinking about how incentives operate

and what costs really mean. If I were subtitling this book for accuracy rather than sales,

it has a nice subtitle now, but one subtitle you might have used is one of my favorite definitions

of economics, which is that economics is the study of how to get the most out of life. What I found

...