On the Trail of Economic Oddities

Cornell professor Robert Frank asks students to pose questions about real-world economic enigmas. Now, he has compiled the best answers in a book

Robert H. Frank
Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management
Cornell University

Story Tools

• post a comment
• e-mail this story
• print this story
• order a reprint
• digg this
• save to del.icio.us

A curious individual, Robert Frank, the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, is never shy about asking, "Why?" And he forces students to wonder aloud, too.

Driven by a desire to tell stories people won't soon forget, Frank has students—from freshmen to PhD candidates—ask questions and find answers in what he calls the "economic-naturalist" assignment. Students have to write an essay explaining everyday occurrences and oddities in economic terms. They have churned out papers on everything from why hotel mini-bar prices are so exorbitant to why drive-up ATMs have Braille dots on their keys.

Invigorated by his students' work, Frank picked the best of the thousands of essays his students have turned in over the years and combine those with his own examples to create The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas (Basic Books, 2007). Frank says the book probably will help people retain basic economic principles better than an introductory course.

Frank, who is also a monthly columnist for The New York Times, says half of the royalties from this edition of the book will go to Cornell's writing program, the inspiration for the assignment. And he hopes to encourage other professors to offer similar assignments because he thinks it's one of the most effective ways to teach just about anything, not just economics. Plus, says Frank, the explanations make for great conversation at cocktail parties.

Frank recently spoke with BusinessWeek.com reporter Francesca Di Meglio. Here are edited excerpts of their discussion:

What's so exciting about economics?
What's exciting about the subject is that there are really only four or five or six—it depends on how you count—basic ideas. And once you master them, you can understand a whole host of things that you encounter in the world.

It's like biology in that sense. Once you master a few principles in evolutionary biology, there's suddenly all this texture and pattern that seems sensible and interesting, even though you never noticed it before. It's the same with basic ideas in economics.

Why should people learn the basics of economics?
Economics is all about how you make the most of your opportunities. It's always a question of trying to figure out how to achieve a decent balance between competing aims that you hold. If you understand economic principles, you're going to end up getting much more out of your possibilities than you could if you didn't understand them.

How do you think professors can make economics more accessible?
The key is to embed the ideas in simple narratives that have a story line that makes sense. We didn't really evolve doing equations and graphs. That came very late in our history as a species. For most of our evolutionary history, the way things got transmitted from one person to another was through stories. We were storytellers by inclination.

If you can wrap a story around an idea, it seems to slide into the brain without any effort. If you translate the idea into equations and graphs, you can still get into the average student's brain, but it just takes a lot more work, and they seem to lose all appreciation of the charm of the idea. Then they don't talk about the idea with one another, which is one of the main ways ideas get reinforced in your mind.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?
If you're really willing to let yourself get absorbed in this book, you're going to learn more economics than students typically will from taking several courses in the subject. My real hope is that most of the people who read it will become economic naturalists.