Robert H. Frank

The playful guide to how economics explains the simple but profound ideas that govern our world. Why do the keypads on drive-up cash machines have Braille dots? Why are round-trip fares from Orlando to Kansas City higher than those from Kansas City to Orlando? For decades, Robert Frank has been asking his economics students to pose and answer questions like these as a way of learning how economic principles operate in the real world--which they do everywhere, all the time. Once you learn to think like an economist, all kinds of puzzling observations start to make sense. This book employs basic economic principles to answer scores of intriguing questions, and, along the way, introduces key ideas such as the cost-benefit principle, the "no cash left on the table" principle, and the law of one price. There is no more delightful and painless way of learning these fundamental principles.--From publisher description.

Robert Frank caused a national debate in 1995 when he and co-author Philip Cook described the poisonous spread of "winner-take-all" markets. Now he takes a thought-provoking look at the flip side of spreading inequality: as the super-rich set the pace, everyone else spends furiously in a competitive echo of wastefulness. Frank offers the first comprehensive and accessible summary of scientific evidence that our spending choices are not making us as happy and healthy as they could. Furthermore, he argues that human frailty is not at fault. The good news is that we can do something about it. We can make it harder for the super-rich to overspend, and capture our own competitive energy for the public good. Luxury Fever boldly offers a way to curb the excess and restore the true value of money.

In this book, two distinguished economists draw attention to an important and disturbing new trend that has dramatically transformed our economy in the last two decades: the spread of "winner-take-all" markets, where more and more people compete for ever fewer and bigger prizes. Such markets, where tiny differences in performance translate into huge differences in reward, have long been the hallmark of the performing arts and professional sports, where increasingly sophisticated recording technologies and the global reach of television have enabled millions to listen to and watch only "star" artists and athletes, leaving nothing for the also-rans. In recent years, however, winner-take-all markets have reached into virtually every part of the nation's economic life, spreading into such businesses as fashion, investment banking, and media; into professions like law and medicine; into higher education; and, increasingly, into management itself. While not for a moment denying that consumers have sometimes benefited - nobody has to listen to a second-rate soprano when virtually everyone can afford recordings of first-rate singers - Frank and Cook argue persuasively that, on balance, the result has been disastrous. They show how winner-take-all markets have dramatically widened the gap between rich and poor by concentrating all rewards among just a small handful of winners, and how they have lured some of our most talented individuals into socially unproductive and sometimes even destructive pursuits. Finally, in their relentless stress on winners - the bestselling novel, the blockbuster film, and so on - winner-take-all markets have diluted our culture in ways that many people find deeply disturbing.

"A New York Times economics columnist explores the findings in recent years by scientists who have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life situations than most people imagine, showing how a more accurate understanding of this discovery could lead to better, richer and fairer economies and societies,"--NoveList.