Create Your Own Economy - by Tyler Cowen
ISBN: 9780525951230Date read: 2025-10-28
How strongly I recommend it: 2/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Surprised me by being a book about autism. But it had some good points anyway.
my notes
Framing effects are irrational but framing effects help.
We spend time and energy framing things in the right way so that we can enjoy them more or learn more from them.
Framing helps us care and it gives meaning to our experiences.
Good mental ordering is how you can create your own set of frames and thereby create your own economy.
Autism often comes with problems.
But a correlation should not be turned into a definition, any more than we should define sub-Saharan Africa as being full of poor people.
If we define autism in terms of its problems, we will find it harder to understand how those problems come about, how to remedy them, and how to appreciate and build upon autistic strengths.
We tend to miss unfamiliar forms of beauty, hidden to us because they are hard to see from the outside looking in.
We now have unprecedented access to small bits of culture.
When it comes to romance not so many people are willing to fly across the country for a peck on the cheek.
When the cost of a trip is high, usually you want to make sure it is worth your while.
It was common for a classical music concert to last five or six hours.
If people were walking long distances or arriving by slow coach, the trip had to be worth their while.
When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty.
When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces.
Shorter bits of culture makes it easier to try new things - to indulge your desire to sample.
You want to be trying new things all the time so you have something to look forward to and so you have the thrill of ongoing discovery.
A blog will fail if the blogger doesn’t post every day or at least every weekday.
People don’t like the idea of visiting the blog and coming away empty-handed.
In my emotional universe that site no longer exists for me and it holds a status lower than the proverbial needle in the haystack.
Top websites supply of new bits of information and pleasure each day.
Individuals can learn to improve their productivity at multitasking and task-switching.
Small bits are building blocks for seeing and understanding some larger trends and narratives.
There is no information overload, there is only filter failure.
Shift in the meaning of cultural literacy:
Not whether you know the classics but whether you can operate an iPhone
Bypass traditional cultural canons and go to a more direct perception of the underlying aesthetic values.
Daydreaming = internally directed resting thoughts.
No one has compared modern education to a placebo.
What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated?
Maybe that’s what current methods of education already consist of.
Buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed. They buy little dreams.
Smith’s life’s work was to mix economic reasoning with Stoic moral philosophy and applied psychology, most of which he generated from his own reasoning.
A lot of human behavior is about creating artificial scarcity and then choosing a quest.
Quests are stories of overcoming scarcity.
If you want to go on a meaningful quest, you must be lacking in something.
The protagonist cannot focus on everything and thus must choose and discard priorities to define a preferred quest.
Paradise doesn’t make for good fiction.
My dreams, my fantasies, my deepest visions of what I can be: I pull them from social context.
I pull them from celebrities, from ads, from popular culture, and most generally from ideas that are easy to communicate and disseminate to large numbers of people.
We all dream in pop culture language to some degree.
The choice is not “Fantasy: yes or no?” but rather “How much fantasy do we want in our lives?”
Our minds shape and frame truth as much as track it.
Few people would want, upon reflection, to live a life unadorned by the power of framing effects.
Beneficial self-deception is common in human life.
A lot of human achievement takes place only because we tell ourselves - often contrary to reason - that we are in fact smarter or wiser or better than other people.
Let’s put down our polemic against living in our heads and let’s put down our bias against interiority.
Let’s give our stories their proper due.
The more mixed the crowd, and the greater the number of dimensions of status and achievement, the greater the chance that unusual people will find a means of excelling or just surviving or fitting in.
To put it another way, the mixing of populations lowers the cost of being unusual.
It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.
In Japan there is explicit recognition of hobbyist obsession as a way of life.
Tokyo is a paradise for people with unusual or highly specialized interests.
Tokyo is the world’s biggest, richest, and most highly educated collection of consumers in one place.
You’re supposed to obsess about things there and that’s part of the charm of the place.
That’s why the Italian food in Japan is so good, even outside of the fine or expensive restaurants.
The Japanese man cooking it probably had apprenticeship in Italy for a few years and he has been perfecting his technique ever since.