Parentonomics

"Every parent has to deal with a common set of issues. Whether it be getting children to eat healthy meals, encouraging toddlers to use the toilet, engage in socially acceptable play or simply to behave well in public, parents have to use what they have to get through the day. Parentonomics recounts how an economist dealt with parenting using the things he knew best: economics and incentives. It is a story of the trade-offs parents face and the limitations of using rewards to get the behaviour you might desire. In dealing with his three children, Joshua Gans, an economics professor uses every trick in the book. Sometimes he is successful, such as doing deals with babies to get them to sleep through the night. Other times, it is a tale of dramatic failure; like using treats to speed up toilet training. But each is a topic, parents will find familiar, thought-provoking and often fairly amusing."--Provided by publisher.

What every parent needs to know about negotiating, incentives, outsourcing, and other strategies to solve the economic management problem that is parenting. Like any new parent, Joshua Gans felt joy mixed with anxiety upon the birth of his first child. Who was this blanket-swaddled small person and what did she want? Unlike most parents, however, Gans is an economist, and he began to apply the tools of his trade to raising his children. He saw his new life as one big economic management problem—and if economics helped him think about parenting, parenting illuminated certain economic principles. Parentonomics is the entertaining, enlightening, and often hilarious fruit of his “research.” Incentives, Gans shows us, are as risky in parenting as in business. An older sister who is recruited to help toilet train her younger brother for a share in the reward given for each successful visit to the bathroom, for example, could give the trainee drinks of water to make the rewards more frequent. (Economics later offered another, better toilet training solution: outsourcing. For their third child, Gans and his wife put it in the hands of professionals—the day care providers.) Gans gives us the parentonomic view of delivery (if the mother shares her pain by yelling at the father, doesn't it really create more aggregate pain?), sleep (the screams of a baby are like an offer: “I'll stop screaming if you give me attention”), food (a question of marketing), travel (“the best thing you can say about traveling with children is that they are worse than baggage”), punishment (and threat credibility), birthday party time management, and more. Parents: if you're reading Parentonomics in the presence of other people, you'll be unable to keep yourself from reading the funny parts out loud. And if you're reading it late at night and wake a child with your laughter—well, you'll have some guidelines for negotiating a return to bed.

The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology is the seminal reference in the field of positive psychology, which continues to transcend the boundaries of academia to capture the imagination of the general public. Almost 20 years after the first publication of this groundbreaking reference, this new third edition showcases how positive psychology is thriving in diverse contexts and fields of psychology. Consisting of 68 chapters of the most current theory and research, this updated handbook provides an unparalleled cross-disciplinary look at positive psychology from diverse fields and all branches of psychology, including social, clinical, personality, counseling, health, school, and developmental psychology. Several new chapters are included which highlight the latest research on positive psychology and neuroscience, as well as growing areas for applications of positive psychology.

How parenting became a verb, from Dr. Spock and June Cleaver to baby whispering and free-range kids. When did “parenting” become a verb? Why is it so hard to parent, and so rife with the possibility of failure? Sitcom families of the past—the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Conners—didn’t seem to lose any sleep about their parenting methods. Today, parents are likely to be up late, doomscrolling on parenting websites. In Long Days, Short Years, Andrew Bomback—physician, writer, and father of three young children—looks at why it can be so much fun to be a parent but, at the same time, so frustrating and difficult to parent. It’s not a “how to” book (although Bomback has read plenty of these) but a “how come” book, investigating the emergence of an immersive, all-in approach to raising children that has made parenting a competitive (and often not very enjoyable) sport. Drawing on parenting books, mommy blogs, and historical accounts of parental duties as well as novels, films, podcasts, television shows, and his own experiences as a parent, Bomback charts the cultural history of parenting as a skill to be mastered, from the laid-back Dr. Spock’s 1950s childcare bible—in some years outsold only by the actual Bible—to the more rigid training schedules of Babywise. Along the way, he considers the high costs of commercialized parenting (from the babymoon on), the pressure on mothers to have it all (and do it all), scripted parenting as laid out in How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, parenting during a pandemic, and much more.

In many modern economies, creativity, the essential prerequisite for innovation, tends to be assumed or neglected while the catchphrase "innovation" dominates the field of business as the key to national performance and competitiveness. Creativity and Innovation in Business and Beyond illustrates the ways in which creativity spurs innovation and innovation enables creativity – not only in the realms of business and management, where the innovation is regularly acknowledged and discussed, but throughout the social sciences. With contributions from experts in fields as far-flung as policy, history, economics, economic geography, sociology, law, psychology, social psychology and education, in addition to business and management, this volume explores the manifold avenues for creativity and innovation at many levels including nation, region, city, institution, organisation, and team across a multitude of sectors and settings.

We've needlessly turned parenting into an unpleasant chore. Parents invest more time and money in their kids than ever, but the shocking lesson of twin and adoption research is that upbringing is much less important than genetics in the long run. These revelations have surprising implications for how we parent and how we spend time with our kids. The big lesson: Mold your kids less and enjoy your life more. Your kids will still turn out fine. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is a book of practical big ideas. How can parents be happier? What can they change -- and what do they need to just accept? Which of their worries can parents safely forget? Above all, what is the right number of kids for you to have? You'll never see kids or parenthood the same way again.

Why solving the information problem should be at the core of our pandemic response: essential reading about the long-term implications of our current crisis. COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The COVID-19 pandemic is caused by a lack of good information. A pandemic is essentially an information problem: this is the enlightening and provocative idea at the heart of this book. If we solve the information problem, argues economist Joshua Gans, we can defeat the virus. For example, when we don't know who is infected, we have to act as if everyone is infected. If we actively manage the information problem--if we know who is infected and with whom they had contact--we can suppress the virus or buy time for vaccine development. This is an expanded version of an eBook originally published as Economics in the Age of COVID-19.

Two leaders in the field explore the foundations of bounded rationality and its effects on choices by individuals, firms, and the government. Bounded rationality recognizes that human behavior departs from the perfect rationality assumed by neoclassical economics. In this book, Sanjit Dhami and Cass R. Sunstein explore the foundations of bounded rationality and consider the implications of this approach for public policy and law, in particular for questions about choice, welfare, and freedom. The authors, both recognized as experts in the field, cover a wide range of empirical findings and assess theoretical work that attempts to explain those findings. Their presentation is comprehensive, coherent, and lucid, with even the most technical material explained accessibly. They not only offer observations and commentary on the existing literature but also explore new insights, ideas, and connections. After examining the traditional neoclassical framework, which they refer to as the Bayesian rationality approach (BRA), and its empirical issues, Dhami and Sunstein offer a detailed account of bounded rationality and how it can be incorporated into the social and behavioral sciences. They also discuss a set of models of heuristics-based choice and the philosophical foundations of behavioral economics. Finally, they examine libertarian paternalism and its strategies of “nudges.”