Accounting for Tastes or The Dynamics of Socio Economic Development

Accounting for Tastes

Author: Gary S Becker

Economists generally accept as a given the old adage that there's no accounting for tastes. Nobel Laureate Gary Becker disagrees, and in this lively new collection he confronts the problem of preferences and values: how they are formed and how they affect our behavior. He argues that past experiences and social influences form two basic capital stocks: personal and social. He then applies these concepts to assessing the effects of advertising, the power of peer pressure, the nature of addiction, and the function of habits. This framework promises to illuminate many other realms of social life previously considered off-limits by economists.

Table of Contents:

1	Preferences and Values	3
2	De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum	24
3	A Theory of Rational Addiction	50
4	Rational Addiction and the Effect of Price on Consumption	77
5	An Empirical Analysis of Cigarette Addiction	85
6	Habits, Addictions, and Traditions	118
7	The Economic Way of Looking at Life	139
8	A Theory of Social Interactions	162
9	A Note on Restaurant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influences on Price	195
10	A Simple Theory of Advertising as a Good or Bad	203
11	Norms and the Formation of Preferences	225
12	Spouses and Beggars: Love and Sympathy	231
	Acknowledgments	241
	References	245
	Index	259

Books about: How to Eat Like a Hot Chick or RealAge Makeover

The Dynamics of Socio-Economic Development: An Introduction

Author: Adam Szirmai

Why are poor countries poor and rich countries rich? How are wealth and poverty related to changes in nutrition, health, life expectancy, education, population growth and politics? This modern, non-technical introduction to development economics takes a quantitative and comparative approach to contemporary debates, examining historical, institutional, demographic, sociological, political, cultural and ecological factors. Chapters contain comparative statistics from twenty-nine developing countries and assume no prior knowledge of economics.