Joshua Gans. Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009. 240 pages.

If there are two things that there is no shortage of opinions on, it’s parenting and economics. Yet books about both continue to be popular. So when one combines both topics, it’s of definite interest, at least to parents.

Parentonomics‘ writer would seem to be as good an authority as any–he’s the father of three children and a noted economist. He cautions readers in the preface that the book is not a manual or a textbook, but a deeply personal look at his experience as an economist dad. He doesn’t mean to instruct, but to inform and possibly provoke discussion.

He definitely succeeds in his goals–Parentonomics is readable and his economist’s take on child-rearing is sure to raise some questions. How do incentives work, and how do well-intentioned incentives lead to failure? These are questions that economists consider every day, and the author describes how he applied them–with occasional mirth–to his own parenting.

The book started as a blog, and it is divided into short chapters focused on specific topics, like sleeping, eating, toileting, protecting, and traveling. This gives readers the benefit of either reading it cover to cover, or simply skipping to the parts that they need to think about.

As personal as the author claims the book to be, neither his wife nor his children are given names anywhere in the book. Instead, they are referred to as “the Children’s Mother,” “Child No. 1,” “Child No. 2,” and “Child No. 3.” This is disconcerting, because it’s hard to develop any real connection with characters with no names, even if they do have fleshed-out personalities. It doesn’t feel clinical so much as uninspired. If the author wanted to preserve his family’s privacy, he could either have a) not written a book about parenting based on his own life; b) created a fictional family that, while based on his own, clearly wasn’t; or c) just used pseudonyms, like Amy, Barbara, and Charlie. Even Uno, Dos, and Tres would have worked better, for me at least.

Getting beyond this necessarily-distancing feature, there is still a great deal of interest for parents in Parentonomics. It’s not going to knock What to Expect When You’re Expecting off of anyone’s bookshelf, but it doesn’t try to, and it’s a fun read.