TYLER COWEN tugs popular economics in the direction of self-help: how you can use simple insights and intuitions from economic theory to get more of what you want. The dust jacket of his book promises tips on love, work and dentistry, and that's only the start. There are suggestions for improving your reading habits, surviving torture, getting the dishes done at home, collecting fine art, going to the cinema, giving to charity and ordering food when eating out (at an expensive restaurant, “If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good”).

If you didn't know that Mr Cowen was an economist, you might take him for a psychologist. The version of economics advanced here has nothing to do with algebra or interest rates. It is economics in Ludwig von Mises's formulation of a “logic of choice”. How do we decide what we want? How do we know what other people want? If we can make a bit of progress on those two fronts, says Mr Cowen, we can probably improve the quality of our everyday life.

One of his recurrent warnings is to allow for the complexities of human emotions. What people want cannot always be expressed in money. You cannot, for example, pay your children to respect you, any more than you might pay your spouse to love you. And even in situations where cash incentives might seem appropriate, you are liable to come up against the general truth that people hate to feel manipulated. A teenage child might balk at washing dishes at home to qualify for pocket money—but would willingly do the same thing in the café down the road, where a job and a wage signalled independence.

Mr Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virgina, and a co-owner of marginalrevolution.com, one of the best economics blogs on the internet. At George Mason he has helped to build a creative and widely admired economics faculty. The seriousness of his academic credentials should still any doubts about the conversational tone of his writing. This could easily have been a much longer and more densely argued book had the author so wished. Even so, and allowing for the intended general readership, it is still prone to skip from idea to idea with little pause for thought—a virtue in blogging, where ideas are floated for debate, but less so in a book, where the reader expects rounded argument.

“Discover Your Inner Economist” joins a recent school of books demystifying and popularising economics that began with Steven Landsburg's “Armchair Economist” in 1993, and conquered the bestseller lists in 2005 with “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It stands apart from its predecessors by making its revelations not so much about the way the world works as about the way we ourselves work (and play) and how we can take practical steps to do both better.

Mr Cowen's model for running better meetings is hard to beat: put in place a system (he suggests body sensors) that enables participants to signal their boredom anonymously. When everyone is known to be bored, the meeting halts. It's a pity, however, that Mr Cowen doesn't really arrive at any useful advice for keeping the dentist in line. The problem here, to extend his line of argument, may be that you want a dentist whose supreme value is to avoid inflicting pain; yet who, with that supreme value, would ever become a dentist?