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...

"Disruption" is a business buzzword that has gotten out of control. Today everything and everyone seem to be characterized as disruptive -- or, if they aren't disruptive yet, it's only a matter of time before they become so. In this book, Joshua Gans cuts through the chatter to focus on disruption in its initial use as a business term, identifying new ways to understand it and suggesting new tools to manage it.

Almost twenty years ago Clayton Christensen popularized the term in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, writing of disruption as a set of risks that established firms...