“When a dinner party guest wonders how much to spend on a bottle of good wine, Dear Economist ignores the Good Wine Guide and reaches for the Journal of Wine Economics.”

What, you might wonder, is the secret to happiness? Harford, citing Kahneman, says that sex is best, but that exercise, food, and prayer are also good. In fact, all human contact is good, except for that with your boss, which is quite bad. The secret to happiness? Don’t have sex with your boss.

Tim Harford is a frequent writer for the Financial Times, and has also published several excellent pop economics books, including The Undercover Economist. Dear Undercover Economist, however, is a collection of advice columns he published in the FT. Written in the classic style of Dear Abby columns, they use economics to answer questions about love, family, careers, and other domains. He gives advice to a man who gives bad first impressions (give a signal of quality, like giving the girl theatre tickets for a third date with him when they first meet); a student who is too busy with his karate club activities to study (gains from trade: find a weakling to do his homework and beat up the weakling’s enemies); someone looking for missing socks (give up on them: instead, focus on interchangeable parts, and just buy all identical socks); and, in response to someone concerned about inflation and the shrinking size of Mars Bars, points out they are actually a very stable unit of account, with about 20,000 bars buying you a small car for the last 70 years.

This is classic pop economics, freakonomics-style. It takes the insights of economics, particularly signalling, screening, and trade, and applies them to problems outside economics’ traditional gaze. I’m not sure I’d take the advice myself, but the columns are entertaining and well written: you could do worse if you’re trying to learn some microeconomics for yourself, or if you’re a student taking microeconomics. After all, how many other opportunities will you have to make economics fun? Overall, a great romp through the insights of economics, applied to everyday problems.