Tim Harford

Analyzes the underlying economic logic behind seemingly irrational behavior, explaining how people are responding to future costs and benefits and how socially tragic outcomes have their roots in individually rational decisions.

The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

The Logic of Life

Gavin

Celebration of the universality / imperialism of economics (the application of the field’s hard-nosed acquisitory rational choice theory to more and more human phenomena - crime, romance, addiction, corporate pay, and The Ascent of Man). Harford is better than Levitt - to whom the books owes its format, cheek and some of the original research - because he’s less amused about the unflattering and anti-humanist results people have uncovered.

Some of the research is astonishing – and contentious (I have in mind the 2005 paper that purported to show significant shifts in [expressed] sexuality as the AIDS epidemic peaked, in proportion to how well people personally knew sufferers, “cost of AIDS”.) In any case, Harford writes extremely clearly about technical things, and the research can’t be ignored, because it suggests routes for generalised policy (rather than cynical rules to apply to all individual cases).

Extra point for his lovely immanent-performative ontology of maths: he claims cricket players and economic actors are doing maths unconsciously when they catch a ball or opt for an optimum (third-order differentials). This implies that sunflowers are mathematicians -  that all the world is not merely describable with maths, but acts as maths, is maths. I don’t believe this, but isn’t it lovely?

Diana Platgalve

Very weak book on rational choice theory. Backed up with some primitive comments on game theory. Only chapter 6 on rational racism is worth a read really.

D VA

Erhan Bilici

John Elbing

Mary Baldwin

Truly eye-opening . . . There is almost no situation that Harford cannot dissect with his sharp economist's tools . . . economics has never been this cool' NEW STATESMAN If humans are so clever, why do we smoke and gamble, or take drugs, or fall in love? Is this really rational behaviour? And how come your idiot boss is so overpaid? In fact, the behaviour of even the unlikeliest of individuals - prostitutes, drug addicts, racists and revolutionaries - complies with economic logic, taking into account future costs and benefits, even if we don't quite realise it. We are rational beings after all.

The Logic of Life The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

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