My Reading Running and Recipe spot, plus a Ten of the Best on the occasional weekend.

Monday, 26 October 2015

Misbehaving by Richard Thaler

Misbehaving is Richard Thaler’s take on the world of Behavioural Economics. This field is fascinating, not least of all because it explains some anomalies in the financial world (which should be true if all assumptions were held, and all humans acted rationally). We all know that the basic premise isn’t true, but it is interesting to work out why. Being a self-confessed lazy person, Richard summarises all the main theories that have been prevalent in this field – from the “endowment effect”, “loss aversion”, “framing” to “anchoring”, “quasi-hyperbolic discounting” and “mental accounting”. Being one who doesn’t study this full-time, but only occasionally enough to need a refresher, I found his examples memorable, well-told, easy to follow and therefore helpful in my understanding and recall of the “theories”.

I listened to the Audible version of this book, and found myself laughing aloud, and enjoying every minute. It doesn’t labour the points, keeps it simple and relatable and uses the conflict between the traditional economists and the misbehaving world, explained by psychology, to keep us entertained.

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From my reading

"That's the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there's something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one where one person has done something so horrible and unforgivable that the other person is immediately absolved of all the low-grade sins of sloth, envy, gluttony, avarice and I forget the other three."

― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

Thanks for reading. While you're here, you may want to check out my favourite books of 2017