I don't very often do book reviews but I can really recommend this one. Its full title is "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness".
I want to point out upfront that I bought the audio version of the book so I didn't actually read it, I listened to it. And I bought my version from iTunes which was far cheaper (by about $10) than Audible or Amazon.
I found this book fascinating and entertaining. The first part of the book describes all the ways in which humans are fallible and how we often don't behave rationally in the way that economists would like to model our behavior. That is, our decisions and conclusions are often sub-optimal because of all kinds of bias, lazy thinking, social norms/coercion, emotions and more. It's incredibly thought-provoking and insightful and packed with tons of examples to illustrate the points.
I was only into the first chapter when I decided it was well worth the money and by the time I was half way through I thought it was one of the best books I've read... er.. listened to :)
So, given our human nature, the authors argue that care must be taken when organizing and offering choices and that public policy makers and businesses ought to "nudge" us in the right direction or at least take care not to nudge us in the wrong direction.
The second part of the book looks in detail at some pretty weighty issues such as opportunities to increase the supply of organs for transplants and improving environmentally responsible behavior. Even if examination of these issues doesn't float your boat, it's still worth buying for the first part of the book.
Music Downloads example
One of the many very interesting insights was a discussion about an experiment with music downloads. The experiment took 14,000 people and randomly signed them up to eight different "worlds" (think "online stores") in which everyone was free to download unknown songs from unknown bands. The results are interesting: songs were more likely to be downloaded the more popular they became (ok, you might expect that) but those popular songs were different across the worlds- people followed the herd and choices were heavily influenced by the first downloaders. In the control group - where nobody could see how many times a song had been downloaded - outcomes were very different. I haven't read the original study but I did find it here ;)
ARe you freaking kidding me? this was the scariest thing I ever read. Did Dr. Mengele help write it?
Posted by: marie greene | September 05, 2009 at 07:36 PM
Er.. Marie.. what are you talking about? I know who Mengele is but don't see any connection. Maybe you'd like to tell me what you issue was with the book?
Are you even talking about the same book?
Posted by: Zen Films | September 07, 2009 at 03:27 AM