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Yet another pop econ book.

Article Excerpt
THE LOGIC OF LIFE: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

By Tim Harford

272 pages; Random House, 2008

I have been a reader of books that attempt to popularize the discipline of Economics and expand the empire of issues that its tools can address since I finished my Ph.D. 15 years ago. At that time, they were a sinful pleasure in the guilt-driven halls of my department. In graduate school my professors treated any "popular" account of economics (which to them included any journal article that did not involve taking the second derivative of a translog function) the same as my junior high basketball coach treated the act of playing on an eight-foot hoop with a junior-sized basketball. To both, it was a perversion of our training that would ultimately ruin our skills. I was not brave enough to defy the professors who held my career in their hands by deigning to cross them in any meaningful way, save for reading the stray non-academic text.

I first picked up a "pop econ" book when I came across a copy of Richard Thaler's The Winner's Curse while still in graduate school. The book introduced me and thousands of others to behavioral economics, exciting me enough about the subject to consider ditching my dissertation in progress to do something related to Thaler's work. No dice, said my adviser, and I trudged through my detailed analysis of labor union activity across business cycles, ending with a tract so deadly dull that its sole saving grace was that my dissertation committee found it as difficult to read as it was to write. (They passed me, I suspect, to avoid having to ever read it again.)

After...

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