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A review by lpm100
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
medium-paced
1.0
Book Review
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
1/5 stars
"Weird, hippie academic ramblings"
*******
There are some problems with this book. I'll give specific examples (there are lots of them, so I'll only give an abbreviated listing to try to keep the review readable). Some examples are by chapter and others are by page number.
General problems:
1. I have no doubt that this author is a bright guy, but he is not an economist. He does not do his best work when he tries to use formal economic reasoning in his service and he looks even more foolish when he tries to debunk what economists have already hashed out.
2. The book really wanders off topic in more than a few chapters. WAY off topic. I had to remind myself several times that *this is a book about irrationality* (or at least that is what it was supposed to be).
3. This book was written before Daniel Kahnemann's "Thinking, Fast and Slow," but it sure does seems like a lot of psychologists quote the same experiments OVER AND OVER. There is a good bit of overlap between what Kahnemann wrote and what is covered here, and so I'll try to cover what was different in this book to the aforementioned. (Was it really such news that human beings are not calculators/ economists and that they are likely to make reasoning errors accordingly?)
4. We don't know about the external validity (i.e., how well do these things work in the REAL WORLD outside of the lab) of his experiments (1) and following that (2), how well do the experiments scale up (as in, to the scale of a whole country)? He could be blowing smoke. Already in his last book (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves), he pointed out to us that his experiments had NO external validity in explaining relative corruption across different countries.
Specific examples:
(p. 46.) Supply and demand don't really exist but prices are just anchoring and arbitrary coherence?
People don't know what an object is truly worth to them? (p. 49)
Um, I think what Ariely is talking about has already been addressed by the idea of Subjectivism. And that says that there is no inherent value to any object. The Marxists have already tried that one and been thoroughly rebuffed. Some objects are worth something to some people at some times something else to other people at other times. Full stop. And what about aggregating effects? Assume that some people value something too high (because of arbitrary coherence, like the author suggests). Isn't it statistically likely that others would value it too low. Over a large enough sample size, shouldn't these effects cancel each other out? (In a Gaussian distribution- like way?)
He also makes this entire case over, like, 3 pages.
And he is using a book on Psychology to attack the free market as a utility-maxizming device (since people don't really know what things are worth to them). He gets back to it again (p. 50). We only "think" we know what we want. I am not sure what he could be saying (although I am pretty sure what he is implying). That we don't act completely rationally and that our brain is more like a lawyer (=retroactively finding reasons) than a logician? We already knew that. (Now that I think about it, Jonah Lehrer filled a whole book with that topic. How We Decide.) I see that he is trained in Psychology and Business Administration and not Economics.
Chapter 4. This is the second book that I have read by this author this month, and I am learning to take him with a grain of salt. He sets up some experiments, and I have NO CLUE about their external validity (=how well they hold up in the real world outside of the lab), since the giveaway in his last book (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves) was that the entirety of his studies had almost NO external validity. P.90 Ariely stretches his case to talk about cuts in pensions/ benefits/ etc as transforming the social relationship between employers and employees into a market relationship. Was it a social relationship before? (Factories in Ford/ GM?) Did a social contract ever exist? By page 92, I have to give up trying to address every single point. I'll just generally say that the author is (1) committing the "Chess Piece Fallacy" (no, men can't be arranged like pieces on a chess board) and (2) making THE SAME mistake in confusing economic/ cost benefit issues with moral failings. And he might actually know this if he had studied a bit of the economics that he is criticizing. Now we get from drug trafficking to No Child Left Behind. Apparently up until now, education was a Social Norm-like thing. But this is making it a market norm-type thing. Why this is bad, he doesn't say (it's not like he gives us any comparison to countries that are doing it-- he just says that it is "bad" and leaves it at that). Then he gets into some unsubstantiated babbling about "linking education to social goals" (p.93) as "we have learned in our experiments" (no, we haven't-- no proof of external validity!).
So, do we need money? (Yes, a Jew-- of all people-- asked that.) He then gets into the details of some experiments where some individuals took larger numbers of chocolates when they had to pay for them but fewer when they were offered for free. From there, he easily and quickly glides to the notion that pollution goals must be enforced by social norms (instead of financial sanction). Of course because companies are the same as people and can be expected to behave the same. And of course because these experiments are shown to have external validity.
Chapter 6. Safe sex. Men don't like to use condoms when sexually aroused? Because they are thinking with their other head. Um, was this new? (Maury Povich has made an entire CAREER of documenting the results of this).
Chapter 9. Loss aversion. P. 196. He's up to talking about Burridan's donkey. Nice, but another philosopher has already covered that-- over a hundred years ago. Ditto for his having brought up the economic principle that two choices that are equally good are no better than a single choice. Not exactly novel. (And that this point, I am starting to wonder: "What is this book about again? Weren't we on about irrationality").
Chapter 10. The effect of expectations. Was it really such news that when we expect something to be good/ bad, then it really can become that (for us)? Was it really news that people have racial stereotypes? (And are they always and everywhere untrue?) Again, he covers the same experiments as Daniel Kahnemann. There was also the experiment about the violinist (Joshua Bell) playing in a subway covered in The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Simons and Chabris. (Doesn't it seems like psychologists quote the same experiments over and over?)
Chapter 11. The Placebo effect. We didn't know about that? What was this book about again? Irrationality?
Chapter 13. Here, he cannibalizes some of what went into making the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves. This is tangentially related to irrationality-- in the sense that people are not quite rational in their choices about what to be honest/ dishonest about.
Verdict: Save your time and money. Not recommended. Just an academic who has convinced himself that these things are useful/ real because he wrote them.
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
1/5 stars
"Weird, hippie academic ramblings"
*******
There are some problems with this book. I'll give specific examples (there are lots of them, so I'll only give an abbreviated listing to try to keep the review readable). Some examples are by chapter and others are by page number.
General problems:
1. I have no doubt that this author is a bright guy, but he is not an economist. He does not do his best work when he tries to use formal economic reasoning in his service and he looks even more foolish when he tries to debunk what economists have already hashed out.
2. The book really wanders off topic in more than a few chapters. WAY off topic. I had to remind myself several times that *this is a book about irrationality* (or at least that is what it was supposed to be).
3. This book was written before Daniel Kahnemann's "Thinking, Fast and Slow," but it sure does seems like a lot of psychologists quote the same experiments OVER AND OVER. There is a good bit of overlap between what Kahnemann wrote and what is covered here, and so I'll try to cover what was different in this book to the aforementioned. (Was it really such news that human beings are not calculators/ economists and that they are likely to make reasoning errors accordingly?)
4. We don't know about the external validity (i.e., how well do these things work in the REAL WORLD outside of the lab) of his experiments (1) and following that (2), how well do the experiments scale up (as in, to the scale of a whole country)? He could be blowing smoke. Already in his last book (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves), he pointed out to us that his experiments had NO external validity in explaining relative corruption across different countries.
Specific examples:
(p. 46.) Supply and demand don't really exist but prices are just anchoring and arbitrary coherence?
People don't know what an object is truly worth to them? (p. 49)
Um, I think what Ariely is talking about has already been addressed by the idea of Subjectivism. And that says that there is no inherent value to any object. The Marxists have already tried that one and been thoroughly rebuffed. Some objects are worth something to some people at some times something else to other people at other times. Full stop. And what about aggregating effects? Assume that some people value something too high (because of arbitrary coherence, like the author suggests). Isn't it statistically likely that others would value it too low. Over a large enough sample size, shouldn't these effects cancel each other out? (In a Gaussian distribution- like way?)
He also makes this entire case over, like, 3 pages.
And he is using a book on Psychology to attack the free market as a utility-maxizming device (since people don't really know what things are worth to them). He gets back to it again (p. 50). We only "think" we know what we want. I am not sure what he could be saying (although I am pretty sure what he is implying). That we don't act completely rationally and that our brain is more like a lawyer (=retroactively finding reasons) than a logician? We already knew that. (Now that I think about it, Jonah Lehrer filled a whole book with that topic. How We Decide.) I see that he is trained in Psychology and Business Administration and not Economics.
Chapter 4. This is the second book that I have read by this author this month, and I am learning to take him with a grain of salt. He sets up some experiments, and I have NO CLUE about their external validity (=how well they hold up in the real world outside of the lab), since the giveaway in his last book (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves) was that the entirety of his studies had almost NO external validity. P.90 Ariely stretches his case to talk about cuts in pensions/ benefits/ etc as transforming the social relationship between employers and employees into a market relationship. Was it a social relationship before? (Factories in Ford/ GM?) Did a social contract ever exist? By page 92, I have to give up trying to address every single point. I'll just generally say that the author is (1) committing the "Chess Piece Fallacy" (no, men can't be arranged like pieces on a chess board) and (2) making THE SAME mistake in confusing economic/ cost benefit issues with moral failings. And he might actually know this if he had studied a bit of the economics that he is criticizing. Now we get from drug trafficking to No Child Left Behind. Apparently up until now, education was a Social Norm-like thing. But this is making it a market norm-type thing. Why this is bad, he doesn't say (it's not like he gives us any comparison to countries that are doing it-- he just says that it is "bad" and leaves it at that). Then he gets into some unsubstantiated babbling about "linking education to social goals" (p.93) as "we have learned in our experiments" (no, we haven't-- no proof of external validity!).
So, do we need money? (Yes, a Jew-- of all people-- asked that.) He then gets into the details of some experiments where some individuals took larger numbers of chocolates when they had to pay for them but fewer when they were offered for free. From there, he easily and quickly glides to the notion that pollution goals must be enforced by social norms (instead of financial sanction). Of course because companies are the same as people and can be expected to behave the same. And of course because these experiments are shown to have external validity.
Chapter 6. Safe sex. Men don't like to use condoms when sexually aroused? Because they are thinking with their other head. Um, was this new? (Maury Povich has made an entire CAREER of documenting the results of this).
Chapter 9. Loss aversion. P. 196. He's up to talking about Burridan's donkey. Nice, but another philosopher has already covered that-- over a hundred years ago. Ditto for his having brought up the economic principle that two choices that are equally good are no better than a single choice. Not exactly novel. (And that this point, I am starting to wonder: "What is this book about again? Weren't we on about irrationality").
Chapter 10. The effect of expectations. Was it really such news that when we expect something to be good/ bad, then it really can become that (for us)? Was it really news that people have racial stereotypes? (And are they always and everywhere untrue?) Again, he covers the same experiments as Daniel Kahnemann. There was also the experiment about the violinist (Joshua Bell) playing in a subway covered in The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Simons and Chabris. (Doesn't it seems like psychologists quote the same experiments over and over?)
Chapter 11. The Placebo effect. We didn't know about that? What was this book about again? Irrationality?
Chapter 13. Here, he cannibalizes some of what went into making the book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves. This is tangentially related to irrationality-- in the sense that people are not quite rational in their choices about what to be honest/ dishonest about.
Verdict: Save your time and money. Not recommended. Just an academic who has convinced himself that these things are useful/ real because he wrote them.