A user-friendly and often entertaining treatise on how to be a more discerning, vastly more aware handler of money.
A lively look at how even the wisest among us are too often fools eager to part with our money.
Most of us think about money at least some portion of each day—how to get more of it, how to spend less of it. However, cautions Ariely (Psychology and Behavioral Economics/Duke Univ.; Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations, 2016, etc.), working with comedian and writer Kreisler (Get Rich Cheating, 2009), “when we bring money into the equation, we make the decisions much more difficult and we open ourselves to mistakes.” The better course, they urge, is to consider money not for its own sake—indeed, not to acknowledge its existence at all—but instead to consider the concept of opportunity cost: what do we give up when we make one choice over another? Is the forgone acquisition really the correct one? What if, instead of buying a big-screen TV or new clothes, we thought of what we might do with the hours we don’t have to work in order to procure them or of the other things we might buy in their place? Such counsel comes after consideration of other economic notions, such as the endowment effect, whereby we give more significance to things simply because we own them, and our generally risk-averse economic behavior, whereby the pleasure taken in gaining something is vastly overshadowed by the pain caused by losing it. Ariely and Kreisler, writing breezily but meaningfully, allow that money has its uses as a symbolic system of fungible, storable, accessible value. However, the real consideration should always be that “spending money now on one thing is a trade-off for spending it on something else,” a calculation that is not often reckoned simply because it’s more difficult than fishing out a credit card or some other means of delaying the recognition that spending money now has future, downstream effects.
A user-friendly and often entertaining treatise on how to be a more discerning, vastly more aware handler of money.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-265120-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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