Reviews
The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them-And They Shape Us by Ray Fisman, Tim Sullivan
dusang's review against another edition
3.0
I read this shortly after finishing [b:Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business|26150584|Makers and Takers The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business|Rana Foroohar|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1453058460s/26150584.jpg|46106436], which made it very difficult for me to warm to the opening chapters of this book, discussing RAND Corporation and the "mathematization" of economic theory. Makers is considerably less enamoured of the legacy of RAND than Fisman and Sullivan; and I personally consider the "mathematization" of economics one of the greatest scams of modern academia. Although the proofs and models the post-war economists developed may have some limited application, economics cannot be divorced from psychology and behavourial science and retain any semblance of relevancy to the real world.
The middle section, particularly regarding auction design, was more engaging for me. However, throughout the book I found the authors' application of "diverse" gendered pronouns a bit odd -- I appreciate the impulse to use "she" in equal measure to "he" for generic examples but I noticed early (and often) that the "she" examples were almost universally the more negative ones. This was further driven home when the authors spent an entire chapter using (what they admitted to be) heteronormative middle school dance couplings as the descriptive example of deferred acceptance algorithms, where they somehow managed to entirely strip the majority of women within the example of any agency. The authors doubled-down on the gendered inequality by repeatedly commodifying the "prom queen" stereotype as a luxury good.
Although the authors acknowledged that they purposefully didn't discuss government intervention or regulation, I acutely felt the lack of that discussion throughout the book. Adam Smith was not a free market advocate -- he believed that unregulated capitalism would tend toward greed and inequality. The "invisible hand" is not a magical apparition within the heart of a market, it is the result of the direct intervention of regulators and/or market makers.
Finally, if there aren't enough coat hooks in a classroom for all of the students, the answer is not (and never will be) to auction off the existing hooks to the highest bidders -- put up more goddamn coat hooks. (How was that literally never suggested in the entire chapter where they used this as an illustrative example of market application?)
The middle section, particularly regarding auction design, was more engaging for me. However, throughout the book I found the authors' application of "diverse" gendered pronouns a bit odd -- I appreciate the impulse to use "she" in equal measure to "he" for generic examples but I noticed early (and often) that the "she" examples were almost universally the more negative ones. This was further driven home when the authors spent an entire chapter using (what they admitted to be) heteronormative middle school dance couplings as the descriptive example of deferred acceptance algorithms, where they somehow managed to entirely strip the majority of women within the example of any agency. The authors doubled-down on the gendered inequality by repeatedly commodifying the "prom queen" stereotype as a luxury good.
Although the authors acknowledged that they purposefully didn't discuss government intervention or regulation, I acutely felt the lack of that discussion throughout the book. Adam Smith was not a free market advocate -- he believed that unregulated capitalism would tend toward greed and inequality. The "invisible hand" is not a magical apparition within the heart of a market, it is the result of the direct intervention of regulators and/or market makers.
Finally, if there aren't enough coat hooks in a classroom for all of the students, the answer is not (and never will be) to auction off the existing hooks to the highest bidders -- put up more goddamn coat hooks. (How was that literally never suggested in the entire chapter where they used this as an illustrative example of market application?)
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