A review by tbauman
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

4.0

I enjoyed this book, but it occupies a weird ground between autobiography, history, and popular science book, and I'm not sure it totally works. A lot of good popular science books (like the classic "Thinking, Fast and Slow") have only a handful of strong ideas repeated frequently that you can easily remember after reading them. Thaler's work, to his credit, doesn't fit such a simple structure. The story of his life is amusing but not enthralling. There are a few interesting experiments about perception, but the main takeaway is that most of the assumptions of economics are wrong. If you're already interested in the topic, you'll learn some things and you might enjoy this book, but if you want to learn behavioral economics, you're better of looking elsewhere.