RedPhoenixxx wrote:
It's a really interesting book, although in fairness there is not much "new" in there. Behavioural change is an old concept, all these guys have done is collected of all the disparate evidence of its efficiency into one place. But still, entertaining and intellectually stimulating.
The concept is definitely not new, but this book goes a little further and actually advocates policies based on the underlying ecomonic and psychology theories.
As a random tangent, this is always one of the hardest things that I've found to explain to people when they learn that my degree is in economics. They assume that I mean macroeconomics, i.e. national fiscal and monetary policy, balance of trade, etc. However, the most interesting field of economics nowadays (in my opinion anyways) is behavioral economics, which plays a large chunk (or should, at least) in current policy construction.
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As for similar reads, "Blink" is pretty good (you only need to read 1/3 of it to "get it"), anything by Malcolm Gladwell (Wisdom of Crowds, for ex), and of course "the Undercover Economist" by Tim Hartford is really cool too. Freakonomics is another obvious one.
I've read The Undercover Economist, as well as a few other of Tim Harford's books, and found then to be quite interesting. Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics were also pretty neat, although the latter seemed to advocate policies that were intentionally controvertial solely for the sake of publicity (and the resulting book sales).
I've heard good things about Gladwell, so I'll check him out next.