Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Freakshow Freakonomics

WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird by Peter Leeson

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This is one of a stack of books I was generously given by Econ Dave, the college professor husband of one of the doctors I work for. I’m still not 100% sure whether it’s endearing or annoying that any time we socialize, I end up bending his ear about economics books I’m reading, but given the stack of books he recommended he can’t be that mad about it.  This one looked like the most fun, confirmed when the doctor handed me the pile and said […]

The Beatles of Behavioral Economics

The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

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As I’m sure has been obvious from my reviews, I’m a behavioral economics fiend. I love economics as the study of human behavior, particularly explaining irrational or unexpected human behaviors. I’ve read dozens of books on the subject, and many of them reference the same studies, so much so that I’ll read half of a sentence and think “oh, this one where people think that a coin flipped ten times as heads will be tails next because it’s “due,” instead of it being the same […]

Leggo your eggo

Decisive by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

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I’m a waffler. I waffle like an Eggo. I waffle like an ice cream cone. I am so bad about pulling the trigger on any decision and am constantly evaluating alternatives (thanks, anxiety! Store-bought serotonin can only eliminate so much of my personality). So I was pleased when I found that Chip and Dan Heath – whose Made To Stick put them on my “I’ll buy anything they write” list – wrote a book about making better decisions. The Heaths go through the “WRAP” process […]

“We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence” (a Bromance)

The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

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Behavioral economics is such a popular topic nowadays that noted economist and student of human behavior Richard Thaler was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in the field in 2017. I first became interested in the topic that same year when I was asked to give a presentation at work, and I started by reading Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational (read my review here!). Back in the 1970s, though, the suggestion that people, as a general rule, behave irrationally in all sorts […]

Maybe we don’t think so good

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

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This book, by the author of Moneyball, is essentially a biography of the two men who did more to change the way we think about thinking.  Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are Israeli psychologists who discovered heuristics and connected the fields psychology and economics, helping create the new field of behavioral economics.  If you recognize either name, it is probably Daniel Kahneman who wrote the outstanding book Thinking, Fast and Slow a few years ago.  At the beginning of that book he writes about his […]

Outdated, but easy to see why it’s popular.

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I’m afraid I don’t really have much interesting commentary to contribute to the discourse around Freakonomics. The first edition was published over 10 years ago, and I strongly suspect that the contents seemed much more “rogue” then, than they do now, in the thick of a Big Data revolution where these type of interdisciplinary data-mining projects to form sociological hypotheses have become altogether common and trendy. Clearly, Levitt and Dubner have a good sense for interesting topics and an accessible approach to exploring them, as […]



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