The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

The latest picks from the proof pile previewed by The Bookseller's editorial team. The blog is edited by The Bookseller's Book News editor Benedicte Page.

Tim Harford: The Logic of Life

01.10.07

Neill Denny writes:

Why can it sometimes make sense for employers to be racist? Why can it be logical for prostitutes to shun condoms? Why are their more women than men in New York? These are some of the eye-catching problems explained by Tim Harford, who will be known to many of us as the author of The Undercover Economist, something of a companion volume to Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics.
 
In this second book, The Logic of Life (Little, Brown, Feb), Harford applies so-called rational choice theory to a host of everyday dilemmas, getting economic theory out of the textbook and into the street, the workplace and the bedroom.  He believes economic analysis can be applied to a host of decisions which are not purely economic: how to vote, where to live,  where to go to uni, etc.
 
If you believe that people are essentially rational, argues Harford, then a host of surprising conclusions come into view. If crime persists, for example, crime must pay, because otherwise it would not be worth being a criminal. If the financial gains of unprotected sex with a client outweigh the odds of catching Aids, prostitutes will not use condoms, and so on.
  
Harford is pretty clever, using a series of headline grabbing dilemmas to illustrate what would otherwise be quite dry economic theory to suck you in,before he then goes on to cover a whole range of meatier subjects such as the "rewards for failure" amongst chief execs and why lobby groups have such a grip on the democratic process. I haven’t quite read the whole book yet but it has been pretty eye-opening so far.

Harford is very funny and very brutal when he applies economic theory to love and marriage. The reason there are so many more single women in big cities like New York is that that is where the richest men are: women are trading off the smaller chance of marrying against the possibility of marrying a rich man. In rural areas, men outnumber women precisely because they are less interesting in marrying a rich wife, or because they have been priced out of the city. As Harford puts it “Manhattan’s women may constantly grumble about the lack of marriageable men in the city, but it is their rational choice not to relocate to Alaska.”  When you put it like that…
 
He is also very good on why cities are such edgy places, and why people will pay such vast sums to live in the right areas; the short answer is, the proximity of people brings random meetings, which generate random ideas, some of which are profitable, so the net effect is the bigger the city, the richer it is.
 
Although most of Harford's research data (and for the book he has rounded up plenty of obscure academic research) is American, he is currently based in London, which supplies a fair few examples. I am off to interview him next week for a piece in the magazine: perhaps he’ll give me some ideas to help pay the rent and stop my wife divorcing me for someone richer.

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