Misbehaving

Editorial review

Thaler's intellectual memoir is the best one-volume history of behavioral economics from the inside. He is funnier than most economists and substantially more honest about the role of professional ego in academic disputes.

AI-generated summary

Nobel laureate Richard Thaler tells the story of how a small, scrappy field built itself from a list of empirical anomalies — behaviors traditional economic models could not account for — into a discipline that now influences governments, firms, and how we model human beings.

Key takeaways

• 1

  Real economic agents differ systematically from the 'Econs' of textbook models.

• 2

  Endowment effects, mental accounting, and fairness preferences are robust and consequential.

• 3

  Disciplines change when anomalies accumulate faster than the dominant theory can absorb them.

• 4

  Most ideas are rejected first by their own field, then later canonized by it.