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Agreed - Misbehaving is a really interesting history of the development of the field, and the characters introduced along the way. I was also doing Thaler a dis-service, I find his writing to be far more page-turny than Kahneman or Sunstein.

> Misbehaving is a really interesting history of the development of the field

A Thaler-centric history. There are others...

(I have a copy of Misbehaving.)

Nudge is pretty easy reading from Thaler and Sunstein. Personally tough, I preferred his Misbehaving which goes into his history with the field. Way back when, I had a couple courses with Thaler when he was calling the field Behavioural Decision Theory.

Misbehaving by Richard Thaler. It's like Thinking, Fast and Slow except more hilarious.

Tl;dr: Many organizations make decisions like a drunken madman whose seeing-eye dog just ate his hearing aid.

For reasons why, see Thinking, Fast and Slow (just reading it now; it's quite good) and Thaler's Misbehaving.

sounds like someone read Misbehaving by Richard Thaler, which I'm about halfway through right now.

Great book on behavioral economics, and Thaler's academic career, for anyone who hasn't read it.

If you enjoyed this article, I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, in which Thaler and insights like the one highlighted in this article feature prominently.

I also happened to stumble across this gem yesterday: Michael Lewis writing on Kahneman and his influence on Moneyball, the book and the revolution:

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112

I was impressed by Kahneman's humility, although not at all surprised after reading the book.

One of these days, I'd like to start a discussion about Kahneman's recommendations for doing interviews from Thinking Fast and Slow. Just waiting for the right "Interviews are broken" thread, I guess.

Finally, in fairness to the article at hand, I should probably check out Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics when it comes out.

Thaler has written a couple of books. Nudge (with Cass Sunstein) focuses on how the "right" decisions can be "nudged" by setting up appropriate decision frameworks.

Misbehaving is more of a personal history of how he got to behavioral decision theory. I particularly enjoyed that because I had a couple classes with him when he was working on these ideas early on.

While his co-authored Nudge is an easy read and is probably better known, his more recent Misbehaving gives a good account of how his career and the field developed.

It’s really interesting stuff. I actually had a couple of grad courses with Thaler when he was at Cornell. I still have a draft copy of one of his earlier books in Behavioral Decision Theory somewhere.

The interest rate (.2%) is very, very small.

I'm currently getting 2% from a non-FDIC insured institution, but there are many examples of FDIC-insured accounts with far greater returns.

Axos - 1.09%
https://www.axosbank.com/Personal/Savings/High-Yield-Savings

CIT - .95%
https://www.cit.com/cit-bank/bank/savings/savings-builder-ac...

T-Mobile Money - 4% (up to $3,000)
https://www.t-mobilemoney.com/en/home.html

I'm a large fan of behavioral finance (read Misbehaving, in Thinking Fast & Slow), etc. -- but this feels like a huge disadvantage to be giving people. Unless you have math that says the average winnings people will get will make up for the .7-8% difference you see other institutions giving?

> One of the things Richard Thaler points out in Misbehaving (on behavioral economics) is that traditional economics cannot decide whether out is descriptive or normative.

That's because "traditional economics" doesn't actually exist as an entity, it's a strawman.

It can't "decide" because it includes different people amd groups who can decide, and who have decided differently.

Here's some: with why I like them

Thinking, problem solving related:

Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock: accurate forecasting

Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman: how to avoid bias

Misbehaving: like thinking fast and slow but more hilarious

The checklist manifesto by Atul Gawande: the power of simple process

From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin: lots of mental models to add to your latticework

Business management:

The Outsiders by William Thorndike: capital allocation

The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz: some mental models for managers facing the real-life struggles of startups

Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake masters: for the chapter on what kinds of business are always going to be tough (i.e. ones in perfectly competitive industries)

Worldview:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined

The making of modern economics by Mark Skousen (audiobook): explains various economic ideas through telling the history of the fathers of those ideas.

Investing:

You can be a stock market genius by Joel Greenblatt: where to look for undervaluation

The Essays of Warren Buffett by Lawrence Cunningham: Buffett's thoughts in Buffett's words, neatly categorised by topic

Competition Demystified by Bruce Greenwald: how to identify a high quality business

Go back to the 1980s or so and a lot of economists may have recognized that their assumptions didn't really hold in a some cases but the orthodoxy was still that underlying theory was fundamentally economically rational [in the sense of assuming, for example, that people maximize expected value] in nature. What behavioral economics has done is started to provide intellectual foundations for observed behavior that isn't explained by traditional economic models.

Richard Thaler's Misbehaving is a good read on how this developed. I had Thaler as a professor for a couple of classes in the early 80s and I found some of the insights from early-on behavioral economics some of the more useful things I learned in my MBA.