If you have read Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan you will have come across some of Benoit Mandelbrot’s ideas. However, Mandelbrot and Hudson’s The (mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward offers a much clearer critique of the underpinnings of modern financial theory (there are many parts of The Black Swan where I’m still not sure I understand what Taleb is saying). Mandelbrot describes and pulls apart the contributions of Markowitz, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and friends in a way likely understandable to the intelligent lay reader.

One of my favourite parts of Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment is his chapter examining the reasons for “radical skepticism” about forecasting. Radical skeptics believe that Tetlock’s mission to improve forecasting of political and economic events is doomed as the world is inherently unpredictable (beyond conceding that no expertise was required to know that war would not erupt in Scandinavia in the 1990s). Before reading Expert Political Judgment, I largely fell into this radical skeptic camp (and much of me still resides in it).

Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers is largely an exercise of shooting fish in a barrel, but is an entertaining read regardless. The central premise of the book is that most blockbuster business books (think Good to Great), for all the claims of scientific rigour, are largely exercises in storytelling. The problem starts because it is difficult to understand company performance, even as it unfolds before our eyes.

Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction doesn’t quite measure up to Tetlock’s superb Expert Political Judgment (read EPJ first), but it contains more than enough interesting material to make it worth the read. The book emerged from a tournament conducted by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), designed to pit teams of forecasters against each other in predicting political and economic events. These teams included Tetlock’s Good Judgment Project (also run by Barbara Mellers and Don Moore), a team from George Mason University (for which I was a limited participant), and teams from MIT and the University of Michigan.

A common summary of Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? is that “experts” are terrible forecasters. There is some truth in that summary, but I took a few different lessons from the book. While experts are bad, others are worse. Simple algorithms and more complex models outperform experts. And importantly, forecasting itself is not a completely pointless task. Tetlock’s book reports on what must be one of the grander undertakings in social science.

Last year’s World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society and Behaviour from the World Bank documents many of what seem to be successful behavioural interventions. Many of the interventions are quite interesting and build a case that a behavioural approach can add something to development economics. The report also rightly received some praise for including a chapter which explored the biases of development professionals. World Bank staff were shown to subjectively interpret data differently depending on the frame, to suffer from the sunk cost bias and to have little idea about the opinions of the poor people they might help.

While I suggested in my post on Jonathan Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting that reading about demographics in developed countries was not uplifting, the consequences described by Last could be considered pretty minor. A slight tightening of government budgets could be dealt with by raising pension ages by a few years. Incomes may be lower than otherwise, but as Last states, “A decline in lifestyle for a middle-class American retiree might mean canceling cable, moving to a smaller apartment, and not eating out.

Here are three I recently enjoyed: Econtalk:Brian Nosek on the Reproducibility Project - Contains a lot of interesting context about the reproducibility crisis (of which you can get a flavour from my presentation Bad Behavioural Science: Failures, bias and fairy tales). Econtalk: Phil Rosenzweig on Leadership, Decisions, and Behavioral Economics - The problems with taking behavioural economics findings out of the lab and applying them to business decision making.

I’ve recently read a couple of books on demographic trends, and there don’t seem to be a lot of silver linings in current fertility patterns in the developed world. The demographic boat takes a long time to turn around, so many short-term outcomes are already baked in. Despite the less than uplifting subject, Jonathan Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster is entertaining - in some ways it is a data filled rant.

After the recent hullabaloo about whether ego depletion was a real phenomenon, I decided to finally read Roy Baumeister and John Tierney’s Willpower cover to cover (I’ve only flicked through it before). My hope was that I’d find some interesting additions to my understanding of the debate, but the book tended into the pop science/self-help genre and there was rarely enough depth to add anything to the current debates (see Scott Alexander on that point).