The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour by Adam Ferrier If you’ve read a couple of behavioural economics/behavioural science books, it doesn’t take long to become bored with hearing the same experiments and examples over and over again. Ferrier manages to largely avoid that problem. He works in advertising, so has plenty of new stories to tell, and it’s interesting to hear how advertisers go about their job (and desperately try to win the beer accounts).

Tyler Cowen described Joanna Masel’s Bypass Wall Street: A Biologist’s Guide to the Rat Race as “Darwin plus Fred Hirsch on positional goods as applied to finance and portfolios. Unorthodox, interesting.” I agree with Cowen’s description of the book as unorthodox and interesting, although I was looking forward to more Darwin and more of a biological lens. As the title of the book implies, it provides a biologist’s view on savings and investment, and Masel’s background as a biologist - she is Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona - has likely guided her as to what arguments she is sympathetic to.

In The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall asks why we live and breathe stories. We are prolific storytellers. We consume movies, novels and plays. We even create stories in our sleep. Gottschall’s argument is that our propensity to storytelling is an evolved trait that helps us navigate problems. He likens stories to flight simulators that prepare us for problems when they arise. Here are snippets from two chapters.

For pitching in to help my PhD supervisor on a paper, I’ve scored my first biology publication: Sperm use economy of honeybee (Apis mellifera) queens Authors: Boris Baer, Jason Collins, Kristiina Maalaps, Susanne P. A. den Boer The queens of eusocial ants, bees, and wasps only mate during a very brief period early in life to acquire and store a lifetime supply of sperm. As sperm cannot be replenished, queens have to be highly economic when using stored sperm to fertilize eggs, especially in species with large and long-lived colonies.

If you have read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, you will be familiar with the concepts of System One and System Two. Gerd Gigerenzer is not a fan of the dichotomy, with the below passage from an interesting interview by Justin Fox (the one over N heuristic Gigerenzer refers to is the heuristic to invest your money equally across your N options): What is system one and system two?

John Kay’s Other People’s Money is generally an excellent book. Kay argues that the growth in the size of the financial system hasn’t been matched by improvements in the allocation of capital. He proposes that financial services are not as profitable as some headline numbers would suggest. And he suggests that the replacement of those who are good at meeting clients on the 19th hole with those who were good at solving complex mathematical problems was not always a good thing - sometimes clever people are the problem, particularly in a complex environment.

I am sympathetic to many of Peter Thiel’s arguments in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, but this is not a book where the arguments are buttressed with evidence to convince you they are true. Below are some random observations. Thiel argues that competition is something a company should avoid. Competition erodes profits, so you want to be a monopoly. In some ways Thiel’s argument isn’t about avoiding competition, but a recommendation to compete in different spheres - competing to find the next monopoly, wealth, status, etc.

I am in two minds about Doug Kenrick and Vlad Griskevicius’s The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think. As an introduction to evolutionary psychology and the idea that evolutionary psychology could add a lot of value to economics - and behavioural economics in particular - it does a pretty good job. On the other hand, the occasional straw man discussion of economics and the forced attempt to sex up the book kept distracting me from the central argument, so I never found myself really enjoying the reading experience.

A touch late, but as for earlier years, my list comprises the best books I read in the year, not the best of those released in the year (in fact, almost every book I read was released before 2015). It’s a short list - I read only 20 or so non-fiction book this year - but here it is: Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward Glaeser.

A couple of months ago I was notified that my PhD thesis had been passed (full pdf here). I have posted about each chapter before: The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics Economic Growth and Evolution: Parental Preference for Quality and Quantity of Offspring Population, Technological Progress and the Evolution of Innovative Potential Sexual selection, conspicuous consumption and economic growth Evolution, Fertility and the Ageing Population.