In Scarcity: Why having too little means so much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir tell the following (now famous) story: To see the effect of scarcity on fluid intelligence, we ran some studies with our graduate student, Jiaying Zhao, in which we gave people in a New Jersey mall the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test. First, half the subjects were presented with simple hypothetical scenarios, such as this one: Imagine that your car has some trouble, which requires a $300 service.

Last month a new meta-analysis of ’nudges’ by Stephanie Mertens and friends was published, with a headline finding that: choice architecture interventions overall promote behavior change with a small to medium effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.45 (95% CI [0.39, 0.52]). The criticism came fast. Andrew Gelman jumped in to “broadcast the problems with this article right away”. He wrote: Wha . . .? An effect size of 0.

This week I finally took the plunge and joined academia. It’s a possibility that has been lurking over me for close to ten years, although recently I had been of the view that the time had passed. As I wound up my PhD in 2014, I nosed around the Australian academic job market. With twins on the way, I was somewhat reluctant to nose further afield, so only applied for two foreign opportunities that were a particularly good fit.

This reading list is a balance to the one-dimensional view in many popular books, TED talks, or conferences. For those who feel they have a good understanding of the literature after reading Thinking Fast and Slow, Predictably Irrational and Nudge, this is for you. [In the time since I first wrote this, it’s fair to say that the balance has swung on Twitter.] The purpose of this reading list is not to argue that all behavioural economics or behavioural science is bunk (it’s not).

Gerd Gigerenzer is fond of telling a story about Harry Markowitz, modern portfolio design pioneer and winner of the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Here’s one version of the story, from Risk Savvy: Assume you have a chunk of money and want to invest it. You do not want to put all your eggs into one basket and are considering a number of stocks. You want to diversify.

It was easy to see why many behavioural practitioners loved the idea that you could induce honesty by getting someone to sign a form at the top, not the bottom. It was practical. It was cheap to implement. It involved more than the common “send them a reminder” or “chuck a social norm on it” that comprises much of the applied behavioural science canon. (That said, don’t underestimate reminders.) It provided an unintuitive proposal to improve business outcomes that wasn’t likely to come from any other source.

The best books I read in 2021 - generally released in other years - were: David Badre, On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done: Effectively spans from the latest neuroscience to practical applications. The presentation of some computational models of our brains was great. I think about them a lot. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding: I’m not sold on the overarching thesis, but I love the way they pull apart many different theories and approaches in psychology.

These notes are now out-of-date. See the updated notes here. – Below are the notes I developed in preparing content for a unit in Applied Consumer Financial Decision Making as part of UTS’s Graduate Certificate in Behavioural Economics. (It was titled Behavioural Approach to Investment and Insurance Decisions). The course was for post-graduates with no assumed prior knowledge of economics or behavioural economics. This unit taken taken after introductory economics and behavioural economics units.

The best books I read in 2020 - generally released in other years - were: Albert Camus, The Plague Tom Chivers, The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World: Great introduction to and history of the rationalist community. Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, A Guide for Thinking Humans: Mitchell is too easy on humans, but a fair examination of where we are with AI and some great explanations of various AI approaches.

Below is the text of my presentation at Nudgsestock on 12 June 2020. Intro Over the past decade or two, behavioural scientists have had a great ride. There have been bestselling books and Nobel Memorial Prizes. Every second government department and corporate has set up a team. But recently, the wind seems to have changed. We’re told that behavioural economics is itself biased. “Don’t trust the psychologists on coronavirus - Many of the responses to Covid-19 come from a deeply-flawed discipline”.