It's the Economy, Stupid, with Emphasis on the Stupid: A Review of PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL
With this week's headlines about the dizzying volatility of the stock market, we've seen investors jump in and out of the game as they've responded to the most powerful emotions on Wall Street: fear and greed. Surprising? Not if you're Dan Ariely, behavioral economics guru at MIT and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. This may be the most entertaining econ book you'll ever read, as you laugh at other people's foibles and then wince inwardly as you recognize some of the described behaviors in your own life. It may make you swear off shopping, at least for a while.
The basic premise of the book is that yes, people behave irrationally where money is concerned (thank you, Alan Greenspan!). But Ariely's contribution is to prove, through research so far-ranging it will make you pity his research subjects, a.k.a. Poor Sod Graduate Students, that people behave irrationally in quite predictable ways. We will, for example, almost always report more satisfaction with a product if we know it was expensive--even if that means we give high marks to an ineffective medical placebo. On the other hand, we will also go to ridiculous lengths to obtain any product that is "free," a fact that marketers realize and routinely exploit. That chapter reminded me of the Simpsons episode where Lisa asks Homer in disbelief if he is drinking blood. "Correction!" Homer responds. "Free blood." Bottom line? We'll do just about anything to get something for nothing.
There were a couple of great anecdotes in the book. One was about a company that introduced one of the first bread machines in the world. The trouble was, nobody bought it; people who already routinely made bread at home didn't understand why they would need a machine to help them do it, and those who didn't already make bread weren't about to start. The company's marketing folks hired a consulting firm, which advised them to also introduce a very high-end bread machine to sell right alongside the other. It would have all the bells and whistles and be super-expensive, out of reach for most consumers. The point of this exercise was not to push the high-end model but the basic one, which started to sell like gangbusters. Apparently consumers love and need choice, and they always want to feel they're getting a deal. When faced with the option of the high-end machine, they both a) felt justified in buying the less tricked-out version and b) felt that they were part of a movement that was trendy, exciting, and upper-class. Interesting. It's similar to the phenomenon in fancy restaurants that might have a $40 entree. Very few people order it, but its presence on the menu sure makes them feel better about the $26 entree they actually choose.
Another fascinating revelation is that the presence of an honor standard or system really does work. Ariely find that people were less likely to steal or cheat when reminded of the Ten Commandments, for example, even when they couldn't remember what all the commandments were. Just being reminded of some sort of honor benchmark (which could be anything, not just something religious) helps to prevent cheating. Also, people are less likely to steal when the results of their thievery are direct. In an informal experiment, when Ariely put Cokes in his refrigerator at work, they disappeared readily. When he put actual cash in the fridge, no one touched it. As he points out, stealing food and beverages is out of someone else's pocket, as if they had stolen cash, but most people stop short of stealing actual money. This is why white-collar criminals try to justify their behavior as victimless crime.
It's not a perfect book, and some of the research is too anecdotal to convince Ariely's fellow economists, but for the general reader it's fantastic--well-written, story-driven, and even funny. High marks.
Do any of the following describe you?
And--the fun abounds!--the movie is strong too. My husband, who had not read the book (and who, I am sorry to admit, has read no Austen at all, though he has so few other serious faults that one might overlook this), enjoyed it thoroughly. It's a movie that is a party in its own right, and I would see it again, despite the fact that so many interesting subplots had to be cut to shrink the book to a filmable length.
And then there is the book’s delicious back matter, absent of course from the movie. Fowler has more appendices than the trio of endings to Return of the King, including, most entertainingly, a chronology of reviews and comments about Austen from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. Austenites can puff up with righteous indignation at Mark Twain’s infuriating comment that he would like to dig up Austen’s shin bone and smack her skull with it (!), or Sir Walter Scott’s scathing, patronizing review of Emma. (Scott later changed his tune.) And we can all cheer at E.M. Forster’s confession that he was “slightly imbecile about Jane Austen,” who was his favorite author. I always knew there was a reason I liked Forster.
What is harder to forgive is the movie’s total overhaul of the book’s characterizations. All the bad guys get to remain bad, but the bad girls get a makeover. In the book, Mary is one of the only characters we can root for, because every person around her—her parents, uncle, sister Anne and brother George—is scheming to get ahead, though George at least is an ally. Anne in the film is almost unrecognizably human, even kind, speaking gently to her servants (would any Tudor queen have thanked her servants in that wholly American way?), showing maternal affection and concern for her daughter Elizabeth, and loving her sister Mary. In the film, they begin as best friends whose relations are temporarily fractured by their competition for the king’s bed, but in the much more interesting book their relationship is tortured from first to last. And in the book, their mother is one of the most calculating and ambitious members of the family, showing no love to any of her children and thinking of them only in terms of how they might push the family forward. In the film, the mother (played by a too-little-seen 
