The Why Axis
Hidden Motives and The Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Two of Forbes magazine’s “world’s most powerful economists” provide the breakthrough ideas to challenge the assumptions of human decision-making.
Can economics be passionate? Can it centre on people and what really matters to them? And can it help us understand why they do what they do in everyday life? Two revolutionary economists believe it can.
In The Why Axis, Uri Gneezy and John List lead us on a journey to discover the economics underlying human motivation and how to structure the incentives that can get people to move mountains.
Finding the right incentive can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but Gneezy and List have pioneered an innovative approach to zeroing in on those needles. Like other economists, they gather data and build models, but then they go much, much further, embedding themselves in our messy world—the factories, schools, communities and offices where people live, work and play. Their goal: to discover solutions to the big, difficult problems, such as the gap between rich and poor, the violence plaguing inner city schools, why people really discriminate, and whether women are really less competitive than men.
Their revelatory and startling discoveries about how incentives really work are both groundbreaking and immensely practical. This research will change the way we both think about and take action on big and little problems. Anyone working in business, politics, education or philanthropy can use the approach Gneezy and List describe in The Why Axis to reach a deeper, more nuanced understanding of human behaviour and a better grasp of what motivates people and why.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gneezy and List, economists at U.C. San Diego and the University of Chicago, respectively, specialize in ingenious "field experiments" that elucidate the workings of social psychology and decision making: from a ball-tossing game that exposes the social pressures that make women shy away from competition, to role-playing skits that tease out the subtleties of discrimination at car dealerships. There are some less-groundbreaking findings men, it seems, give more money to door-to-door fundraisers if they are attractive females but also many counterintuitive insights: it's possible to boost sales of a wine by raising its price; increase charitable giving by letting prospects opt out of solicitations; and even raise profits by letting customers pay whatever they want for a product. Writing in the Freakonomics vein of breezy pop-econ (Steven Levitt provides the foreword), Gneezy and List assert that "self-interest lies at the root of human motivation," but it's a self-interest broadly conceived to include the "warm glow" of philanthropic sacrifice and readily influenced by the unobtrusive policy nudges they suggest. The authors' lucid, engaging exposition of thought-provoking research spotlights some of our more perverse promptings and their underlying logic. Photos.
