It may be time for me to take a break from behavioral economics books…

…because I think I’m at the point where I can quote word-for-word from the conclusions of all the major current studies that go into the average one of these. Maybe a year or so from now, some new research will have been done, but right now, everything is starting to feel a bit recycled.

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, for example: an elegant synthesis of an enormous amount of difficult information in an impressive amount of detail.  It’s just that I knew a lot of it already, from reading many, many other books building on Kahneman’s work and cross-referencing him frequently. The pleasures I found here were in the smallest details, like seeing the actual math behind Bayes’ theorem (not that I could explain it now, mind you, but, much like my experiences with reading Stephen Hawking, for a few brief, shining hours, it all made perfect sense). I also enjoyed the focus on the role of luck, and the idea that in fact the idea of regression to the mean is essentially about luck, but I’m sure the book felt a lot more revolutionary to readers who hadn’t been down the path before.

Where Kahneman did an elegant overview, Dan Ariely‘s The Honest Truth About Dishonesty takes a zoom lens to one of the topics that’s covered almost as an aside in a lot of behavioral economics books: lying and cheating, and how we rationalize such behaviors to ourselves. Which, at least in this book’s opinion, basically boil down to various kinds of priming effects and contexts—though I will note that this did feel a little oversimplified, more so than in a lot of these book. Again, definitely interesting in the small details—I was especially intrigued by the research into the way one kind of act of dishonesty, like carrying a counterfeit Prada bag, can spread “contagiously” to one’s overall willingness to cheat in other circumstances—but none of it felt ground-breaking anymore either. To this reader, who freely admits she may be in a bit of a rut, anyway.

What Money Can’t Buy

Michael Sandel is a political philosopher, not an economist, behavioral or otherwise—which makes What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets a very useful and thought-provoking companion piece to the plethora of economics/psychology/sociology/ cognitive science hybrid books (Freakonomics and its descendants, among them the very comprehensive Thinking, Fast and Slow, if you want to dip into that field) currently trying to explain social behavior in economic terms, and vice versa.

Where the more familiar trend is to look at the way our decision-making sometimes fails to follow classical economic precepts (like maximizing rewards in a purely self-interested and measurable way), Sandel is taking a step further back, and looking at the ethical foundation of not just a market economy but our increasingly market-based society: What does it mean to value “first-come/first-served” as a method for allocating certain scarce resources (or time) versus paying a price for faster service (or for getting the access at all)? What are we saying when we create monetary incentives for certain activities, rather than other cultural rewards?

Sandel also teases out the logically necessary but often evaded fact that at the root of the market society is the proposition that those with less access to money somehow either desire other goods and services less, or deserve less access to, well, just about everything else, from health care to theatre tickets to seats at a congressional hearing. Now, hard-core free-market libertarians may really believe that to be true, but Sandel wants to examine the ethical conclusions of that proposition, and of replacing other kinds of value scale with explicitly monetary ones.

If paying underachieving kids to read books brings a dramatic improvement in reading skills, we might decide to try it, hoping we can teach them how to love learning later. But it is important to remember it is bribery we’re engaged in, a morally compromised practice that substitutes a lower norm (reading to make money) for a higher one (reading for the love of it).

The book is slim; it barely brushes the surface of a lot of the issues it raises, and I’d like to see a follow-up that actually connects some of these ideas more specifically with contemporary Western political rhetoric. But, in a way similar to David Graeber‘s Debt (which, with its rigorous anthropological approach to understanding capitalism in historical terms, thoroughly challenged my mind earlier this year, and which I need to go back and re-read sometime when I can give it more undivided attention and more thoroughly work on my own understanding of some of its historical analogies and complicated analyses), Sandel forces us to confront the presuppositions that condition our understanding of our society and its norms. And that is always valuable.