Great book that makes you think about the mundane and routines of life from an economic perspective. Highly recommended. ( )

Harford’s previous work is stronger, but The Logic of Life is entertaining enough, if not wholly sound. The work is best approached as a way to gain exposure to a number of fascinating economic topics and relevant research, while ignoring Harford’s overreaching generalizations and sometimes unfounded conclusions.

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Very good, in a similar vein to his first. I thought there were quite a few interesting ideas and I must say that the length of this book was just right - having just finished it, I'm not so tired of the subject that I don't want to go and have a good think about it! ( )

After waiting about a year for this to be released in paperback, this reviewer devoured it in a couple of days, rather as she suspected she would.

The reference to "everything" is somewhat ambitious for 240 pages, and a little more so than for Bill Bryson in his 500 page "Short History of Nearly . . .". But that can be forgiven. Harford tries to sound somewhat like Steven Levitt (although has some claim to have been writing about this stuff for longer), and touches on some similar subjects as Steven Landsburg does in "More Sex is Safer Sex" too. But the author reserves a bigger chunk of "Logic"'s coverage for the game theory-derived work of Gary Becker and Thomas Schelling to write about rational crime and rational racism ("not justifiable, of course"). To that end, it isn't the "new economics" either, but rather, fare from the last few decades refreshingly re-aired. The subtitle had vanished by the time this reviewer got her hands on the paperback anyway.

Harford extolls a strong theme of rational behaviour throughout the brief tour of interesting phenomena (love, marriage, divorce, overpaid bosses, inner city decay and racial segregation within them and in education and employment, urbanisation continuing despite the death of distance). This is useful in two respects--one being that proof of rationality begets true understanding, the second being that once you figure out that people are responding to incentives, you can also conceive of how to change behaviour by altering the payoffs, unless that is too difficult, which it sometimes is. Some of the conclusions about rational response are quite arresting, such as in the "marriage supermarket", where if women outnumber men by just one, the scarcity value of the slightest imbalance can give the men all the bargaining power, leaving the women with none.

Another finding that the book skirts with revealing, but doesn't quite get into, is what is called naturalistic decision-making. This is most apparent in chapter two ("Las Vegas"), where John von Neumann's analysis of poker, exploited most famously by Chris "Jesus" Ferguson to win the 2000 World Series, hints at how hard it actually is to codify rational strategy when a game gets just a little bit complex. The non-academic poker legends are portrayed as performing similar rational calculations to those that super-algorithms do, but on the fly and without really realising that they are doing it. So while myriad intricacies of rational choice may well underlie success in strategic interactions, prevailing is still an art more than a science. This would corroborate numerous failed attempts to get extraordinary performers (and not just in poker) to perform anything like as well in laboratory settings as they do in the field. (Gary A Klein's book "Sources of Power" has a lot more on this--"Logic" does not even mention the term naturalistic decisions)

The book will likely jar a little with the school of thought about irrationality that has spawned a lot of pop-science books lately. However the conflict that might result from any perceived dichotomy is mostly false. Just as pop-economics is blossoming by extending the idea of incentives well beyond dismally scientific pecuniary ones, "rational" choice is similarly amenable to extension to include the rationally-irrational within its ambit: as long as there is a benefit to a daft choice, sensible folk will demand it and cough up for the transaction too. So, um . . . perhaps it does explain everything after all.

Francesca ( )

Unlike other recent books on behavioral economics (such as Predictably Irrational, Sway, and Nudge), this book argues that people are rational. Choices such as having oral sex, smoking, or not getting an education are logical conscious or unconscious decisions made by individuals. While I don't fully accept this thesis, the book intelligently discusses many interesting studies and theories, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in why people act the ways they do. ( )

Charming and intelligent. Very good discussion of race. ( )

In his tongue in cheek style, Tim Harford explains why Economics is logic of life. A recommended reading for everyone along with his previous book (Undercover Economist), in order, for everyone. ( )