Misbehaving

Thaler's argument, told partly as a memoir of his own career-long fight with the economics establishment, is that mainstream economics built its models around a fictional creature he calls Econs — coldly rational, perfectly self-interested optimizers — and then treated any human behavior that deviated from Econ predictions as an anomaly to be explained away rather than data to be taken seriously. Behavioral economics, the field Thaler helped found, insists on the opposite: start from how people actually behave, quirks and all, and build the theory from there.

This matters because those "irrational" quirks aren't random noise that cancels out in aggregate — they're systematic, predictable, and have enormous real-world consequences, from how much people save for retirement to how professional sports teams draft players to how casinos design their floors. The book traces Thaler's decades-long argument with orthodox economists, and the string of experiments, oddities, and eventually institutional acceptance that behavioral economics fought for.

Who should read it

Anyone curious about why people don't behave like the rational actors in an economics textbook — including anyone making decisions about money, policy, or business strategy — will get a highly readable education in the field. It's also simply a fun, opinionated insider's account of an intellectual insurgency succeeding against a resistant establishment.

About the author

Richard H. Thaler is an American economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, widely regarded as a founder of behavioral economics; he won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for this work.