I recently read Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, a book about behavioral economics, and I enjoyed it very much. The examples he uses are fascinating, and he obviously likes people (despite some of the outcomes of his experiments), which is always appealing in an author. I also entertained myself trying to guess the outcome of the experiment before he revealed it.

Predictably Irrational argues against standard economic theory on the basis that pepole make choices which aren't data driven, but are down to a quirk of the psyche. I don't find that argument a stretch; he fairly convincingly demonstrates that people are not necessarily data oriented.

The big weakness of this book, to me, is that I don't agree with the title. Because he doesn't look at why people make the choices that they do, future choices which are similar but different aren't predictable. I also suspect that what we call a rational choice is a short-term logical assessment of the data we have available; but how we actually behave is much more dependent on what makes for successful choices as a species. Which means that the choices we make, while not always data driven, are not necessarily irrational.

While this book convincingly argues that standard economical models don't offer a complete view of human behavior, it provides very little insight into how to predict behavior or why exactly we apparently make irrational decisions.