Predictable Irrationality or Hidden Rationality?: Our First Author One-on-One

Now that we've started bringing authors onto Omni, we thought the next step would be to open the floor to two authors to talk directly to each other, without our getting in the way. (But feel free to get in the way yourself in the Comments section.) How often, for instance, would you like to see a book review, instead of serving as the final word, start a back and forth between the author and the reviewer (played out somewhere less infantile than the Letters to the Editor sandbox)? Or see debut authors trade notes about what it's like to have your first book published? We're hardly the first people to think of this sort of thing (Slate has done it well for years, although not as often as they used to), but it's new to us, so we're excited.

And we're excited about our first pairing, which was so glaringly obvious and potentially fascinating that it forced us into action. One of the liveliest and most popular new subgenres in publishing (along with Vampire Romance and Brett Favre Tributes) is Popular Economics, bustling with witty contrarian analyses of the ways the dismal science can illuminate our everyday lives, all coming in the wake of the blockbuster Freaknomics. But not all Pop Econ books are alike. In fact, on the surface, it looks like the two most popular new books in the genre this year, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and Tim Harford's The Logic of Life, have a pretty basic disagreement. Ariely, says his book jacket, "refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways," while Harford's book jacket replies, "Under the surface of everyday insanity, life is logical after all." So, underneath it all, are we irrational or rational? (Or is one man's irrationality another's rationality?)

That's a fine disagreement to begin with, but from reading both books, you can tell the sides would not remain so simply divided (despite the doctored fight photo above that Ariely sent in when we proposed the idea--Ariely's in the red trunks and Harford's in the green, white and red). In part, this is a piece of a larger debate between traditional rationalist economics (Harford is an economics columnist for the Financial Times and Slate and the author of the bestselling Undercover Economist) and the newer field of behavioral economics (Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT), but more than that, it will be, I hope, a conversation between two smart and funny guys with a rare talent for connecting complex ideas to our daily lives.

The conversation actually began in February, when Harford wrote a largely positive review of Predictably Irrational in the FT. Here's a quote:

I could scarcely imagine a better introduction to “behavioural economics”, a discipline of growing influence that sits on the boundary between economics and psychology. But opinions differ among economists as to whether behavioural economics seriously challenges the long-held basic assumption of economics that we make rational choices, or whether it merely illuminates some fascinating but relatively minor human foibles.

Ariely continues things here on Omni with his first post today. Harford will follow later in the week, and for the next few weeks we'll keep roughly to a Monday/Thursday schedule. Please add your own comments to the discussion in the meantime, and thanks for joining us. --Tom

P.S. You'll notice Dan Ariely's photo a couple places on our page: our interview with him is also featured in the current episode of our Amazon Wire podcast (you can play the podcast in the right column of the blog while it's the current episode, or find it in the archives).