The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life

John List is surely a candidate for the Nobel Prize, and this is a very fine, accessible summary of his work with Uri Gneezy. List did field experiments before they became cool, and some of the results (particularly in a tour de force study on paying kids to study with future Clark medalist Roland Fryer) are stunning. The book is also a model of simple, no-frills writing that is rather uncommon in academia.Outside Daniel Kahneman's seminal "Thinking, Fast and Slow", this is one of the best popular economics books in years, better than Levitt-Duber, better than Landsburg, better than Harford. Read it.

I WAS LISTENING AUDIO BOOK - THIS IS AN IDIOTIC BOOK,NOT WORTH A PENNY - THINGS WHICH ARE OBVIOUS ARE SHOWN AS "EXTENSIVE" EXPERIMENTS... PROLONGED, PUSHED AS BUNCH OF REPETITIVE ENGLISH LINES..

I really like this book because the authors are very creative scholars and the world needs more field experiments. Here are my two major drawbacks to the book.1. If the purpose of the book was to "feature" their own research, then they did a good job. If the purpose was to propose answers to the questions they raised, then they did a pretty lousy job. They ignore tons of other research (some of it experimental) done by scholars in other fields. How many people did they name besides a few co-authors? I'm sure it was less than 10. Even if the purpose of the book was to demonstrate the value of field experiments, there are lots of them out there that should have been acknowledged. Otherwise it sounds like they're saying "Have no fear world! Economists (from Chicago, no less) have arrived to solve your problems." And this is really the root of the problem: behavioral economists tend to ignore the huge amounts of work done in other fields by other people. Maybe their academic papers acknowledge them, but if you read books like this one or Freakonomics or Nudge, then you would never know of social scientists who have spent decades studying human behavior.2. Maybe this is addressed in their academic papers, but they never mention one huge threat to internal validity. In the educational experiments, how many people know about the experiment and who's in what condition? When parents find out that their child is in the "control" condition (or any other condition) how does that affect their behavior and the children's behavior? In other words, field experiments are great, but doing a truly double blind experiment is often impossible. It would have been nice to at least mention this problem.But still a book worth reading.

The empirical-instrumental method that has represented the basis of our modern scientific knowledge and the progress of our western world civilization is finally beeing applied to economics. Not singular in its approach to the topic, "The Why Axis" however has the freshness and catchiness of first responder reaction to field experiments. Many of these economical books for laymen are actually retellings of stories experienced by others. Here instead we have the actual experimenters narrating the how and why of their work. From societie's needs, to the people and groups involved in solving them Gneezy and List pull us into issues such as gender discrimination, modern racism, minority difficulties in schooling, charity business. They show us how it is difficult to make statements if these are not based on experiments, and how when experiments are carried out sometimes motivations and results are completely different from what we immagined. Social sciences and economics are a one and only discipline.Resting on the shoulders of giants such as Kahneman and Tversky, Gneezy and List take us another step into the new field of experimental and not theoretical economics and incite us to try our own experiments in our little backyards.A fun book, mind opening and optimistic. Leaves you happy.

I used this product to expand my horizons I'm very glad that the authors are located in the U.S.A. I appreciate very much the knowledge provided there. I wanted to read more about psychological factors and how they affect the acts that each individual person takes and how it affects in a holistic way the society that we live and the next generations. Tricky in a funny and adventurous way titles...I loved the way the story was being told I'm reffering to the way it reminded me something like a case study it was a great food for thought situation. The diagrams are very helpful althought I would like to see somewhere something more strange as a diagram not just one dimension if you could use the mat lab it could be more realistic to get the whole picture of what you want to say and push the button of the imagination of the reader to create something bigger. Thanks anyway it was a great book I regained so many memories thank you. Keep up the good work

Uri Gneezy and John A. List are world-class economists. Economic theory is, more often than not, fairly esoteric and boring to pretty much everyone who is not an economist (and likely even to many economists). Thankfully, Gneezy and List have side-stepped that whole concept, and have produced a fun, readable book that looks at everyday topics (that affect pretty-much everyone) through the lens of economic concepts like game theory. This is a fascinating and enlightening book.