The Logic Of Life
   HOME
*





The Logic Of Life
''The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World'' is a book by Tim Harford published in 2008 by Random House. Harford argues that rational behavior is more widespread than expected in the larger population. He uses economic principles to draw forth the rational elements of supposedly illogical behaviors to illustrate his point. Overwhelming gain paradox The overwhelming gain paradox is a paradox of reasoning that is referred to in the book. Harford illustrates the paradox by the comparison of three potential job offers: * In Job 1, you will be paid $100, and if you work hard you will be paid $200. * In Job 2, you will be paid $100, and if you work hard you will have a 1% chance of being paid $200. * In Job 3, you will be paid $100, and if you work hard you will have a 1% chance of being paid $1 billion. Most people will state that they will choose to work hard in jobs 1 and 3, but not job 2. In Job 1, working hard is obvious because there is a clear rewar ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Tim Harford
Timothy Douglas Harford (born 27 September 1973) is an English economic journalist who lives in Oxford. Harford is the author of four economics books and writes his long-running ''Financial Times'' column, "The Undercover Economist", syndicated in ''Slate'' magazine, which explores the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. His column in the ''Financial Times'', "Since You Asked", ran between 2011 and 2014 and offered a sceptical look at the news of the week. Since October 2007 Harford has presented the BBC Radio 4 programme '' More or Less.'' The series segments are also available as podcasts. Subsequently Harford launched his own podcast on the podcast production network Pushkin Industries, called ''Cautionary Tales''. Education Harford was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School and then at Brasenose College, Oxford. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and then a Master of Philosophy in Economics, in 1998. Harford said that he ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Random House
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. History Random House was founded in 1927 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, two years after they acquired the Modern Library imprint from publisher Horace Liveright, which reprints classic works of literature. Cerf is quoted as saying, "We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random," which suggested the name Random House. In 1934 they published the first authorized edition of James Joyce's novel ''Ulysses'' in the Anglophone world. ''Ulysses'' transformed Random House into a formidable publisher over the next two decades. In 1936, it absorbed the firm of Smith and Haas—Robert Haas became the third partner until retiring and selling his share back to Cerf and Klopfer in 19 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Little, Brown And Company
Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown in Boston. For close to two centuries it has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Early lists featured Emily Dickinson's poetry and ''Bartlett's Familiar Quotations''. Since 2006 Little, Brown and Company is a division of the Hachette Book Group. 19th century Little, Brown and Company had its roots in the book selling trade. It was founded in 1837 in Boston by Charles Little and James Brown. They formed the partnership "for the purpose of Publishing, Importing, and Selling Books". It can trace its roots before that to 1784 to a bookshop owned by Ebenezer Battelle on Marlborough Street. They published works of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and they were specialized in legal publishing and importing titles. For many years, it was the most extensive law publisher in the United States, and also the largest importer of standard English law a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Hardcover
A hardcover, hard cover, or hardback (also known as hardbound, and sometimes as case-bound) book is one bound with rigid protective covers (typically of binder's board or heavy paperboard covered with buckram or other cloth, heavy paper, or occasionally leather). It has a flexible, sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened. Modern hardcovers may have the pages glued onto the spine in much the same way as paperbacks. Following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk. Hardcover books are often printed on acid-free paper, and they are much more durable than paperbacks, which have flexible, easily damaged paper covers. Hardcover books are marginally more costly to manufacture. Hardcovers are frequently protected by artistic dust jackets, but a "jacketless" alternative has increased in popularity: these "paper-over-board" or "jacketless" hardcover bindings forgo the dust jacket in favor of printing the cove ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Irrational
Irrationality is cognition, thinking, talking, or acting without inclusion of rationality. It is more specifically described as an action or opinion given through inadequate use of reason, or through emotional distress or cognitive deficiency. The term is used, usually pejoratively, to describe thinking and actions that are, or appear to be, less useful, or more illogical than other more rational alternatives. Irrational behaviors of individuals include taking offense or becoming angry about a situation that has not yet occurred, expressing emotions exaggeratedly (such as crying hysterically), maintaining unrealistic expectations, engaging in irresponsible conduct such as problem intoxication, disorganization, and falling victim to confidence tricks. People with a mental illness like schizophrenia may exhibit irrational paranoia. These more contemporary normative conceptions of what constitutes a manifestation of irrationality are difficult to demonstrate empirically because it ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Paradoxical
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time. They result in "persistent contradiction between interdependent elements" leading to a lasting "unity of opposites". In logic, many paradoxes exist that are known to be invalid arguments, yet are nevertheless valuable in promoting critical thinking, while other paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions that were assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identificatio ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


The Undercover Economist
''The Undercover Economist'' () () is a book by Tim Harford published in 2005 by Little, Brown. The book provides an introduction to principles of economics, including demand-supply interactions, market failures, externalities, globalisation, international trade and comparative advantage. It explains in non-technical terms how Starbucks and other coffee providers price their products, why it is hard to buy a decent used car, why the health insurance system in the United States is failing, and why poor countries remain poor while the People's Republic of China has continuously grown rich in the last couple of decades. ''Freakonomics'' author Steven Levitt called it "a rare specimen: a book on economics that will enthrall...Beautifully written and argued, it brings the power of economics to life." See also * ''The Logic of Life ''The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World'' is a book by Tim Harford published in 2008 by Random House. Harford argues th ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

2008 Non-fiction Books
8 (eight) is the natural number following 7 and preceding 9. In mathematics 8 is: * a composite number, its proper divisors being , , and . It is twice 4 or four times 2. * a power of two, being 2 (two cubed), and is the first number of the form , being an integer greater than 1. * the first number which is neither prime nor semiprime. * the base of the octal number system, which is mostly used with computers. In octal, one digit represents three bits. In modern computers, a byte is a grouping of eight bits, also called an octet. * a Fibonacci number, being plus . The next Fibonacci number is . 8 is the only positive Fibonacci number, aside from 1, that is a perfect cube. * the only nonzero perfect power that is one less than another perfect power, by Mihăilescu's Theorem. * the order of the smallest non-abelian group all of whose subgroups are normal. * the dimension of the octonions and is the highest possible dimension of a normed division algebra. * the first numb ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Books About Philosophy Of Economics
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is '' codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

English-language Books
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots language, Scots, and then closest related to the Low German, Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is Genetic relationship (linguistics), genealogically West Germanic language, West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by Langues d'oïl, dialects of France (about List of English words of French origin, 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]