Life sometimes seems illogical. Individuals do strange things: take drugs, have unprotected sex, mug each other. Love seems irrational, and so does divorce. On a larger scale, life seems no fairer or easier to fathom: Why do some neighborhoods thrive and others become ghettos? Why is racism so persistent? Why is your idiot boss paid a fortune for sitting behind a mahogany altar? Thorny questions–and you might be surprised to hear the answers coming from an economist.
This morning, I strapped my two-year-old daughter into her buggy and walked her to the toddlers' art club at our local community centre. Our Hackney neighbourhood is rough around the edges. A town planner might raise an eyebrow at the mechanic's yard, piled high with wrecks, at the end of a row of terraced houses. A sociologist might draw your attention to the betting shops and massage parlours, or the pool of dried-up vomit in the gutter outside our local bar. A novelist might linger descriptively on the bunch of dead flowers, bleached and desiccated in the bright June sunshine; they were propped forlornly against the wall of a notorious nightclub, commemorating a young man who was recently shot dead.
Introduction
One Introducing the logic of life
Two Las Vegas
Three Is divorce underrated?
Four Why your boss is overpaid
Five In the neighbourhood
Six The dangers of rational racism
Seven The world is spiky
Eight Rational revolutions
Nine A million years of logic
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index