Pun Salad

I put this book on my get-at-library list back in February when the author, Richard Robb, appeared on Russ Roberts' EconTalk podcast. (After the months-long library hiatus, things are finally starting to disappear from that list. It's pretty long.)

I was (and am) a lousy philosophy student, lacking patience and intellect. But I got a feeling about what I liked about the best philosophers or at least, my favorites: the ability to carefully dissect complex concepts into component parts, using precise and clear language, making plausible arguments and relevant examples.

Some of that has fallen out of favor these days. But not with Richard Robb! It's perhaps telling that Robb is not a philosopher, at least not a professional one: he's a hedge fund manager. He also has a teaching gig at Columbia, but in the "School of International and Public Affairs", where he teaches microeconomics, economic foundations of capital markets and international finance.

So he is nominally a real-world kind of guy. But here he delves into (see subtitle above) how we choose our actions. And his argument is straightforward. There is the Homo economicus model, where we are strict utility-maximizers, assigning a "price" to everything: worldly goods, various kinds of leisure, companionship, etc. We rationally trade off one for another.

Well, not always. Because we're also slaves to cognitive biases, so we make mistakes. And sometimes we have an unclear grasp on what we want. But those things can be corrected, and we're still in the realm of what Robb calls "purposeful" behavior, where goals can be (and often are) rationally compared, one against another.

But the main theme of the book is Robb's carve-out of "for-itself" choice. Things we do because "we are who we are". Because of our social relations with others. Because we want to stay on course to achieve our own goals, when it might make more "rational" sense to do eternal mid-course corrections.

So: not bad, all in all. Robb gives plenty of examples from his own life doing that hedge fund thing. If you think you would be interested, I'd suggest you check the podcast linked above, an easy intro.