Are You Crazy?

How rational are our choices? In the 21st century, at least, not very.

That’s the message we’re getting from all these recent “popular-economics” books.

Just look at some of the titles that have come out this year (I’ll forgo the links—they’re all on Amazon and Barnes & Noble):

• Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

• The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

Perhaps the granddaddy of them all, Irrational Exuberance, by Robert Shiller. (You’ll remember that the title came from a speech by Alan Greenspan in 1996.)

All this comes on the heels of various books that have come out in the past couple of years that discuss how stupid our brains are, like:

• A Mind of its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

• Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

• Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

• Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

• On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not

The market for books about irrational markets has also been driven by the success of Freakonomics and other contrarian books about economics, such as:

• More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics

• The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas

• The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor—and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!

(Yet another trend is the monosyllabic title for books meant to uncover the deep and often irrational mental infrastructure beneath of our decision making—Blink, Sway, Kluge, Nudge.)

What to make of this madness? Two obvious things come to mind (and come with yet more bullet points):

• We’ve just come out of a couple of mighty economic bubbles (high tech and housing), where people clearly were made stupid by their greed. Turns out the laws of economics weren’t overturned after all!

• We’re also massively in debt, even though we “know” that we don’t need most of the stuff we buy—and “know” we can’t afford all of it.

In short: Yep, we are irrational.

Call it “the power of magical thinking.” In fact, maybe I’ll call that the title of my own book. There’s clearly a market for it.