I want to premise by saying I thoroughly enjoyed reading Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society. While I have a lot of criticism of the book, it is not specifically the concepts that I find to be at fault – it is the extremity of the claims. Building his own Straw Man Read more…
I have a list of books to read as long as my arm and, I’ll admit, Wisdom wasn’t on that list. I came across the book in a rather serendipitous way as I wandered around Portland visiting a friend. Dotted through Portland’s peaceful little neighborhoods are “Little Free Libraries” – Read more…
At the advice of co-worker Hammans Stallings, the next book for 2014 is The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society by Eric Beinhocker. Complex Adaptive Systems: The purpose of this book is to propel a shift from traditional economics methodologies Read more…
The second book of 2014 is The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg. In it, Duhigg deconstructs habits in a series of anecdotes and that help us understand what they are, how they form, how they change, and what the aggregate effects Read more…
Now that I’ve finished Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, I want to add a few more ideas from the book to my list that I missed earlier, and then sum it up with a review. So, a few more important concepts: Mental Accounting: Often times, we’ll allocate Read more…
I’ve made it a little further in Nudge and would like to outline the authors’ rules for designing useable systems which they have, well, stretched, into the acronym NUDGE: Incentives: Provide Incentives for good decision making, even if they are small. It is important to remember that the fundamentals of Read more…
So, the first book of 2014 is Nudge, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein. I picked it up because my new goal, here in a few years, is to go back to grad school for a degree in Economics and I’d like Read more…