Here are the details, Tuesday April 15th:

The following event has been organized by our Holland Park Shop and is part of an occasional series taking place at the Louise T Blouin Institute, 3 Olaf Street, London W11 4BE.

15th April 2008 at 6.30pm

DAUNT BOOKS - HOLLAND PARK

In conjunction with

LOUISE T BLOUIN INSTITUTE presents

TIM HARFORD

The Times called Tim Harford’s bestseller, The Undercover Economist “As lively and witty an introduction to the supposedly “dismal science” as you are likely to read.” His new book, The Logic of Life, always entertaining and often provocative, is an astonishing guide to the hidden logic of the world around you.

Tickets £5, includes wine.

Reserve Tickets with Daunt Books - Holland Park : 0207 7277 022
Or email: hollandpark@dauntbooks.co.uk

Do please come along.

Tomorrow evening I’m speaking about my new book at the RSA in central London, with Stephanie Flanders. Details:

The Logic of Life

Lecture | 08 April 2008 18:00 | National

Speakers: Tim Harford, Stephanie Flanders

Location: RSA, 8 John Adam Street, London, WC2N 6EZ
Booking Status: Open
Join Tim Harford, award-winning journalist and author of the bestseller The Undercover Economist, as he looks at the logic behind the seemingly irrational.

Chair: Stephanie Flanders, BBC Economics Editor

In his new book, The Logic of Life, Harford argues that under the surface of everyday insanity, incentives are at work. 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? But many people comply with economic logic, always taking account of future costs and benefits, even if they don’t quite realise it.

Book here, it’s FREE.

Richard Florida, who coined the phrase “The World Is Spiky” - which I purloined for chapter 7 of The Logic of Life - has an excellent new book out, “Who’s Your City?”. The book’s website is here. My own thoughts on the spiky world here.

That is New York Magazine on The Logic of Life. I think it’s good news for me, especially since they place it much closer to “brilliant” than to “despicable”. But I am not sure.

The rigours of the book tour mean that I am very late to this piece in Fast Company, but perhaps it is still news to some of you. The writer, Clive Thompson, reminds us of Malcom Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” and the role of influential opinion-formers in spreading news:

These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. “What we are really saying,” he writes, “is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others.” In modern marketing, this idea–that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends–is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free. Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims “E-Fluentials” can “make or break a brand.” According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billon is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That’s on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.
Yet, if you believe [Duncan] Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.

I would not be quite so quick to write off “The Tipping Point” - in any case its main merit has always been that it’s a cracking read. But Duncan Watts is a fascinating researcher and the Fast Company article is excellent too. You can also read a piece Watts wrote for the New York Times last year. And inspired by these pieces, I’ve just read Watts’s book, “Six Degrees” and heartily recommend it. (Confusion alert: there is another book out there with the same title.)

I was in Singapore last week, promoting The Logic of Life. One feature of the book that some reviewers have picked up on is that the book contains a thoughtful, rigorous and (in my opinion) decorous few pages on the economics of oral sex. It was only as my interview schedule was nearly finished that the publicist said, “by the way, oral sex is illegal in Singapore“.

Hm. Fascinating. And it would have been nice to be told before commencing the tour of Singapore.

While I’m in Australia, let me lament the fact that “Parentonomics” is currently scheduled to be published only in the Lucky Country. Here is author Joshua Gans’s blog; here are his thoughts on parenting; here is how to make a profit from a children’s party. I am meeting Professor Gans later this week and looking forward to it.

Not sure where my weekend columns have disappeared to - they are supposed to appear on this blog. While we wait, here’s my review from yesterday’s FT of Dan Ariely’s excellent “Predictably Irrational”. But wait! Controversy is afoot. The Economist dislikes the book almost as much as I like it:

Mr Ariely’s weakness for soft-headed extrapolation from experimental findings are on full display at the ends of his chapters. For example, in his second chapter, a few clever experiments are deployed to show that it is possible that a trade may not produce a surplus of utility. Without any discussion whatsoever of the real-world frequency of such cases, Mr Ariely proceeds to question the general validity of the law of demand. And then we find this:

If we can’t rely on the market forces of supply and demand to set optimal market prices, and we can’t count on free-market mechanisms to help us maximize our utility, then we may need to look elsewhere… If you accept the premise that market forces and free markets will not always regulate markets for the best, then you may find yourself among those who believe that the government (we hope a reasonable and thoughtful government) must play a larger role in regulating some market activities, even if it limits free enterprise.

I find this flabbergasting. Every indication is given by Mr Ariely that these alleged irrationalities are general tendencies of the species. So they must afflict every voter, every politician, every bureaucrat, every power hungry general. How exactly is “a larger role” for the government supposed to improve on the coordinating function of the price mechanism? We are offered no details about the principles by which the allegedly superior mechanism is supposed to perform. I suppose we just hope, as Mr Ariely does, that “reasonable and thoughtful” people come to power. To my mind, this is just transparent political signaling (”Hey guys, I’m no right-winger!”), not social science.

This is fair criticism given unfair prominence. As I mention in my review, Ariely’s heroic policy conclusions are weak. But they are also a small part of the book. By the time I’d finished reading it, I’d mentally discarded them and simply remembered an excellent account of experimental science in action. No accounting for taste…

Tyler Cowen never ceases to amaze:

Popular economics books reveal their true colors most clearly when they talk about sex. In Freakonomics sex is not holy but rather sex and reproduction lead to the birth of criminals…For Harford sex is a slightly naughty pleasure, and a pleasure to be mocked, but at least it is a real pleasure; this American reviewer again cannot help seeing the British tinge of his work.

There is more, much more. Do I agree? I’m not saying.

I was astonished when the enormous Old Theatre at the LSE was packed out at least fifteen minutes before I gave my talk on 6 Feb. Lots of people were turned away, including some for whom I’d reserved seats. I’m a bit embarassed about that, although obviously pleased that the event was popular.
But… there will be another chance to hear me talk about “The Logic of Life” at the Cass Business School on 12 March. Details are here - along with details of other talks in The Lake District, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Singapore, Wellington and several Australian cities too. Looks like we’ll arrange a couple more London events later in the spring, too.