I just finished reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. It was a Christmas present from my wife. At the time I thought it was another pop-psychology-business book so I wasn’t too excited to get it as a gift. I feel like I’ve ran the gamut through these types of books. But as I started reading it I realized that it was the author that Michael Lewis wrote his own book about. So I figured it must be good. Once again, my wife knows me better than I know myself. She got me a book that I ended up really liking. It’s definitely in my top 5 all time books.

The “Thinking…” book is basically a trip down experiments that expose how biased humans are. How we say we want one thing but in reality we choose something else. It’s a fascinating read on how the human mind is split into a intuitive, fast-thinking (but often wrong) brain that helped us survive and evolve. And then there’s the slower, deeper-processing brain that is lazy, but can be called upon to really investigate when needed. The author won a Nobel Prize for economics, despite himself being a psychologist.

This is the part that I really love, the economics. I love to think of myself as an armchair economist. I didn’t care one bit for finances or budgeting or economics until the Great Recession (and marriage) in 2009 forced me to rethink how I look at the world and how the world works. I was also spending 3 hours a day commuting to/from work, so I had plenty of time to listen to audiobooks. I devoured about anything I could get on economics and finances, which led me to philosophy, and then to my holy grail that integrated all of this – Behavioral Economics. You see, it’s just not enough to know the basics of economics and how resources are allocated and all of that. You need to dig deeper, to find out more than what the textbook rational actors do. You need to find out how humans really think and act in the real world. That’s what I find fascinating about behavioral economics. It’s info about info, it’s meta-data, it’s one step beyond.

Growing up I was always the smallest of any group. I was the youngest and smallest of my siblings, and I was the smallest/weakest of my friends group. It was through knowledge, curiosity and education that I felt powerful. My group of friends was a wonderful bunch – I still love them to this day. We all had a role and fit into it. There was the leader, the joker, and the brains. I tried really hard to be the brains, and to stay in that role. I guess you could say that this role made me a better person. It defined who I was, this kid who got good grades. I don’t know how much of this I was born with, versus how much of this was a personality I developed just to fit in. [I mean, think about. How awesome was my group of friends growing up? There was no peer pressure. We didn’t try to be “cool” or fit in or be like each other. We respected each other for who we were and didn’t try to change each other.]

But being the smallest meant that I had to be smart to have any sort of power. And not only did I need to have information, I had to have information that not a lot of other people had. I had to know weird facts and stuff like this, stuff that would set me apart from the normal information people had. And that’s why I love behavioral economics in my later life. Like, you can make good decisions if you know the basics of economics. But to be really good, you’ve got to know more than the basics. You have to go meta. So knowing how real people make decisions is fascinating to me, because I feel like I can make good financial decisions with this knowledge, and not only does knowledge = power, but money = power lol.