Written by a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for showing how ridiculous it is that economists model humans as rational agents, this book is a treasure trove of insights on how we act like we do and why.

Elections results can be predicted with 70% accuracy by asking uninformed strangers to judge "leadership qualities" on the sole basis of the candidates' headshots. Everybody knows the World is not predictable, but act as if it was. We're quick to attribute to skill was is likely the result of chance alone. Investment managers and professional pundits both do demonstrably worse than dart-throwing chimps at picking stocks or forecasting political developments. Even those who read the studies demonstrating that their record is best explained by luck and accept it intellectually continue doing their job still "believing" in their predictive powers. Firms with award-winning CEOs do worse than those lead by unknowns. The majority of drivers think they're better than average at driving but the majority of people think they're worse than average at starting conversations with strangers. Terrorism and lotteries work for the same reason: we overweight low-probability events.

And that's just a sliver of a percentage point of the shocking results explained in this book. Even if you've read Thaler, Susstein, Ariely, Taleb and Mlodinow, as I have, you'll learn a lot in this book. If this is your first brush with behavioral economics and decision science, you're in for an amazing treat.