52 Books Like Sludge

From this book, I learned that cognitive errors and human misbehaviours are not necessarily in contradiction to rationality.

It taught me that the generally negative perspective on psychological mechanisms provided by behavioural economics is limited. By contrast, a deeper understanding of what rationality means is needed. This book enriched my own way of analyzing how psychological factors impact daily decisions.

The book was, for me, an inspiring journey and an enriching learning experience. While conventional behavioral finance tends to analyze deviations from rationality within economic decisions, this book diverges, offering a holistic behavioral framework.

I like that the book views individuals not merely as economic agents but as complete beings, with financial well-being acting as a gauge for overall life prosperity. I believe that Prof. Statman's third generation of behavioral finance represents a paradigm shift towards a constructive scientific approach. I fully share its primary objective to empower individuals in their pursuit of personal fulfillment and satisfaction.

This book inspired me to apply quantitative and theoretical models to analyse the impact of human psychology on financial decision-making. The book is sometimes a bit technical, but I felt that that the explanations around the mathematical requirements sufficiently supported the development of my own intuition about their economic and psychological motivation.

I learned from this book how to combine economic theory and psychology to explain empirical and experimental evidence on asset prices.  As a mathematician, I was excited to learn how Prof. Shefrin mathematically included psychological factors in classical models for financial decision-making and analyzed the implications for asset prices.

This book is certainly the most technical among my favorites. However, I cannot resist listing it here because I really love it. Honestly, I highly esteem Peter Wakker, and I learned tremendously much from his scientific papers. Therefore, I read this book with high expectations, and these were fully fulfilled.

I learned from this book what prospect theory is and how it developed. I learned Prof. Wakker’s view on decision theory, and this strongly shaped my personal understanding of many decision-theoretical problems.

This book served me greatly in teaching courses on education and social stratification in Israel.

Its ethnography is fascinating and although it was published some 55 years ago its insights are still compelling and relevant. The book exposes the veiled bureaucratic interests which pull the strings behind the curtains of the educational system rather than ideals of justice and equity.

This critical analysis influenced my understanding with regard to the emergence of discrimination and racism that were the outcomes of concentrating Ethiopian children in separate classes for a long time.    

I cherish this groundbreaking book because it clarified to me the role of State bureaucracy behind various social phenomena, among which are: the connection between bureaucrats' power and violent behavior and the profound impact of State agencies on immigrants' integration processes.

The book's theoretical approach, which is based on power-dependence relations, encouraged me in analyzing the absorption of immigrants from Ethiopia (my PhD thesis) in terms of bureaucratic control rather than through cultural background and differences.

Not less important, this book was authored by the late Prof. Emanuel Marx, who was my admired supervisor and a very dear friend for over 40 years.  

The thing I love about this book is that it illustrates how difficult the jobs of street-level bureaucrats (i.e., public servants working directly with the public at the street level) are.

Being a cop, teacher, social worker, etc. is a lot more complex than what it looks like from the outside because it’s not just about helping citizens; it’s also about navigating all the rules and policies that govern how public services are delivered.

It’s impossible to read this book and not walk away with a respect for how hard those jobs are.

Another classic, Understanding Forests is the finest all-around narrative explaining the values of forests and the nuts and bolts of their management, their mismanagement, the bureaucracies of forestry and how they function, the needed reforms, and the political strides that must be taken, both twenty-five years ago and now. In one or two sittings a forest advocate can graduate from knowing very little to having an effective grasp of what we need to do for better care of our forests.  

I was very fortunate to have a coach from the Covey organization for a few years named Andy Cindrich, and I’m forever grateful for his help to shift my own paradigms around trust. 

I’d been raised with the story ‘Losing trust is like a house burning down… you can try to rebuild it, but it takes 18 months and it’s never quite the same…’ Through The Speed of Trust, I learned managing trust is a skill. When we embrace trust falls courageously and sort through the gap and pain with care and intention, we end up grateful for the problems and issues that allow us to show our character, reinforce our values, and elevate relationships. 

I wish for everyone to have these tools in their pockets, not to maintain perfect trust, but to fix things fast when they inevitably get messy between us humans.

This book is the best I have read on how simple and sound properties in science can be so misapplied in the legal system.

Thresholds and tolerances defined by specific scientific principles and studies, once incorporated into laws, can have unattended consequences when applied to scenarios never anticipated by the original studies.

The book gives numerous examples of well-intentioned laws creating havoc and causing harm when misapplied to new scenarios. It is a book that often comes to mind when I read the basis of a new regulation based on data that we never generated for that purpose.