Economist's World View

I am reading Tim Harford's "The logic of life". I read his "the undercover economist" in Chinese translation, Harford's work was not much my cup of tea then. However, "The logic of life" started with very interesting opening, the game theory. The mathematician, Von Neumann vowed to decode the highly irrational human factors in poker game with mathematical modeling (whether he had succeeded or not is still of a question, at least I cannot quite see). We all respond to incentives, we trade in everyday life, making decisions in the hope of being better off. Harford tries to find out answers to our everyday life, such as why oral sex has increased dramatically among teenagers or why the lobbyists only protect a handful number of people's interest without being scrutinized by the public. The heartbroken facts about life, racism. Why is that companies respond to "white" sounding name resumes more than "black" sounding name ones?

In fact, every chapter is equally engaging. The particular chapter is about marriage. Marriage is basically an arrangement in response much of economic sense. A factory is more efficient when workers have a particular skill and the collabration of workers with different skills speeds up the productions. The union of a girl and guy is much like this, a family produces desired well-off feelings, such as stablity and share of offspring rearing. Man tends to be the breadwinner, not necessary because he is good at it, most likely because he would create a mess if staying home taking care of kids.

It is a bit scary to see marriage as a contract to create a economical agreement. However, if you think really into it, that's indeed what's going on for anyone in it, you give what you can (willing to give) and harvest the fruit out of it.