If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered why modern society often views being selfish as "rational" rather than just plain wrong?
- Did you know that a small group of economists over the last 50 years may have fundamentally reshaped your personal sense of right and wrong?
- Are you curious about how academic concepts like "free-riding" and "game theory" have secretly given us a psychological licence to behave badly?
Listen to Licence to be Bad — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from Licence to be Bad
- Discover why economics is not a hard, objective science, but rather a collection of fallible human opinions that masquerade as absolute truth.
- Understand how the controversial, free-market ideologies of the Chicago School rose to dominance and fundamentally shaped modern global policies.
- Learn how radical economic theories have dangerously influenced society by encouraging us to blame regulators for financial crashes and ignore climate change.
- Find out why game theory promotes a coldly selfish view of human behavior, despite real-world evidence that people actively prefer to collaborate.
- Explore how Ronald Coase's observations about transaction costs were twisted by economists to put unregulated dealmaking and economic efficiency above the law.
Licence to be Bad — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: A set of controversial free‑market economic ideas now dominate the way we think about society.
Chapter 3: Game theory promotes an unusually selfish view of the world.
Chapter 4: Ronald Coase unwittingly led economists to place dealmaking upon a pedestal.
Chapter 5: Numerous economic theories are unduly harsh toward government.
Chapter 6: Free‑rider thinking feels tempting, yet can yield devastating consequences.
Chapter 7: Applying economic reasoning to daily life can lead us in some strange directions.
Chapter 8: People don’t always respond to incentives as economists expect them to.
Chapter 9: Our methods of calculating probability are fundamentally flawed.
Chapter 10: Modern economics is unduly accepting of extreme inequality.
Licence to be Bad Summary & Overview
Licence to be Bad (2019) explains how in the past 50 years a small handful of economists has drastically changed the way we think about the subject. Ideas including game theory, public choice theory, and free-riding have worked their way into our minds and our discourse, apparently permitting us to behave badly.
Who Should Listen to Licence to be Bad?
- Economists interested in rethinking the subject
- Ethics enthusiasts with an interest in recent thought
- Anyone wondering why we think the things we do
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