But while Shirky's book is useful for understanding how to foster innate motivation and generosity in people, Arielly's work tackles the route to happiness from a different cardinal direction. He does this by breaking down the effects (both good and bad) of "free," the power of comparisons--real and illusionary--in decision-making, the pull of sunk costs (i.e. "ownership"), the conflation of price and value, etc. It's not long before the illustrations of how we fritter (or gamble) away our time, money and opportunities becomes downright dismaying. And, although the honesty is commendable, it's more dismaying still when the anecdotes Arielly uses are from his own experience--at a time when he, intellectually, should have known better. (The fact that many experiments were carried out on unsuspecting MIT students, who are supposed to be pretty sharp, only rubs salt into the already-stinging pride...)
But ignorance is bliss, it also comes with a high price tag. When the folks on our lovely jewel of a planet come to their senses and elect me Supreme Benevolent Dictator for Life, this will be mandatory high school curriculum, which I don't say about much, except for memorizing the formula for computing compound interest. And knowing how to use apostrophes (for those languages that have them). And understanding logical fallacies. Oh, and not making stuff up about history or the constitution of your country, darnitalready!
Anyhoo, since my ascension to absolute power seems to be slow in coming, I'll only say that I don't have enough thumbs to give this book the props it deserves. Go--pester the library for it if they don't already have it. Trust me.
