Reviews and Comments

I didn't actually finish this. And while I'm always game for a good counterintuitive argument, there are just too many bad ones here, where the author plays the contrarian for the sake of, well, just doing that, I guess. The problem with economics is that it's a pseudoscience in which creative thinkers gravitate toward conservative assumptions in order to extrapolate fanciful outcomes, while pretending all of it is ironclad, unassailable logic. Some of this might make for a pretty decent science fiction premise, but despite professing to represent reality, those assumptions really don't hold up well in 2025.

The attention-grabbing book title has a point, though, because better sex education, communication, and mental and physical support (healthcare, etc) is safer for society, and yet, somehow, Landsburg doesn't hit on any of that. Instead, the entire point is just encapsulated by a story about some guy (authorial self-insert perhaps) who probably should have banged his coworker because that would save her -- and presumably, society, somehow -- from potentially catching a venereal disease from a different, more sexually experienced guy. Okay. I decided to make a good economic decision and stop wasting my time on this book.

A quick read. I feel like trying to employ techniques to gauge whether someone is lying to you to be exhausting if you go through life using them all the time. Perhaps it's ultimately more useful to know of them in case anyone else who's read this book is trying to manipulate you.

More generally, the book is useful as a way of understanding you and how other people think. Part II is about how self-esteem really affects the way people behave, so understanding whether or not people like themselves will shed a light on any interaction. More importantly, for me, as I'm also going through life grappling with self-esteem issues, it helps to know how resolving them will also change my own interactions with others.

A couple of other notes: the writer uncritically leans on Meyers-Briggs and Maslow's hierarchy of needs here, whose validity have been called into question by others elsewhere. While it doesn't necessarily invalidate the entire book, it does remind us that this is one view of how humans work -- possibly narrowed by American or Western cultural norms -- and not necessarily a magical how-to guide reflecting a universal truth. As Lieberman himself disclaims early on, his research can only give you a statistical advantage, not a crystal ball. Context is everything. And unfortunately, in the real world, one does not have the privilege of running the same interaction hundreds of times to test the statistical edge.