The act of designing and conducting an experiment to test a hypothesis seems so obvious today, yet the field of economics is still dominated by theory and rational thought. Scholars still fetishise over their thousands of theorems and their models of rational individuals living in a ceteris paribus world.
In The Why Axis, economists Uri Gneezy and John List attempt to answer the question: “Why do we act the way we do?” But instead of creating more formulas to throw into the next edition of some economics textbook or attempting to develop a grand unified theory of human behaviour, they conducted simple field experiments to reveal the answers to many pressing questions. The pursuit of knowledge led them to some of the most exotic parts of the world, making it nearly impossible to attribute their empirical data to confounding factors.
One of the core themes of Gneezy and List’s many experiments is the question of nature versus nurture. Are men more competitive than women? The answer is yes in most societies, since most societies used to be (or still are) patriarchal. But when the same studies were conducted in matriarchal tribes in India, women were more competitive than men, suggesting competitiveness to be a nurtured trait. Gneezy and List then went on to explore the role of nature and nurture on intelligence and the incentives behind discrimination. For the purposes of brevity: Intelligence can be nurtured, and discrimination in the West is more influenced by perceived economic benefits rather than genuine animus towards specific groups.
My favourite part was about the incentives behind charitable donations because their experiments on this topic revealed what happens when contradictory psychological effects clash with each other. For example, the advertisement that resulted in the most donations stated that 66% of the funding goal has already been met. This makes sense when you consider the effect of conformity. “If so many other people have donated, then it’s probably a pretty good cause that I can pitch in to.” Yet it contradicts what the free-rider effect would suggest: “If they’ve already raised so much money, surely they can reach the goal without me.” Turns out conformity wins over free-riders in the end.
The Why Axis also got me thinking about the ethics of field experiments. How moral is it to test unconventional teaching methods on young children? Do the ends of better pedagogical systems justify the means of potentially setting back our youth? I think they do, because running smaller scale experiments is still much preferable to an entire school board rolling out sweeping changes based on untested theories. And in the case of education, it's too costly to not try new things and continually strive for improvement.
The reason for the mediocre rating is that I felt the book tried to do do much, and as a result lacked in deeper insights. It serves as a nice springboard for future economics readings, and was a fun and easy read.
IRL Update (03/22/2023): Made quick work of this book, onto the next one!