Life sometimes seems illogical. Individuals do strange things: take drugs, have unprotected sex, mug each other. Love seems irrational, and so does divorce. On a larger scale, life seems no fairer or easier to fathom: Why do some neighborhoods thrive and others become ghettos? Why is racism so persistent? Why is your idiot boss paid a fortune for sitting behind a mahogany altar? Thorny questions–and you might be surprised to hear the answers coming from an economist.

This morning, I strapped my two-year-old daughter into her buggy and walked her to the toddlers' art club at our local community centre. Our Hackney neighbourhood is rough around the edges. A town planner might raise an eyebrow at the mechanic's yard, piled high with wrecks, at the end of a row of terraced houses. A sociologist might draw your attention to the betting shops and massage parlours, or the pool of dried-up vomit in the gutter outside our local bar. A novelist might linger descriptively on the bunch of dead flowers, bleached and desiccated in the bright June sunshine; they were propped forlornly against the wall of a notorious nightclub, commemorating a young man who was recently shot dead.

  Introduction

One   Introducing the logic of life

Two   Las Vegas

Three  Is divorce underrated?

Four  Why your boss is overpaid

Five  In the neighbourhood

Six   The dangers of rational racism

Seven  The world is spiky

Eight  Rational revolutions

Nine  A million years of logic

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index