Beyond Misbehaving: Changing Universities, Pluralism, and the Evolution of a Heterodox Behavioral Economist

This fascinating book is both an intellectual autobiography and a self-help career guide for academic economists. It tells, in a good-humoured way, a cautionary tale about the career arc of its recently-retired author, set against the backdrop of an evolving university environment that increased the challenges faced by academic economists who deviate from the mainstream. It is a deeply reflective, tell-all account, in which the author does not hold back from analysing his own role in how he under-achieved despite earning a double-first at Cambridge, being willing to switch countries to advance his career, having an unshakable work ethic and spending four decades working in behavioral economics, an area that eventually became very popular. It explains how the author began to work in this area around the same time as the 2017 Nobel Laureate, Richard Thaler, but went down a very different, much more radical pathway as a behavioral economist, a pathway that has resulted in an approach that