One-year anniversary

Taking stock

In this post, I take stock of the first twelve months of this Substack: why I started it and where it is going. After one year, I am also turning on the option for paid subscriptions to offer readers the possibility to support this Substack.

I launched this Substack in May 2023. Twelve months later, it is time to celebrate the first anniversary of this Substack, take stock of how it has shaped up and look at how it is going to develop next.

The aim of this Substack

Quality contributions

I have been active on Twitter since 2017. My aim was to contribute to the public discourse in a positive manner. Over time, and somewhat unexpectedly, I have grown a significant number of followers.

Twitter profile

Over the years, I am happy to have made several contributions that reached a wide audience.¹ However, I have found Twitter’s short format (and the incentives it gives to posters) somewhat restrictive for substantive contributions. The takeover by Elon Musk and several of his subsequent actions have raised questions about the fate of the platform. Many academics have left Twitter and the switch to an algorithmic selection of posts seems to be overly favouring viral content at the expense of the posters you may have chosen to follow.

A key motivation for my involvement on social media has been to bring high-quality insights out of the ivory tower of academia. I saw in Substack a possibility to invest in a way to communicate more interesting content than on Twitter. I thought that a core of interested readers could pick up high-quality pieces about human psychology and sociality. Indeed, that is what happened, and I am glad this Substack has now found an audience.

Building on my book Optimally Irrational: Unifying Behavioural Sciences

The other reason I started a Substack is because of the publication of my book Optimally Irrational. Having worked in behavioural economics for many years, I felt the field, or how it was broadly discussed, was overly presenting a pessimistic vision of humans’ cognitive and decision-making abilities. Behavioural economics was often summarily presented as having established that “people are irrational”. This was particularly the case for one of the most popular researchers in the field, Dan Ariely.² In this book, I aimed to show that people are much better at making decisions than this description could suggest.

Behavioural economics was born from well-founded criticisms of standard economic principles that somewhat assumed people were overly simple computer-like agents. Behavioural economists investigated a range of new theories making sense of psychological biases found: risk preferences, social preferences, and time preferences. However, paradoxically, neighbouring behavioural disciplines like cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary sciences, have been in the meantime producing very different insights, often depicting humans as much better decision-makers than commonly assumed in behavioural economics.

With my book, I aimed to bring together a wealth of ideas and results from across behavioural sciences presenting the view that human decision-making is not the product of a patchwork of defective rules; instead it is a product of aeons of evolution that have made our decision-making surprisingly good at navigating the rich and highly complex world we live in.

The book has been very well received, notably among behavioural economists. There is a broadly shared feeling in the field that we need to look for more fundamental and unifying explanations of behaviour. I believe it is likely to be one of the growing directions of research in behavioural economics and other behavioural sciences. The success of Optimally Irrational, was the second motivation for me to start this Substack: to continue the discussion it initiated.

Toward future books: Human behaviour and sociality

A third reason to start this Substack was that, having finished Optimally Irrational, I had ideas for future books that would go beyond discussion of the issue of “biases” and provide a consistent viewpoint on human behaviour and sociality.

That viewpoint consists of using the insights of economics to peer through the complexity of human life. By “economics”, I do not mean macroeconomics, the study of growth, inflation and trade which most people are familiar with as the type of economics they hear about in the news. I mean the science of decision-making: how to optimally allocate resources and make the best decisions in strategic situations. Life is the result of an evolutionary process that selects the organisms that make the best decisions possible. For that reason, economics is the natural grammar to understand it and evolutionary biologists indeed share the same formal tools with economists: optimisation techniques and game theory.

This approach offers an outlook that makes perfect sense but is nonetheless somewhat radical given the current state of social and behavioural sciences, siloed in different disciplines using different language and often assuming widely different explanations for individual and social behaviour. This outlook makes it possible to propose a unifying picture of the key questions we may have when thinking about human life: from understanding the foundations of our cognitive processes to the seemingly unfathomably rich aspects of social life.³ Such a perspective is in line with the unifying perspective of two recent books I have greatly enjoyed: Minds Make Societies (2018) by Pascal Boyer and A Theory of Everyone (2023) by Michael Muthukrishna.

This Substack is an opportunity for me to discuss a wide range of topics following this perspective. There is so much to talk about. The integrated approach I propose provides a powerful lens through which we can examine and understand many apparent puzzles and mysteries of human psychology and social behaviour.

This Substack is both about the “small”, the questions we face at the micro-level of our daily lives, and the “big”, the questions we face at the macro-level of society about its institutions and rules. From the underlying cognitive mechanisms that generate our thoughts and feelings to the hidden layers of strategic interrelations woven into social events and institutions, I plan to provide answers that will often surprise, amaze and hopefully most often enlighten readers about interesting aspects of our lives and of the world we live in. If you are interested in these questions, I encourage you to subscribe to follow me in exploring the many fascinating questions and ideas that lie ahead.

Opening paid subscriptions

As the first year closes, I am now opening the option of paid subscriptions, in addition to free subscriptions. I want to emphasise that the large majority of the content will remain free and accessible to everyone. My goal with this Substack is for its ideas to reach a wide audience.

The introduction of the possibility of opting for paid subscriptions is about allowing me to dedicate more time and resources to researching and writing about the ideas and topics I described above. For paid subscribers, I will publish several subscriber-only posts a year. These will dive deeper into some of the topics covered in this Substack. I will also consider questions and topics that you may raise for such posts and organise AMAs.

To all those who have decided to subscribe in some form, and who have shared the posts with others, many thanks for your interest and for contributing to the growth of this Substack over its first year. To the existing paid subscribers who have already pledged their support, and to those who choose to become paid subscribers, I am most thankful for your support. I look forward to interacting further with all of you around the ideas and topics explored in this Substack.

1. Among other things, I wrote threads on the notion of probability, Berkson’s paradox, how the Lagrangian multiplier works, the notion of entropy, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine interspersed between some viral posts like those on architectural tax avoidance, Newton’s principle of inertia, how order can come from chaos, or how co-authoring works in science.

2. The book’s title Optimally Irrational was an implicit answer to Ariely’s popular book Predictably Irrational. That being said, the book is not about Ariely’s ideas and he is only mentioned incidentally in it.

Since the publication of my book, Dan Ariely has been accused of having engaged in academic fraud. The evidence is, to my mind, pretty damning. Several behavioural economists have differentiated themselves from Ariely, saying he was never an economist but a psychologist. I feel that this distinction was not clearly established prior to Ariely’s public troubles as he presented himself, and is widely perceived, as a leading figure of the field.

3. Taking the point of view that economics is the grammar of human life does not mean discarding other behavioural sciences. On the contrary, there is a wealth of insights in other behavioural sciences that are too often ignored or overlooked by economists and that could fruitfully enrich their thinking.