[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Jonathon Howard of Di Mortui Sunt]

I just finished reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions. It is yet another book cashing in on the market’s love of laymen economics, in the vein of The Tipping Point and Freakonomics.  Like its literary predecessors, PI claims to explain all the quirks of humanity through the lens of Econonics, which as a science has about the same amount of credibility as say your local weatherman.  You know, the one with an associates degree in journalism.

To Dan’s credit though, his field of economics is called “behavioral,” and the field conducts experiments involving actual humans as opposed to trolling through vast fields of numerical data, making random odd pairs in the hopes of stumbling upon one that is correlated significantly enough and then screaming it from the rooftops, as an insightful, new view of human transactions. (more…)

Editor’s Rating: 7.9

Editor’s Note: This review is a fourth entry in a series of weekly e-book reviews.  The review is a guest post by Thursday Bram of ThursdayBram.com.

David Bohl’s ebook, “Your Life in Balance,” is part one of Bohl’s three-part Slow Down Fast Happiness Trilogy which collectively sells for $37.60.  The book is ideal for those of us who need a details than many self-help gurus seem able to offer up. Beyond describing the sorts of changes that a person might make in order to balance his or her life, Bohl provides exercises as well as questions for readers to ask themselves in order to focus their efforts in the parts of their lives where the most change is necessary.

Bohl left a career that was successful on the surface but was becoming a problem in his life. He was very successful financially by his mid-30s, but he had no time for his family and was mentally exhausted. He took a drastic approach to finding his own life balance — he essentially quit and became a consultant.

(more…)