I Hate That This Book Wasn’t Published Earlier
Adulting tips and tricks a University of Chicago econ grad never told me – but Millennials and Gen Z-ers will love!
By Lisa Mattes
Oh, where were you, Daryl Fairweather, when I needed you and life’s cheat codes the most to prevent me from meandering through relationships, starting and stopping career paths, and sitting on the sidelines when I should have been standing up for promotions and pay raises?
Back then, who knew the developing discipline of behavioral economics was hashing out how rationality and irrationality, selfishness and uncertainty manifested in everyday socioeconomic transactions?
Her book, Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love and Work, transforms contemporary behavioral economic principles into essential chess moves that anyone can play to advance their odds of success in some of life’s most formidable challenges: college selection, career entry and advancement, workplace conflict, personal relationships, marriage, home buying, childbirth and life enrichment.
Inspired to pursue a profession in economics by Freakonomics coauthor and economist Steven Levitt, Fairweather enlists radical simplicity to render foundational economic research and principles – particularly game theory – accessible and manipulable by anyone crossing critical personal, social and financial thresholds.
She breaks down complex ideas with straightforward language, providing a framework that applies these principles to her own life, which makes the book especially valuable to Millennials, Gen Z-ers, and other first-timers, who can benefit from smarter analysis and better decision making in these everyday experiences.
Fairweather instructs readers on how to use game theory to understand the economic context underpinning “how people make strategic decisions when success depends on the decisions of others.” So, as the newest members of the adulting club intrepidly step into job interviews, her advice on playing the interview game can keep them from stepping in it.
Fairweather’s pro tip for getting an offer on your dream job: Identify the objective of the game as winning the job offer. Then learn as much as possible about the job to assess its value, so you can decide whether it’s worth accepting.
Better yet, her explanations and applications of academic concepts ensure that anyone, including this former journalism major, understand what she’s saying. Even more effective for comprehension is the book’s structure: Consistent identification and definition of economic principles, a crystal-clear contents outline, glossary of terms, real-life examples using pop culture icons, corroborative anecdotes from the animal world and “game recaps” at the end of every chapter fine-tune Hate the Game to the sensibilities of an audience seeking advice in very short, easily digestible doses, including those who may fear math or never took an economics course.
Hate the Game’s target audience
Having crossed nearly all the experiential bridges that Fairweather addresses, I’m not the target audience. So, I tested my takeaways about the book’s utility for a younger cohort by getting my Gen Z daughter’s feedback on the book.
What I wanted to know was: Did she think Fairweather provided meaningful lessons that she and other Millennials and Gen Z-ers could use at critical life junctures? How could the book enrich her life now?
The idea that strategic thinking could be applied to the underpinnings of human transactions and the negotiations required to arrive at that exchange of value was a new one for her. In more direct terms, she was surprised that principles of economics could be so helpful to, say, dealings in work-life balance. Recognizing the common sense behind the process triggered a lightbulb moment for her – that structure and language could be brought to bear on questions that she may have previously approached on primarily instinctual or subconscious terms.
Fairweather dives deeply into the concepts of inside option and outside option – the benefit obtained from reaching an agreement in negotiation and the benefit derived from not reaching an agreement, respectively – for their essential role in the analysis of any game. My daughter delighted in learning how gameplay and analysis could illuminate something as messy, mysterious and unpredictable as partner relationships.
My daughter also quickly took to the book’s structure and its easy-to-navigate content. With chapters on life events such as securing a dream job, deciding when to find a new one, buying a home, and selling a home, all ending with a game recap of action steps, she thought Hate the Game was a book she could reference at critical stages in her life.
And therein lies the extraordinary value of this book: It’s a manual to be revisited again and again, high praise from a member of a generation accustomed to having its neck bent down – sometimes called “tech neck” – to communicate with chat abbreviations and emojis.
I hope my daughter and I will use this book to guide us to sound decisions that are driven not by financial gains but gains in wellbeing, for ourselves and for the public good.
This is the game Fairweather ultimately promotes in Hate the Game: mastery of critical thinking skills that allow us to recognize the underlying transactions at work or in any human interaction and how to successfully negotiate more equitable and fulfilling outcomes.
Lisa Mattes is a multitalented marketing executive in Chicago.
