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Willful: How We Choose What We Do
A revelatory alternative to the standard economic models of human behavior that proposes an exciting new way to understand decision‑making
“ Willful is a breakthrough in economics. Richard Robb’s tremendously insightful book shows how much of our behavior is not explained by existing theories of human action and explains in sparkling prose why understanding decisions made seemingly without reason presents a fuller picture of our world.”—Edmund S. Phelps, Nobel Laureate in Economics
Why do we do the things we do? The classical view of economics is that we are rational individuals, making decisions with the intention of maximizing our preferences. Behaviorists, on the other hand, see us as relying on mental shortcuts and conforming to preexisting biases. Richard Robb argues that neither explanation accounts for those things that we do for their own sake, and without understanding these sorts of actions, our picture of decision‑making is at best incomplete. Robb explains how these choices made seemingly without reason belong to a realm of behavior he identifies as “for‑itself.”
A provocative combination of philosophy and economics that offers a key to many of our quixotic choices, this groundbreaking volume provides a new way to understand everything from investing to how hard we work to how we manage daily interactions.
“ Willful is a breakthrough in economics. Richard Robb’s tremendously insightful book shows how much of our behavior is not explained by existing theories of human action and explains in sparkling prose why understanding decisions made seemingly without reason presents a fuller picture of our world.”—Edmund S. Phelps, Nobel Laureate in Economics
Why do we do the things we do? The classical view of economics is that we are rational individuals, making decisions with the intention of maximizing our preferences. Behaviorists, on the other hand, see us as relying on mental shortcuts and conforming to preexisting biases. Richard Robb argues that neither explanation accounts for those things that we do for their own sake, and without understanding these sorts of actions, our picture of decision‑making is at best incomplete. Robb explains how these choices made seemingly without reason belong to a realm of behavior he identifies as “for‑itself.”
A provocative combination of philosophy and economics that offers a key to many of our quixotic choices, this groundbreaking volume provides a new way to understand everything from investing to how hard we work to how we manage daily interactions.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published November 12, 2019
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224 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 14, 2020
If you want to know what Chicago PhD economist hedge-fund-guru-cum-academic Richard Robb has concluded after pondering deeply the intersection of personal agency and rational choice economics, this book is for you.
This book may not be for you.
But I really liked it!
So let’s talk about it. This tightly written, brief book sits at the intersection of economics and philosophy. It will be very interesting to a very specific set of readers: people who have a decent grounding in rational choice and behavioral economics, and are troubled by those fields' implied imperative to optimize life in a utilitarian, mechanistic way. I believed in the great importance of personal agency before this book, and I also believed that rational choice economics has very broad applicability, and this helped me mesh those ideas together and relieve some dissonance between them.
The book picks a few key cracks in the utilitarian model and wedges them open to show that even a perfectly rational, optimizing, calculating homo economicus will necessarily exercise personal agency. He will tend to choose “for-itself” (author’s term) to e.g. take on challenges for their own sake, show uncalculated mercy, occasionally act out of character, and so forth. The book also explores practical implications for policy: situations where a standard economic approach explains a lot, but recognizing people’s agency does more.
One centerpiece is an interesting, difficult to summarize discussion of optimizing utility over time. Unlike in an economics model, we don’t sit outside time and make a single strategy that then executes. As we continuously make strategies, our time horizon is constantly shifting, and our strategy is constantly being evaluated against the new horizon. Given this, you need implausible assumptions in order to build a model where people will both adopt, and then maintain upon future re-evaluation, a single fixed strategy to maximize expected utility. At the end of the day, the justification for doing any given thing will contain an element of personal choice—not just choice to optimize based on preferences, but choice to do it “just because” or “for-itself.”
Another interesting discussion centers on the parable of the Good Samaritan, who doesn’t necessarily succeed at being an “effective altruist” along the rational economic lines: potentially a lesser degree of care for a greater number of people might have resulted in a higher benefit measured in quality-adjusted life years. Did he have to pay the innkeeper so much, with an open-ended commitment to pay more? And obviously the Samaritan can’t lavish this degree of care on every beggar he meets; he would never have made it out of town onto his journey. But he chose “for-itself” to care for the man, and it seems obvious that this was a good thing to do.
I think this book has some fascinating implications for theology as well. (Not explored in the text, but here goes.) God, as an omniscient being with a perfect ability to calculate utilitarian courses of action, might seem to be in a very tight box: since he can determine the optimal course, he would execute it; end of story. Reasoning along those lines you tend to end up with a Deist clockmaker god, who initializes the system and then lets it run, without a lot of room for e.g. answering specific prayers. But God, acting as a personal being, is within scope for many of the book’s arguments, which tend towards the conclusion that he not only can but must exercise agency. So then you end up with a God who can act in a “for-itself” manner, showing mercy for its own sake, as in Isaiah 48:11—“For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it: for how should my name be polluted? and I will not give my glory unto another.”
Similarly the Holy Ghost typically inspires people to for-itself action, as in John 3:8—“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” (I have not heard many reports of the spirit inspiring people to re-parameterize their utilitarian calculations.) And Christ originated the parable of the Good Samaritan and lived accordingly. At the same time, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost obviously smile on institutions that help people (e.g. consider your favorite faith-sponsored charity—mine being Latter-Day Saint Charities) and it seems hard to deny that all else equal, they would like these to be administered in a cost-effective way. So their actions fit well within Robb’s framework that respects rational choice, while limiting its scope. End of theological aside.
I guess most of this seems sort of obvious (of course people just do stuff sometimes!); it takes a special kind of economics education to get to where it isn’t. But this book sketches out a nice synthesis where the importance of “for-itself” choice is still clear on the far side, after broadly accepting rational choice economics, not just on the near side.
I heard about the book on EconTalk and felt sort of inspired (in a for-itself way, retrospectively) to pick it up. Glad I did.
(My review was first posted here: https://wordpress.com/post/tomnysetvo...)
This book may not be for you.
But I really liked it!
So let’s talk about it. This tightly written, brief book sits at the intersection of economics and philosophy. It will be very interesting to a very specific set of readers: people who have a decent grounding in rational choice and behavioral economics, and are troubled by those fields' implied imperative to optimize life in a utilitarian, mechanistic way. I believed in the great importance of personal agency before this book, and I also believed that rational choice economics has very broad applicability, and this helped me mesh those ideas together and relieve some dissonance between them.
The book picks a few key cracks in the utilitarian model and wedges them open to show that even a perfectly rational, optimizing, calculating homo economicus will necessarily exercise personal agency. He will tend to choose “for-itself” (author’s term) to e.g. take on challenges for their own sake, show uncalculated mercy, occasionally act out of character, and so forth. The book also explores practical implications for policy: situations where a standard economic approach explains a lot, but recognizing people’s agency does more.
One centerpiece is an interesting, difficult to summarize discussion of optimizing utility over time. Unlike in an economics model, we don’t sit outside time and make a single strategy that then executes. As we continuously make strategies, our time horizon is constantly shifting, and our strategy is constantly being evaluated against the new horizon. Given this, you need implausible assumptions in order to build a model where people will both adopt, and then maintain upon future re-evaluation, a single fixed strategy to maximize expected utility. At the end of the day, the justification for doing any given thing will contain an element of personal choice—not just choice to optimize based on preferences, but choice to do it “just because” or “for-itself.”
Another interesting discussion centers on the parable of the Good Samaritan, who doesn’t necessarily succeed at being an “effective altruist” along the rational economic lines: potentially a lesser degree of care for a greater number of people might have resulted in a higher benefit measured in quality-adjusted life years. Did he have to pay the innkeeper so much, with an open-ended commitment to pay more? And obviously the Samaritan can’t lavish this degree of care on every beggar he meets; he would never have made it out of town onto his journey. But he chose “for-itself” to care for the man, and it seems obvious that this was a good thing to do.
I think this book has some fascinating implications for theology as well. (Not explored in the text, but here goes.) God, as an omniscient being with a perfect ability to calculate utilitarian courses of action, might seem to be in a very tight box: since he can determine the optimal course, he would execute it; end of story. Reasoning along those lines you tend to end up with a Deist clockmaker god, who initializes the system and then lets it run, without a lot of room for e.g. answering specific prayers. But God, acting as a personal being, is within scope for many of the book’s arguments, which tend towards the conclusion that he not only can but must exercise agency. So then you end up with a God who can act in a “for-itself” manner, showing mercy for its own sake, as in Isaiah 48:11—“For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it: for how should my name be polluted? and I will not give my glory unto another.”
Similarly the Holy Ghost typically inspires people to for-itself action, as in John 3:8—“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” (I have not heard many reports of the spirit inspiring people to re-parameterize their utilitarian calculations.) And Christ originated the parable of the Good Samaritan and lived accordingly. At the same time, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost obviously smile on institutions that help people (e.g. consider your favorite faith-sponsored charity—mine being Latter-Day Saint Charities) and it seems hard to deny that all else equal, they would like these to be administered in a cost-effective way. So their actions fit well within Robb’s framework that respects rational choice, while limiting its scope. End of theological aside.
I guess most of this seems sort of obvious (of course people just do stuff sometimes!); it takes a special kind of economics education to get to where it isn’t. But this book sketches out a nice synthesis where the importance of “for-itself” choice is still clear on the far side, after broadly accepting rational choice economics, not just on the near side.
I heard about the book on EconTalk and felt sort of inspired (in a for-itself way, retrospectively) to pick it up. Glad I did.
(My review was first posted here: https://wordpress.com/post/tomnysetvo...)
January 13, 2022
Fun fact disclaimer: I had the pleasure of having taken a course with Professor Robb about 2 decades ago, immensely enjoyed his interactive and passionate lectures.
This relatively short book is a quasi-treatise on how some of our actions cannot be explained by the mechanical economic considerations and concepts of neoclassical economics (such as the utility curves, marginal cost-benefit analysis). They, therefore, cannot lie in the domain of purposeful actions category but belong rather in the for-itself category (both categories defined by the author), the origin of which remains a bit of a mystery, and cannot be “modeled”. We are more of a homo ludens (a playing/sporting man driven by passions, the thrill of challenges, enjoying the use of our will and who at times shows uncalculated mercy, occasionally act out of character) than a mere homo economicus who is a perfectly rational, and optimizing automaton that slavishly obeys the dictates of cold cost-benefit analyses for our actions.
The author also makes the point that our “preferences” cannot be conveniently set by economists for life because time -rather being a snapshot, is a continuous flow where everything keeps changing.
Had the author put that argument in a dull fashion as several books I have come across do, I would not have enjoyed it much. Instead, the author brought together two subject areas (economics meets philosophy) that usually do not mesh well smoothly, by choosing to pepper a healthy dose of quotes from (or references to) some of my favorite philosophers/thinkers (Russell, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Bentham, Montaigne, Nietzsche, but also psychologist Kahneman, and economist Phelps) to support his articulate and meticulous arguments.
Overall, this is a deep and multi-faceted book that a well-read audience would appreciate.
This relatively short book is a quasi-treatise on how some of our actions cannot be explained by the mechanical economic considerations and concepts of neoclassical economics (such as the utility curves, marginal cost-benefit analysis). They, therefore, cannot lie in the domain of purposeful actions category but belong rather in the for-itself category (both categories defined by the author), the origin of which remains a bit of a mystery, and cannot be “modeled”. We are more of a homo ludens (a playing/sporting man driven by passions, the thrill of challenges, enjoying the use of our will and who at times shows uncalculated mercy, occasionally act out of character) than a mere homo economicus who is a perfectly rational, and optimizing automaton that slavishly obeys the dictates of cold cost-benefit analyses for our actions.
The author also makes the point that our “preferences” cannot be conveniently set by economists for life because time -rather being a snapshot, is a continuous flow where everything keeps changing.
Had the author put that argument in a dull fashion as several books I have come across do, I would not have enjoyed it much. Instead, the author brought together two subject areas (economics meets philosophy) that usually do not mesh well smoothly, by choosing to pepper a healthy dose of quotes from (or references to) some of my favorite philosophers/thinkers (Russell, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Bentham, Montaigne, Nietzsche, but also psychologist Kahneman, and economist Phelps) to support his articulate and meticulous arguments.
Overall, this is a deep and multi-faceted book that a well-read audience would appreciate.
April 19, 2025
Robb’s core idea—that humans don’t always act as rational, utility-maximizing agents—is far from original. Thinkers like Daniel Kahneman, Herbert Simon, Martha Nussbaum, and Amartya Sen have already explored this theme in much greater depth. Their work shows how decision-making is shaped by cognitive limits, emotions, identity, and moral values, offering nuanced and empirically grounded frameworks.
• Kahneman & Tversky: Showed that people often make irrational decisions due to biases and heuristics, challenging the idea of rational risk evaluation in economics.
• Herbert Simon: Introduced bounded rationality, arguing that people make “good enough” decisions due to limits in time, information, and cognitive capacity.
• Nussbaum & Sen: Developed the capabilities approach, emphasizing that human well-being is about freedom and opportunity—not just utility or income—blending ethics, psychology, and development.
• Akerlof & Shiller: Highlighted how stories, identity, and culture shape economic choices, challenging the assumption of purely self-interested behavior in macroeconomics.
By contrast, Robb’s distinction between “purposeful” and “for-itself” behavior is overly simplistic. He presents a binary where others have shown a complex continuum. His use of existential philosophy is shallow, and he doesn’t build a rigorous model or provide meaningful evidence to support his claims.
• Kahneman & Tversky: Showed that people often make irrational decisions due to biases and heuristics, challenging the idea of rational risk evaluation in economics.
• Herbert Simon: Introduced bounded rationality, arguing that people make “good enough” decisions due to limits in time, information, and cognitive capacity.
• Nussbaum & Sen: Developed the capabilities approach, emphasizing that human well-being is about freedom and opportunity—not just utility or income—blending ethics, psychology, and development.
• Akerlof & Shiller: Highlighted how stories, identity, and culture shape economic choices, challenging the assumption of purely self-interested behavior in macroeconomics.
By contrast, Robb’s distinction between “purposeful” and “for-itself” behavior is overly simplistic. He presents a binary where others have shown a complex continuum. His use of existential philosophy is shallow, and he doesn’t build a rigorous model or provide meaningful evidence to support his claims.
September 26, 2024
I have trouble understanding what people like about this book. There really isn't any there there. It's true that rational choice theory from classical economics is inadequate to explain a lot of what humans do in the economy. And while behavioral economics helps to fill some of the gaps, it's more of a patchwork than a complete theory - it doesn't lend itself to equations and grand generalizations. So to cover the rest of the universe Mr. Robb proposes a class of behavior he calls "for itself." But it really isn't a true class of behavior at all. It's just a grab bag of what's left that rational choice and behavioral economics don't already cover. For the most part, his theory has little explanatory power. He identifies areas where people act against their best interests and then tells us "just so" stories about why they did it. I'm being a little harsh. It's not quite that bad. I did like his discussion of how habit and belief can drive or retard behavior. And he has a decent discussion of altruism, though others have done altruism better.
December 23, 2019
Well-written, easy to digest, yet remarkably illuminating (to a non-economist) as to the fundamental principles of economics, and how, in Robb's view, those fundamentals don't answer some basic questions -- such as, would I jump in the river to save my spouse. Entertaining, and as much of a page-turner as one would expect an economics treatise to be. Highly recommended.
September 27, 2021
An excellent "new" economic theory and, may, have practical application to everyday life. Well written and easy to follow if you enjoy this type of work. Don't know how I will ever use it, but it was worth learning. Recommended to anyone interested in economic theory, decision theory, or cognitive processes.
July 23, 2024
This was an interesting conception of an explanation for observed human behavior that is not well captured by classical or behavioral economics, delivered quite clearly with engaging and relevant anecdotes. I got to preview early pieces of what eventually became this book ~12 years ago, and was intrigued and pleased to see how it turned out.
November 21, 2019
A book written for people who didn’t study economics, but are interested in deeper explanations about human motivation. He could have given more thorough explanations rather than simple examples, but it’s good for seeing how economic theory and psychology really are intertwined.
March 23, 2020
Interesting combination of philosophy, psychology, and economics. Worth reading again. Footnotes contain pointers to interesting books. Worth thinking through some of the problems posed.
June 13, 2020
Watch a detailed review along with my favorite ideas and takeaways at:
https://youtu.be/X67Xk9s7ifA
https://youtu.be/X67Xk9s7ifA
February 5, 2021
This book is good but is based on logic. Written more like a textbook, but good.
September 3, 2022
The bibliography is a gold mine.
May 16, 2021
[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]
I put this book on my get-at-library list back in February when the author, Richard Robb, appeared on Russ Roberts' EconTalk podcast. (After the months-long library hiatus, things are finally starting to disappear from that list. It's pretty long.)
I was (and am) a lousy philosophy student, lacking patience and intellect. But I got a feeling about what I liked about the best philosophers or at least, my favorites: the ability to carefully dissect complex concepts into component parts, using precise and clear language, making plausible arguments and relevant examples.
Some of that has fallen out of favor these days. But not with Richard Robb! It's perhaps telling that Robb is not a philosopher, at least not a professional one: he's a hedge fund manager. He also has a teaching gig at Columbia, but in the "School of International and Public Affairs", where he teaches microeconomics, economic foundations of capital markets and international finance.
So he is nominally a real-world kind of guy. But here he delves into (see subtitle above) how we choose our actions. And his argument is straightforward. There is the Homo economicus model, where we are strict utility-maximizers, assigning a "price" to everything: worldly goods, various kinds of leisure, companionship, etc. We rationally trade off one for another.
Well, not always. Because we're also slaves to cognitive biases, so we make mistakes. And sometimes we have an unclear grasp on what we want. But those things can be corrected, and we're still in the realm of what Robb calls "purposeful" behavior, where goals can be (and often are) rationally compared, one against another.
But the main theme of the book is Robb's carve-out of "for-itself" choice. Things we do because "we are who we are". Because of our social relations with others. Because we want to stay on course to achieve our own goals, when it might make more "rational" sense to do eternal mid-course corrections.
So: not bad, all in all. Robb gives plenty of examples from his own life doing that hedge fund thing. If you think you would be interested, I'd suggest you check the podcast linked above, an easy intro.
July 19, 2024
i dont believe the absolute case he makes against behavioralism. even quirks of human behavior are still fundamentally biologically explainable and so never ultimately "for-itself." i kind of think the percentage of human actions unexplained by economic or biological or sociological models will eventually decrease to zero. until then, this book is still an interesting and important point.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews