The Why Axis

Economists Uri Gneezy and John List build their careers on field experiments, testing economic ideas in the real world instead of the lab. The Why Axis collects their work into a single argument about hidden motives and the incentives that actually move people. They investigate why a wage gap persists between men and women, why some children fall behind in school and what closes the gap, why people give to charity and how to make them give more, and why discrimination often comes down to money rather than malice. Carrying a foreword by Steven Levitt, the book treats incentives as something you can engineer and measure, turning everyday questions into controlled experiments with answers that defy the obvious guess.