Check out “The Logic of Life” By Tim Harford.

     This work belongs to the growing genre of popular economics books. If you enjoyed Freakonomics, then you’ll love this book. It is all encompassing: funny, entertaining, witty, intriguing, and informative, and sure to please anyone from the casual layman to the student/professor of economics. 
     Unlike a lot of Freakonomics type books, this one actually has an overarching argument, a method to the economic madness, if you will. Harford uses economics to analyze everything from adolescent sexual behavior, marriage, corporate pay, and city population to ‘rational racism’ and technological progress in Western civilization. But it’s all done to demonstrate the important economic principle of human rationality. Harford argues that people are rational, i.e. they respond to incentives, and that many aspects of human behavior and societal organization/structure can be explained the rational means by which people respond to costs and incentives. The entire book is a series of examples meant to articulate this idea.  
     There has been a good deal of research in the past decade about the inherent “irrationality” of ostensibly rational economic actors, so it will be interesting to see how economists like Harford respond to growing challenges from the realm of behavioral economics.