Hate the Recreation brings collectively recreation idea ideas, popular culture references, and Daryl Fairweather’s (AM’12, PhD’14) private experiences. (Portrait photograph courtesy Daryl Fairweather, AM’12, PhD’14)
Daryl Fairweather’s (AM’12, PhD’14) new ebook encourages readers to assume like an economist.
In 1999 two members of the band Future’s Little one, recent off their first primary hit, issued an ultimatum. Both Mathew Knowles—the group’s supervisor and the daddy of the third member, Beyoncé—needed to go, or they might.
The gambit failed. LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett have been dismissed and changed. The reconstituted Future’s Little one went on to launch smash after smash, and Beyoncé turned, effectively, Beyoncé.
To economist Daryl Fairweather, AM’12, PhD’14, this story just isn’t merely an attention-grabbing footnote in pop music historical past. It additionally illustrates the peril of overestimating your energy in a negotiation: Knowles acknowledged, in a approach that Roberson and Luckett didn’t, that his daughter was the breakout star of Future’s Little one. They wanted the band greater than the band wanted them.
As Fairweather writes in her new ebook Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work (College of Chicago Press, 2025), many staff—together with, as soon as, her—make the identical mistake as Roberson and Luckett. They ask for raises or threaten to stop, believing themselves to be considerably much less replaceable than they are surely. However data of key ideas in economics, Fairweather believes, may help folks keep away from these sorts of strategic blunders in work and life. Her ebook, studded with private storiemes and popular culture references, provides simply such a primer.
Hate the Recreation emphasizes recreation idea, a department of economics and arithmetic that focuses on decision-making in aggressive conditions, when every participant’s consequence depends upon the habits of others. Fairweather’s aim, she explains, was to make use of her personal experiences much less as examples to observe and extra as “a vessel for all the economics that I needed to show somebody that I assumed could be helpful to them of their careers.”
And the ebook’s (frequent) Beyoncé references? “For those who discover that just about each time I convey up popular culture, it’s a few Black lady, that was deliberate, as a result of I’ve by no means seen an economics ebook middle Black girls,” Fairweather says. She needed to make use of metaphors that she knew would resonate with “youthful girls and ladies of shade, and I needed them to really feel like this ebook was for them.”
Fairweather by no means severely doubted that economics was for her, however others did. When she started her undergraduate research at MIT, her household inspired her to main in engineering or one other arduous science—in these extra goal fields, they argued, she could be much less more likely to face discrimination. In graduate faculty, she was one in every of eight girls in a cohort of 39, and the one Black lady; she typically felt the load of being a double minority.
Although she initially deliberate to develop into a professor, Fairweather left academia for business and went on to function a behavioral economist at Amazon. Right now she is chief economist at the actual property firm Redfin.
Hate the Recreation differs from different profession recommendation books in its express acknowledgment that a lot about our financial system isn’t honest. “How might our financial system presumably be meritocratic when white People are 28 instances extra more likely to develop into millionaires than Black People?” Fairweather writes. Nonetheless, she goes on, “the principles of the financial system are unfair, however that doesn’t imply you may’t win.”
To that finish, the ebook provides economics-rooted classes on subjects together with profession choices, private finance, and marriage. A frequent theme is the consideration of inside and out of doors choices—in essence, weighing the prices of staying or going. (Roberson and Luckett arguably made the error of undervaluing their inside possibility: staying in Future’s Little one as glorified backup singers.) Earlier than you allow a job or a relationship, Fairweather advises, it is advisable to really feel completely sure you like your outdoors choices.
She additionally devotes a meaty chapter to the subject she has spent almost seven years learning: housing. Working at Redfin has given Fairweather an intimate understanding of the ebbs and flows of the actual property market, in addition to its structural challenges. In her day-to-day work, she and her group are utilizing the wealthy information out there to them to reply questions on how the housing market works and the way patrons and sellers can navigate it.
In 2020, as an example, Redfin started displaying details about houses’ flood dangers. Fairweather partnered with researchers from the College of Southern California, the Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis, and MIT to review whether or not this data affected homebuyers’ choices. It did, they realized—patrons started favoring much less risk-prone houses. Right now, along with flooding, Redfin shows details about present and future dangers of fireside, excessive warmth, extreme wind, and poor air high quality.
In fact, choices about simply how a lot flood threat you’re keen to tolerate—like these about altering jobs or marriage and household life—are particular and contextual. What is smart for one particular person may very well be fully unsuitable for one more. “I don’t know essentially what folks’s trade-offs are, what folks’s objectives are,” Fairweather says. That’s why she tried to fill her ebook with frameworks for fascinated by arduous decisions, relatively than one-size-fits-all recommendation. “Hopefully, after studying this ebook, folks can go apply these classes in a approach that is smart for them.”
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