My guest today, Lighty Clots, is an engineering professor at the University of Virginia who works at the intersection of engineering and behavioral economics.

Who even knew those two fields intersected?

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire, with Steve Levitt.

Lighty summarizes his research ideas in a new book, it's called Subtract, the Untapped Science of Less.

Now, being totally honest, when I first saw Lighty's book, I just missed it as schlock.

One of the hundreds of mediocre pop science books published every year.

But my friend, Sandel Muldinaten, who we might remember from two previous episodes of this podcast, said, no, Lighty's book is different.

There's something really fundamental there.

And Sandel's right about everything, so I gave Subtract a second chance and I realized, yes, there actually is something here.

With my newfound appreciation for what he's doing, I'm excited to talk to Lighty for the first time now.

You've written a book called Subtract, and you've done a ton of academic research on the topic.

Like, most good ideas, it seems like there is an extremely simple insight at the heart of your argument.

What is that?

When we try to improve things, our first thought is, what can we add to make this better?

And as a result, we overlook subtraction systematically.

I think there's an even simpler statement, which is that there's a human bias against subtraction.

Behavioral economists have been working on biases for 40 or 50 years.

And I think it puts a squirreling idea of, here's something that doesn't happen as much as it should, and that's the nature of what biases.

So, do you like that description, or you're not like the description?

I like it.

One quibble would be with, well, we don't want to just have this considered alongside the laundry list of biases that are out there.

Some of them less fundamental than others, because we think this is a pretty fundamental one.

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