“This book is centrally about how to craft commitments that will work best for you”

StickK.com is a website designed to help you achieve your goals. You pick a goal or activity you want to do, pick a referee to check to make sure you did it, and then put up a stake you’ll sacrifice if you don’t follow through: the money can go to a charity or, for the truly motivated, an anti-charity, such as the Bush Presidential Library if you’re left wing, or the Obamacare support fund (not a real thing) if you’re right wing.

It was set up by Ian Ayres, a contract lawyer and behavioural economist, and he’s now written a book to explain the ideas behind it. The idea is pretty simple, and so the book focuses largely on a multitude of great examples, from drugs that make you throw up when you drink alcohol or ingest too much fat, to signs in US National Parks that said that so many guests were stealing petrified wood they were running out, which actually increased total theft. In Israel, so-called ‘kosher phones’ were even set up by the Rabbinic council in Israel to block numbers for escort services and charge more than $2/minute for calls on the Sabbath!

The book got a little wearing for me in the middle: it felt a bit like a long list of examples. The end picked up again, though, first with a chapter on diets (if you want to keep weight off, weigh yourself regularly: it correlates highly with persistence in weight loss. Equally, if you’re on a strict diet, careful you don’t substitute to other activities: 20-30% of bariatric surgery patients pick up another vice, such as gambling, smoking, or drinking), and then a chapter on public policy helping people commit to desirable activities, such as reduce energy use. Overall, very worth the read! Interesting, entertaining, and if a little slow in the middle, still informative.