The perfect seasonal present for economists arrived in today's post – Joel Waldfogel's Scroogenomics. It sets out the economic case for not buying gifts, which of course are highly inefficient. If resources must be transferred, cash is best. The waste in the US, according to Waldfogel, starts with the $66bn of satisfaction which costs $78bn to buy, and then you have to add on the costs of time and shoeleather (or whatever the online equivalent is).

This is all done in a very lighthearted way, and leads Waldfogel to recommend (on a more serious note) that one gives either gift cards or charity christmas gifts, that is, spending the money that would have gone on a gift on say a goat or bicycle for a village in Kenya instead.

I enjoyed the book, and it's another of those very appealing and nicely produced small books (this one with a sensible sub-$10 price). I particularly liked the cover picture: how, one wonders, did they get the child to cry so appealingly? However, I do profoundly disagree with the moral.

Whenever I've received a notional goat, it's annoyed me. Surely, I think, people shouldn't use the pretext of giving me a 'present' to make their charitable donations. Charitable giving is something we should be doing anyway. Presents at Christmas have an entirely different function, namely the tangible expression of social and familial bonds. My feeling (and this is especially for any of my friends and family who happen to be reading) is that gifts will afford me more pleasure than it will cost the giver to buy them, even if I wouldn't have chosen it for myself. And added to that is the pleasure I derive myself from giving presents to others.

So nice try, Prof Waldfogel, and I hope lots of people buy your book as a nicely ironic stocking filler.

The full title of Tyler Cowen's latest book is Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. I enjoyed reading it – regular readers of his co-authored blog, Marginal Revolution, or his previous book Discover Your Inner Economist will know that he's a clear and stylish writer, and can be gratifyingly provocative. However, I ended up feeling that this was two books masquerading as one.

The first is about the kind of economy being brought about by the internet revolution and the amazing, magnificent explosion of web-based technologies and applications. This is clearly an amazing period of creative destruction, and Tyler Cowen was an early enthusiast for the potential of the technologies, as well as a thoughtful analyst of their impact on cultural economics. One excellent section of the book (which formed the basis of an article, Three Tweets for the Web, in the Wilson Quarterly) argues very persuasively that the web is augmenting human intelligence and creativity – and not destroying our capacity to concentrate and create, as the techno-doom-mongers would have it.

Another terrific section (p198ff) talks about what cultural diversity really means. The doomy view is that the technologies mean everywhere is becoming the same because you can buy a burger or blue jeans anywhere. He points out that this definition of diversity is shaped entirely by national boundaries. For individuals, there really is much more choice and variety. Globalization has not turned world culture into brown sludge; instead its creation and consumption has become kaleidoscopic. The urban and cosmopolitan global economy is massively more amenable to diversity; conformism is the norm in poor and rural isolated economies (p217).

However, there is a second book here, about autism, and its links with the other part of the text are not clear to me. There is a lot of very interesting material about autism, about its links with creativity or genius. It seems to me, a non-expert, a somewhat romanticised view. Cowen is unwilling to describe autism as a disadvantage or disability, and I'm sure that's correct for some people on the autistic spectrum; but it clearly is a terrible burden for others. He argues that the internet-mediated economy is more 'autistic' in the sense that cultural information is being consumed in ever-smaller bits, by individuals in a way that suits them personally – in customized patterns which allow as much eccentricity as desired, in other words. But I'm unsure what follows from this observation, or indeed whether it really has anything to do with autism, a subject which has clearly engaged Cowen's interest. It did remind me of an article in Wired some years ago reporting a surge in the number of autistic children in Silicon Valley, and speculating that autistic people were better fitted, in an evolutionary sense, for the world of the new technologies; but that's not a claim made here.

There is one point in the book which strikes me as very forceful, namely that people have extremely different modes of cognition and behavior, which behavioural economics entirely ignores. The limitations of behavioral economics stem from its lack of universality, and here is another dimension of that. There is, I think, good experimental evidence that some people do respond more like 'rational economic man' than others – and indeed that economists are more likely to fall into that category themselves. One could argue that this is a version of autism, with the assumption of no spillovers between the behaviour of different individuals, and the application of logic and calculation to decisions. Indeed, the 'post-autistic' economics school certainly makes that link.

Understanding better the varieties of human cognition and how that affects preferences and behaviour (and whose behaviour, and how that aggregates) in economic contexts is going to be a fruitful research programme. Cowen describes evidence about the way cognition affects tastes, for example, for atonal music. He reminds us too that the founding fathers of economics, Adam Smith and David Hume, were very preoccupied with understanding perception and cognition. Autism is a powerful prism for thinking about what it means to be human – and I'd commend my friend Michael Blastland's book Joe, about his son, for some amazing insights.

On the whole, though, I wasn't sure what to make of this book's preoccupation with autism. However, in the same spirit as it was written, I welcome its eccentricity and individuality. It's an interesting and engaging read, if not at all what I expected.

Reviews in the Observer and Sunday Telegraph today – neither one nearly as positive as last week's by Tim Harford. My copy has arrived despite the post strike, so I'll be able to make my own mind up.

Streetlights and Shadows by Gary Klein, a senior scientist at Applied Research Associates, is a highly satisfying book (and there's a sample chapter on the MIT Press website). The title refers to the ancient joke: a policeman finds a drunk late at night, hunting for lost keys under a streetlamp. 'Is this where you dropped them?' the cop asks. 'No,' comes the reply, 'but this is where it's light enough to see.'

The reference is to the kinds of rules about decision making which amount to conventional wisdom – for example, teach people procedures to ensure they make better decision; collect as much information as possible before you jump to a decision; start any project with a clear description of the goal. There are situations in which the decision rules we buy into in theory do a good job. But these are straightforward, non-complex situations, which are pretty rare in life – and especially in the kinds of jobs in which they are often applied.

Take the conventional wisdom about the importance of clear procedures. This is a way of operating which has taken over the public sector. Decision-making, whether in education, healthcare, financial regulation – across the board – is codified in procedures which must be followed, and be shown to be followed. For example, banks passed their regulatory healthchecks by showing paperwork which demonstrated that they had procedures for reaching decisions about whether or not to make a loan. The wisdom of the loan was not the issue, as we have all discovered to our enormous cost. Klein demolishes, in a wonderfully low key way, the underlying idea that decisions in any but the simplest contexts can be codified in a written procedure.

Not only does the conventional model of decision making not reflect the importance of tacit knowledge, expertise gained over time, intuition, and adaptation to changing circumstances and information; it is also making for worse and worse decisions, in a vicious spiral. People don't get the sack, when things go wrong, if they followed procedures – they do if they failed to follow procedures, even if they had really thereby improved the odds of success. Even worse, doing one's best is more likely to lead to lawsuits. So everyone is demotivated from accumulating expertise and making the best decisions they could. Adequate decision-making by the book becomes the best we can hope for. And 'the book' of procedures simply gets more and more unusable as the rules are extended after every problem. Watch it happen now in financial services.

So this book is an essential read for anyone seriously interested in why government is dysfunctional. Better still, it is stuffed with practical advice for improving one's own decision-making skills, with many example's from the author's career about what approaches work, which fail, and why.

One of the most striking lessons is the need to ensure that individuals within teams who identify relevant information can bring it to the attention of the whole team, perhaps overturning a received view about the situation in question. The clearest example, perhaps, is that there were significant pieces of evidence of an imminent attack ahead of 9/11, but they were not joined together because each piece of intelligence alone was insufficient to overturn the belief that the US was unlikely to suffer an attack at home.

Other lessons include: a  mental model or theory is an essential starting point, more important than amassing plentiful information; but equally, it is essential not to fixate on a theory but to adapt it when it is countered by enough contrary information.

Ask yourself what evidence you would need to change your mind. If you can't think of any, that's a bad sign. How many pieces of evidence do you have to explain away for your theory to be true? Too many is a bad sign. What does a newcomer with a fresh eye on the situation think? Bringing in someone else is a good way to overcome entrenched group-think.

Klein's demonstration of the importance of expertise (as opposed to procedures) and analysis (as opposed to information) couldn't be more timely. The value-added in the leading economies depends more and more on tacit knowledge, as the easy-to-codify activities are outsourced either to machines or foreigners. The private sector has made a significant shift towards using new technologies in ways which make business more productive, in large part by acknowledging the expertise of employees and empowering them to make decisions. Much of private business has moved  beyond the hierarchical assembly line model.

But the public sector has hardly begun – and with the staggering pressure on public finances due to the financial crisis and the pensions crisis, it will have to make the transition quickly. This won't be at all easy, but it is terrific to have the evidence carefully accumulated and described in this book, in order to start replacing conventional wisdom about how to take decisions with good sense instead.

There are definitely a few titles in the Cambridge University Press catalogue that look enticing. I'm excited about catching up with Andrew Gelman's Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences (yes, I am a sad anorak). I'd like to read Michele Boldrin and David K Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly – also available as a free download. Reforming the World Bank by David A Phillips also looks of interest. There's a strong political economy list in general, including the series on the political economy of growth in Africa. CUP also publish The Romantic Economist by Richard Bronk, a guest reviewer on this blog.

There's a one week 20% discount on ordering from the catalogue for buyers in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, promotion code ECOCAT1009 in the online checkout.