Yoshio Yoshimoto (吉本佳生)’s book, 大杯星巴克比较划算 (Chinese translated) is one such example. Another would of course be Tim Harford‘s books. I read Harford’s The Undercover Economist some years back and just completed reading his new book, The Logic of Life recently.
Basically, what books like these do is that they make use of complex economic theories, defined in layman’s terms, to find surprisingly profound answers in simple social situations.
In The Logic of Life, Harford made use of economic principles to explain social topics like how come the bosses are always overpaid even though the worker bees below are the ones slaving; the similar rational choice pattern we make when we choose to smoke, gamble, take drugs or fall in love; how “being racist” when hiring employees is the result of rational choice at work too.
For the latter, Harford coined the term “rational racism” to define this behaviour. In a nutshell, through running a simple test by getting two groups of individuals to wear different coloured shirts to pretend to apply for a job; economists were able to establish that if a particular colour group was perceived to exhibit higher economic returns to employ, the hirer would rationally prefer this group over the other.
Logic kicks in to govern many choices we make, even seemingly irrational ones like taking drugs.