George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001 — DOI-10.1017/CBO9781139164191 (the Cambridge Core edition). The précis
gives the paperback ISBN as 0-521-59694-7 and the length as 258 pp. Only the
year is known here, so published: carries it as the first of January.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s description and the précis’s outline, not a reading.
- The publisher’s description (Cambridge Core), in part: “Ainslie argues that our responses to the threat of our own inconsistency determine the basic fabric of human culture. He suggests that individuals are more like populations of bargaining agents than like the hierarchical command structures envisaged by cognitive psychologists.”
- Structure, as the précis reports it: three sections (“Breakdowns of Will”, “A Breakdown of the Will”, “The Ultimate Breakdown of Will”) and twelve chapters. Chapters 2–4 criticize the conventional accounts and present hyperbolic discounting. Chapters 5–8 develop intertemporal bargaining and its evidence. Chapters 9–11 treat the will’s side effects and premature satiation. Chapter 12 concludes.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 as a seed beside its précis. The owner welcomed replacing long books with shorter works by the same author that do the same job, and named the précis for this one. The précis is read as LIT-586 and is the entry to lean on. This entry exists because the book is the standard citation for picoeconomics, so a reader who meets “Ainslie 2001” elsewhere finds the record’s reading through it.
One thing the record knows about the book from the précis: its Figure 10B is “inaccurately drawn”, and the précis’s Figure 6B corrects it (précis, note 3).
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.