iEconomics?
Check out this clever takeoff of the Mac/PC ads by my friend Dan Ariely, in which he portrays standard economics as a PC and behavioral economics, my specialty, as an iMac.
Check out this clever takeoff of the Mac/PC ads by my friend Dan Ariely, in which he portrays standard economics as a PC and behavioral economics, my specialty, as an iMac.
As someone who has been working in the field of behavioral economics for a couple decades now, I have long been aware of what psychologists call “the availability heuristic.” This was a phenomenon described by Kahneman and Tversky in some of their seminal research from the early 1970s. I recently came across a nice example…
Here is a funny link, funny in my mind, to a profile listing me as one of the world’s top business school professors. And I don’t even think the blogger putting the post together was being ironic. Anyway, some of the content in the post is actually true. Except the part about hospital cafeteria conversations….
Thanks to science, we are confronted with new discoveries every day. But there are some things that science can’t teach us, and which we need to learn without its help. This point was made marvelously in an essay in the Atlantic monthly by Clancy Martin, who was discussing the increasing number of popular books written by…
I could go on quoting Abraham Lincoln all day long, for he was one of the finest writers of his or any time. Here’s one very special quote, where Lincoln uses the metaphor of a snake to make distinctions between slavery itself being bad, versus policies to limit slavery to the south, versus policies to…
“When an illness is viewed as inexplicable and impenetrable, people tend to react to it with one of two extremes: either they stigmatize it or they romanticize it. It’s hard to know which is worse.” – Michael Foster Green, Professor, UCLA Department of Psychiatry (Click here to view comments)
During a particularly miserable World War II battle, a military analyst estimated that it cost $25,000 in artillery shells for each enemy soldier killed. That caused one soldier to ask: “Why wouldn’t it be better to just offer the Germans $25,000 to surrender?” If only the world were so rational! (Click here to view comments)