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Why I’m Not Sad That I Can’t Fly
ByadminI remember one time having a conversation with Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, about the topic of happiness and emotional adaptation, in the context of chronic disability. We were discussing emotional impact of experiencing a limb amputation. Kahneman pointed out that it is the loss of the limb that is really…
Jeremy Bentham Rejecting the Idea of Human Equality
ByadminIn many ways, Jeremy Bentham was all about equality. As the father of utilitarianism, he believed that all social policy should be designed to maximize the happiness and pleasures of humans’ experience while minimizing the pains and miseries. And in espousing this theory of justice, he didn’t distinguish between upper class and lower class and…
The Availability Heuristic
ByadminAs 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…
Be Careful What Standards You Use to Judge Historical Figures: The Case of Abraham Lincoln
ByadminIt’s always tricky to judge anyone’s moral character, much less that of historical figures who lived during times very different from our own. Most of the great people who founded the United States, for example, had slaves. Some even sired children with those slaves – like Thomas Jefferson. Hard to know how to judge that….
Before Anesthesia
ByadminIn an article from the Atlantic last January, Joshua Lang wrote a wonderful article about the challenge of deciding whether surgical anesthesia actually makes people unconscious, or whether people remember parts of their surgery and are traumatized by them later. In the article, he quotes George Wilson, a Scottish chemist who had his foot amputated…
Wallet Biopsy?
ByadminDo you feel like your out of pocket medical expenses are growing? You are not alone. Even for people getting Medicare, the amount of money coming out of patients pockets is growing too. And it is growing not only because all health care spending is growing, but also because patients are being asked to bear…