A second and final post on Alex Edmans’ May Contain Lies, looks at some advice he gives and highlights some of his useful stories. The key thing the general reader might want to take from the book is that claims such as ‘science shows’ are nonsense. Remember, research shows not to believe claims that science…
Category: Decision Making
Understanding How We React To Evidence
We often like to see ourselves as objective observers of reality. This isn’t really how we see the world, nor is it how we describe the world to others. Alex Edmans has a book that helps us in understanding how we react to evidence. Evidence For The Benefits/Challenges Of Sustainable Business Alex Edmans is best…
People Are Generally Reasonable Decision-Makers
An interesting discussion in behavioral science is the nature of humans as decision-makers. There often seems to be an assumption in the literature that people are terrible decision-makers. Consumers, members of the public, and voters are seen as battered by a host of errors and biases. This is partly because papers showing people making a…
Negative Externalities Reduce Public Welfare
Christoper Marquis has a follow-up to his book on the B Corp movement, see here. This has many of the same qualities I admired in the earlier book. The best bits explain how business can be better. He has some excellent examples where businesses are making a positive contribution to the world. That said, the…
Helping Experts Perform Consistently
I have recently read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. It is a few years old now (2009) but it still has a lot to say about the way the world works as well as Gawande’s aim of helping experts perform consistently. Do Experts Really Need Checklists? Gawande is a doctor and his main area of…
Sludges And Nudges
Cass Sunstein is a law professor who worked in the Obama White House. He dealt with matters of regulation, and has a keen interest in how (generally bad) program design and administration prevents action, e.g., sludge. He also is an expert on behavioral economics — he wrote Nudge with Richard Thaler. The idea of sludge…
What If I’m Wrong?
The Population Bomb shared Paul Ehrlich’s predictions about the future. After his doom-laden warnings about mass starvation and the need for population control, by compulsion if necessary, Ehrlich asked, “What if I’m wrong?” What if his Malthusian thinking is a mistake? (See here for Malthus). The author was trying to make the point that it…
Just Say No
Vanessa Patrick is a marketing professor at the University of Houston. She used to be at the University of Georgia, where I now am, but that was before my time. (One of her stories in her book, The Power of Saying No, does involve an Athens, Georgia restaurant. The restaurant was meaty, so not really…
Zero Sum Thinking
Heather McGhee has a popular book on the problem of zero sum thinking. Her specific focus is on racism in the US. The argument is quite simple. Racism prevents policies that would benefit everyone. Zero Sum Thinking People often have a tendency to think of the world as having a fixed amount of a certain…
Epidemiological Transition
A second post on Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape. Here I discuss the epidemiological transition that he notes. There is a general movement in the way disease tends to afflict a country (and indeed across the whole world). The problems of disease, what the diseases are, and who they target, have a distinct pattern. Epidemiological…
