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…
Category: Decision Making
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…
Must Firms Maximize Shareholder Value?
What is the purpose of a firm? Given we have so many firms and business schools are such a sizable chunk of many universities, you might think that we all agree what firms are for. You would be wrong. There is a surprising amount of disagreement as to the purpose of firms. What are they…
People Aren’t Getting Worse
Ever since I was in secondary school (high school in US terms) I have thought it is bizarre that people think that humans are getting worse. Adam Mastroianni and Dan Gilbert wrote a paper in Nature on this phenomenon which they call The Illusion of Moral Decline. In many ways, they have written the paper…
