:Fixed Point

It’s funny and goes out of its way to stress it libertarian credentials - many of the policy examples they give have been implemented by the private sector. The Government interventions they advocate aim to modify the role of the state without increasing it, or to reduce it. It does a good job of countering […]

A while back I posted in response to Bryan Caplan’s essay (and now book) on voter irrationality. He views human misconceptions, about economics in particular, (he quotes how people are wrong in orders of magnitude about the extent of foreign aid given by the US, the effects of immigration etc.) as irrational. That is, people […]

One of the common complaints against the idea of ‘libertarian paternalism’ - the idea that the state, or indeed the market should help us overcome our biases - is that it’s a slippery slope. Mandate that fruit be served before cakes in the cafeteria (because want people really ‘want’ is to be healthy but […]

For those students who attended the lecture last night, here are the behavioural-economics-slides.ppt. I’ve added a slide to reflect some comments and ideas from the class discussion. After the weekend, I’ll give a few additional pointers to the sort of thing that you might be tested on in an exam.
Thanks again, and apologies for overunning.

Was there ever a more appropriate title for Adam Curtis’ slickly edited follow up to the Power of Nightmares?
His thesis, that the failure of political society and democracy is due to our enthusiastic embrace of free markets and the hyper-rational seflish individual model of human behaviour, is so broad that one can’t say it’s either true or […]

The Economist blog weighs in with this:
behavioural economics can point to many interesting irregularities in behaviour, but it cannot dictate political beliefs such as the level of government intrusion into the economy. If we put the government in charge of deciding what we should want, who will be in charge of manipulating government preferences?
It’s a […]

The BBC reports of moves towards ending free banking in the UK, and charging customers for current accounts. Graham Beale, the incoming CEO of Nationwide says,
In a way, I do believe fee-based banking is a fairer proposition
We might grumble about being charged a fee to have an account, but there appears no logical reason to […]

At an interview a few years back I was asked if I would give cash to someone, or buy a gift. The traditional economics answer is of course to stump up the dosh, uless you can buy a gift that the recipient would have bought anyway, but that requires extremely rare powers of insight (or […]

Certainly not this guy, a cognitive neuroscientist who used his knowledge of how memory works to win $500,000.
When I’ve watched TV quiz shows and played along, I’ve either known the answer or used probabilistic reasoning, which goes something like this: “This is a TV quiz show, so some of the answers, even to esoteric questions, […]

Christmas comes but once a year - so how come it seems to take me by surprise as far as gift shopping goes? Of course, despite the advance warning, I never contemplate doing the shopping in September, partly because I am not conditioned to think about the gifts until the requsite environmental cues are salient […]

From the BPS Research Digest
The researchers found that compared with non-fathers, there was a marked increase in the connective branching between brain cells in the front of the marmoset fathers’ brains. Kozorovitskiy told The Digest that this could lead to enhanced information processing, thus promoting paternal behaviour. “Paternal behaviour in marmosets is a complex task, […]

My wife and I are expecting our first child and I thought it would be interesting to offer a sort of diary of observations related to economics and child rearing.
First observation related to the future. Up until a couple of months ago we believed that we still might have some sort of social life, babysitters […]