Richard Thaler Speaks at RSA

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Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago, co-wrote the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness with the legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Here Thaler presents his views about decision making, policy and goverment before an audience at the RSA – often called the Royal Society of Arts.

For those of you looking to read something shorter, Thalen and Sunstein give an overview of their book in this LA Times article Designing Better Choices. They also have a scholarly article Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron. And for the truly devoted, you can check out their website Nudges.

Thalen is a behavioral economist, and thus sees the notion of perfect rationality and idealized cost/benefit decision making as irrational. We are human, flawed and imperfect; more importantly, our “choice architectures” are significantly shaped by features of the environment, such as what captures our attention or simply following the default option like the rest of the herd. Hence the nudge, those small features in the environment that we can shape in specific directions while still letting people make their own decisions.

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Meet the Family: Human Evolution

Here’s a video I found this week and used in my lecture on human evolution on Thursday. It’s well put together, and provides a good visualization of some major moments/species over the past six million years. A few ideas that are still being debated in the field might get slipped in, and this video represents a “splitter” view (seeing more species in the fossil record than the “lumpers”, including the Neanderthals as separate). But overall I liked it.

David Brooks and the Social Animal

In his NY Times op-ed The Social Animal, David Brooks writes that the “individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong. Over the past 30 years, there has been a tide of research in many fields, all underlining one old truth — that we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion.”

He goes on to say that the Republican party hasn’t kept up with science: “Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.”

Brook then declares this worldview the main impediment to modernization of the Republican party: “These problems straining the social fabric aren’t directly addressed by maximizing individual freedom. And yet locked in the old framework, the Republican Party’s knee-jerk response to many problems is: ‘Throw a voucher at it’.”

Brooks misses two crucial points in his op-ed, as he does in most of his recent op-eds covering similar “human nature” issues. He does not get “culture” and he does not get “power and inequality.”

We are not just social animals, we are cultural animals! But the Republican party does not get this fundamental fact of human nature. For the Republicans, there is one set of values that matter, and we can impose those values on others. It’s not just an ideology of individualism, it’s an ideology of culture.

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The Adventures of Little Sacc

Little Sacc was a happy little dude who liked to eat sugar and liked to make beer,

He was always polite and never rude, he liked to smile and he would never sneer.

But the story of Little Sacc isn’t so happy it’s true, his plight is somewhat tragic let me make that clear.

In all the happiness of making a drink, His real future just went down the sink.

But is his destiny so different from our very own?
Should we really smile on this fella whose death we condone?
Dying in his own excrement is no heroic fate,
But who are we to judge? Let me explain, just wait;

 

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Sex and Gender

The female is softer in disposition, is more mischievous, less simple,
more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of the young;
the male, on the other hand, is more spirited, more savage,
more simple and less cunning. The traces of these characteristics are
more or less visible everywhere, but they are especially visible where
character is more developed, and most of all in man.

from Aristotle’s Historia Animalium,
in Barnes, J. Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 1: The Revised Oxford Translation, Princeton University Press, 1984.

 

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