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September 22 - September 22, 2015
What does this mean for an economist who happened to be born Albert Zyzmor instead of, say, Albert Aab? Two (real) economists addressed this question and found that, all else being equal, Dr. Aab would be more likely to gain tenure at a top university, become a fellow in the Econometric Society (hooray!), and even win the Nobel Prize.
“relative-age effect,”
“raw talent” is vastly overrated. “A lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with,” he says. “But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.”
Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
The people who become excellent at a given thing aren’t necessarily the same ones who seemed to be “gifted” at a young age. This suggests that when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love—yes, your nana told you this too—because if you don’t love what you’re doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.
Anyone who has read some history will recognize that Krueger’s terrorist profile sounds quite a bit like the typical revolutionary. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mohandas Gandhi, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, Simón Bolívar, and Maximilien Robespierre—you won’t find a single lower-class, uneducated lad among them.
“foreign ministers from over 50 Islamic states agreed to condemn terrorism but could not agree on a definition of what it was that they had condemned.”
A typical chemotherapy regime for non-small-cell lung cancer costs more than $40,000 but helps extend a patient’s life by an average of just two months. Thomas J. Smith, a highly regarded oncology researcher and clinician at Virginia Commonwealth University, examined a promising new chemotherapy treatment for metastasized breast cancer and found that each additional year of healthy life gained from it costs $360,000—if such a gain could actually be had. Unfortunately, it couldn’t: the new treatment typically extended a patient’s life by less than two months.
Doctors are, after all, human beings who respond to incentives.
nimble
In the fact, the idea In not new and have been developed In UK since the end of 2o great war. Mainly in
Hey, by my banking Account, I look's lika a terrorist
lambasted
“bystander effect,”
whereby the presence of multiple witnesses at a tragedy can actually inhibit intervention.
economists always talk about how self-interested we are,
What might look like good old-fashioned intrafamilial altruism may be a sort of prepaid inheritance tax.
Economists have traditionally assumed that the typical person makes rational decisions in line with his own self-interest.
The selfish gene. Richard Dawkins
Seca severa
donations are heavily influenced by media coverage.
(Anyone hoping to raise money for a Third World disaster had better hope it happens on a slow news day.)
Prisoner’s Dilemma,
Maybe, but probably not. The Ultimatum player making the offer has something to gain—the avoidance of rejection—by giving more generously. As often happens in the real world, seemingly kind behaviors in Ultimatum are inextricably tied in with potentially selfish motivations.
“typically have…[a] higher need for approval and lower authoritarianism than non-volunteers.”
Human behavior is influenced by a dazzlingly complex set of incentives, social norms, framing references, and the lessons gleaned from past experience—in a word, context.
Most giving is, as economists call it, impure altruism or warm-glow altruism. You give not only because you want to help but because it makes you look good, or feel good, or perhaps feel less bad.
not. If John List’s research proves anything, it’s that a question like “Are people innately altruistic?” is the wrong kind of question to ask. People aren’t “good” or “bad.” People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated—for good or ill—if only you find the right levers.
So are human beings capable of generous, selfless, even heroic behavior? Absolutely. Are they also capable of heartless acts of apathy? Absolutely.
distraught
the law of unintended consequences is among the most potent laws in existence.
Copyright?
Where the Good ideas come fom - Steven Johnson
Or consider the whale. Hunted since antiquity, by the nineteenth century it had become an economic engine that helped turn the United States into a powerhouse.
Out of a worldwide fleet of 900 whaling ships, 735 of them were American, hunting in all four oceans. Between 1835 and 1872, these ships reaped nearly 300,000 whales, an average of more than 7,700 a year. In a good year, the total take from oil and baleen (the whale’s bonelike “teeth”) exceeded $10 million, today’s equivalent of roughly $200 million. Whaling was dangerous and difficult work, but it was the fifth-largest industry in the United States, employing 70,000 people.
The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work.
cherishes
But there is little hard evidence for such claims. A more realistic assessment is that IV has created the first mass market for intellectual property.
“If you believe that the scary stories could be true, or even possible, then you should also admit that relying only on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions is not a very good answer,” he says. In other words: it’s illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions. “The scary scenarios could occur even if we make herculean efforts to reduce our emissions, in which case the only real answer is geoengineering.”
But knowing and doing are two different things, especially when pleasure is involved.
To Chen’s surprise, Felix and the others responded rationally. When the price of a given food rose, the monkeys bought less of it, and when the price fell, they bought more. The most basic law of economics—that the demand curve slopes downward—held for monkeys as well as humans.
but these irrational monkeys suffered from what psychologists call “loss aversion.”
The fact is that similar experiments with human beings—day traders, for instance—had found that people make the same kind of irrational decisions at a nearly identical rate. The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, “make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.”
After a few seconds of grooming—bam!—the two capuchins were having sex. What Chen had seen wasn’t altruism at all, but rather the first instance of monkey prostitution in the recorded history of science.
