Economics and the Honor System There is a farm in Nantucket with hundreds of chickens, cucumbers, squash, and other produce. When I needed eggs, I could ask the farmer to walk among the chickens (who were nearby) and collect a … Continue reading The impact of the honor system
Why the Most Important Idea in Behavioral Decision-Making Is a Fallacy Loss aversion, the idea that losses are more psychologically impactful than gains, is widely considered the most important idea of behavioral decision-making and its sister field of behavioral economics. … Continue reading Challenging loss aversion
The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain I am staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years older than I am now. I have not stepped into the twilight zone. Rather, I am trying to rid myself of … Continue reading Are we hardwired to delude ourselves?
People Aren’t Dumb. The World Is Hard. Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “People Aren’t Dumb. The World Is Hard.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via … Continue reading The irritant economist
Drinking, Fast and Slow: A Behavioral Scientist’s Guide To Summer Cocktails Our commitment to bringing our readers the best insights from the labs and offices of leading researchers, practitioners, and journalists often reminds us that the behavioral science world is … Continue reading Enjoy the cocktail
Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize for making economics more human — and more real In 1996, an Israeli psychologist named Amos Tversky was curiously, but fulsomely, eulogized for having urged economists to put down their formulas and look out … Continue reading The economist on the beach
Platonically irrational In his essay ‘On Being Modern-Minded’ (1950), Bertrand Russell describes a particularly seductive illusion about history and intellectual progress. Because every age tends to exaggerate its uniqueness and imagine itself as a culmination of progress, continuities with previous … Continue reading Plato on cognitive biases
