I read the other day in Popular Mechanics that people build a mental model of their environment, and when they encounter a disaster, act on that mental model. Apparently, according to the guy they quote in the article, if there is no model of the environment, and if the disaster is happening quickly – there is not enough time to (a) build a model and (b) make decisions based on it. And that’s when people either freeze up, make poor decisions and then sometimes die.
I found this kind of interesting because it reminded me a lot about how businesses more…
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The one underlying belief that most economists harbour (whether they admit to it or not) is that people, on average, act rationally. And I believe that they do, when given the right information. So why then do we observe fluctuations in economies around the world that can only be borne out of economically irrational behaviour?
Well, I’m willing to bet that the bulk of information we consume comes from unreliable sources. I suppose this is partially because most people don’t know how to distinguish a reliable source from an unreliable one, and partially because they can’t afford the cost of obtaining reliable data.
I like reliable information. To me, more…
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One who thinks that the purpose of economics is to make forecasts about future indicators has misunderstood the field somewhat. Economists are actually much more interested in what makes people tick, and one of the by-products of that simply allows them to create ‘what if’ scenarios. An economist who knows that people are less likely to drive into London if it will cost them more, is easily able to answer the question; “What if we tax people for driving into London?” An economist who knows the exact threshold amount that would cause a person to stop driving into London could even answer the question; “How much should we tax people if we wanted to reduce traffic in London by twenty percent?”
Because economists are constantly pondering on how people do and react to things, they are much more able to imagine more…
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We live in a world where most entertainment happens in 200 second time intervals. Often shorter. That sounds absurd, but it’s also entirely true. The average length of the 70 most popular YouTube videos is 177 seconds. [1] It costs (maybe) five seconds to look at a funny picture in an email and chuckle before looking at the next one. And apparently; the average person takes 96 seconds to read your blog post before moving on.
No one has underestimated the importance of internet in shaping this fact. But a more specific cause is the combination of a work tool with more…
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