Thursday, December 11, 2014

Contemporary individual behavior revised (an overview)


For the purposes of analysis, the traditional wonkish data on economic behavior remains in place.  The consumption and expenditure and sentiment calculations still revert to mean in most analysis.  There are a lot of changes on the margins, but the big picture has not restructured according to experts.

What has changed dramatically is how individual humans behave in the economic processes—often in the inputs to surveys, but decidedly in how they interpret the results they read or hear.  With a potential for overstatement I offer these high level generalizations:

              Individuals appear predominantly self-absorbed                                                            

              When an opinion, a prepared narrative dominates the dialogue

              Influences on attitudes and behavior appear to be tribal in nature

              Comments indicate great information inequality between individuals, by choice

              Discussions and views turn, remarkably often and with little reason, to issues of health

For my own presentations (and even personal discussions), in order to facilitate reception of communication, I simply assume that the individuals with whom I interact  are self-absorbed, will launch into a practiced narrative, revert to the attitudes of their group, either know the data or do not care about data (or science), and sooner or later will mention health concerns. Works for work, but ruins dinner discussions.

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