Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Required reading: Modeling human behavior…have a look at Martin Wolf’s comments today


The descriptor ‘brilliant’ is overused. But not if you refer to martin Wolf’s comment in the FT today “Make policy for real, not ideal, humans“ (Page 9). Wolf combines a review of the
world bank Development Report with a review of
Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow.’  He synthesizes the two works views on behavioral economics into three imperatives  “in first, most of our thinking is not deliberative, but automatic; second, it is socially conditioned; and, third, it is shaped by inaccurate mental models.  “

 

I wrote my views a few days ago, in a framework not too dissimilar for modeling human behavior (http://kkendis.blogspot.com/2014/12/contemporary-individual-behavior.html ) but Wolf’s narrative and references and even his examples are far superior to my own. Wolf frames his imperatives in terms of policy and the implementation of policy, and I cannot disagree. Required reading indeed.

No comments:

Post a Comment