I'm bringing you the latest goings on over at EDGE, a website I subscribe to just to keep my former intellectual ideal of myself from being completely starved into oblivion. These people consider themselves on the cutting edge of everything.
Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world.
The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.
I particularly like to follow the articles and doings of their "Third Culture". You can read their full description of what's meant by Third Culture here: http://www.edge.org/about_edge.html
but a summary of the concept reads:
The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.
Now all of this is coming from a group of Americans whose cultural base is a European Western civilization perspective. That's very important to keep in mind. Everyone does not think like these folks do. But it's important to know how and what they are thinking, as most of them occupy powerful and influential positions in both society and their respective fields. For that reason....I like to know what's on their minds.
And I think you should know also.
On this blog, I spend a lot of time encouraging you to know and listen to the intelligence of your own Heart. If you've been practicing that, by now you might have experienced that often times, doing so, can place one in opposition to the 'powers that be'. Maybe even in conflict with one of the policies of one of these guys that are a member of the mind set of EDGE members. Knowing what they base their thinking on, and how they come up with their decisions, plans and solutions can be quite fascinating, and really a revelation.
I have friends that think that there those that launch conspiracies and actual plots to undermine, subvert,oppress and destroy certain groups, and the freedoms and activities of segments of the population. Paying attention over the years, I've come to believe that we're giving these Devious Entities way more credit than they deserve.
I've come to believe that they're not smart enough to actually concoct the schemes that we might think they are behind. I think that they're actually just blundering their way through the World....stupid, blind, ignorant, greedy, and basically very deeply hurt and sick psyches. They represent humanity in 'arrested development' so they are perpetually immature, and act this out on a global playground.
For various reasons, they are disconnected from a deep feeling of connectedness to All of Life. So instead of relying upon the Love and Intelligence of the Heart, they push their center of consciousness up in to brain, and thus, they like to THINK. Alot.
And the thinking goes on and on and on. And they like to just think up stuff. Abstract reasoning and rationalsim. To quote, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, " Since the Middle Ages, our Occident (Western culture) has been blinded, particularly by the cerebration of the Greek Eleatics who preferred reasoning to experimentation. The beginning of this disquieting period of 'argurers' can be situated with the Eleatic school around 550 or 500 B.C."
He goes on "No sooner had a doctrine seen the light of day than a rejoinder was being born, either a contradiction or an extolling of the idea expressed. To contradict, and to argue, have always been part of the intelligent and subtle temperment of the Greek".
I include this, because the people that live from the Third Culture mentality, and those that I spoke of that produced that tasteless cover of 'The New Yorker Magazine' featuring the Obamas, are all the descendants of Western intellectualism that began with Greek philosophers.
The sad part is that the philosphical and intellectual system the world operates upon today is a deviation of the teachings Greek students ~later to be know as 'philosophers' received in the temples in Egypt. DEVIATION is the key word in that sentence.
De Lubicz said that the Greeks "searched for answers that reason could accept". The problem was, they were dealing with trying to understand levels of Life, that don't fit within rational terms. And here is where one of the first major deviations in man's wholesome thinking date from: They (the Greeks) attributed a physical character to metaphysical principles.
Now don't give up on me....I'm not trying to loose you here. I'm telling you all of this so that you can understand that many of the ideals, concepts and ways which we've been programmed to live and see our world by, conflict with what 'our inner truth' tells us, because they are out of alignment with an organic understanding and ordering of the flow of Life.
I'm suggesting that one's tinge or roar of inner rebellion, is one's innate reaction to these critical deviations in fundamental understandings about how Life works that were suffered long ago. These misunderstandings were allowed to go uncorrected, and thus, continue, flourish and proliferate. Right up to today, where we actually have a President with the intellectual capacity of George W. Bush. And groups like EDGE's Third Culture, quite full of themselves, are on top of the world, influencing society, directing and naming the flow of human civilization.
Okay....I'll get back to the point.
And that is that I want you to check out how these folks are thinking about economics. I'm directing you to a conference they just had where the keynote speakers discussed Behavioral Economics. New to me, but this is something that's been a topic for some time. So if you're loosing your home, or now earning minimum wage because Arnold is your Governor, then I want you to understand where the thinking for the policies that allow you to be in those circumstances stems from.
Because as I said.....these guys....and they are 99.9% men....are simply wingin' it. Just making up stuff....They ain't got a clue. And that's why everything is a mess. But look at the names and the companies in attendance. There's genius present yes. Just notice how it's being directed.
Now. Once you understand this, I'm counting on you to join me in opening yourself up to receive BETTER IDEAS from Cosmic Consciousness, for the needs of our world. DIVINE IDEAS, captured in your meditation and contemplation of the moment. The solutions will come from within YOU.
Not in an economic stimulus of $600. They will be organic, expressions of God/Allah/Cosmic Consciousness/Enlightenment simply Being the Divine Operation. A quote that I've claimed daily is from Judge Thomas Troward. He declares ,"The Divine operation is always for expansion and fuller expression, and this means the production of something beyond what has gone before, something entirely new, not included in past experience, though proceeding out of it by an orderly sequence of growth". You and I are those centers of such Divine Operation.
"Retreating to the luxury of Sonoma to discuss economic theory in mid-2008 conveys images of Fiddling while Rome Burns. Do the architects of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook have anything to teach the behavioral economists—and anything to learn? So what? What's new?? As it turns out, all kinds of things are new. Entirely new economic structures and pathways have come into existence in the past few years." —George Dyson
A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS Edge Master Class 08
By Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel KahnemanGaige House, Glen Ellen, CA,
July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT
RICHARD H. THALER is considered to be one of the founders of behavioral economics—the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
Richard Thaler's Edge Bio Page
SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University.
Sendhil Mullainathan's Edge Bio Page
DANIEL KAHNEMAN is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, and Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.
Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio Page
ATTENDEES: Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; W. Daniel Hillis, Computer Scientist; Cofounder, Applied Minds; Author, The Pattern on the Stone; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist; Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Salar Kamangar, Google; France LeClerc; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Elon Musk, Physicist; Founder, Telsa Motors, SpaceX; Nathan Myhrvold, Physicist; Founder, Intellectual Venture, LLC; Event Photographer; Sean Parker, The Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Director of the Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; coauthor of Nudge; Anne Treisman, Psychologist, Princeton University; Evan Williams, Founder, Blogger, Twitter
INTRODUCTION
This edition of Edge is a prelimanary report of tne second annual Edge "Master Class," which occured July 25-27 in Sonoma, which was followed on July 28th by a San Francisco dinner.
Below we present a summary of the Master Class by Nathan Myhrvold (Day 1) and George Dyson (Day 2) as well as some spirited exchanges among the attendees regarding the reports. Also, you will find the photo galleries of both the Master Class and the dinner.
A year ago, Edge convened the first "Master Class" in which psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman taught a 9-hour course on "Thinking About Thinking". Among the attendees were a "who's who" of the new global business culture. This year, to continue this discussion, Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, one of the fathers of Behavioral Economics, and Sendhil Mullinaithan, a brilliant young Harvard economist, along with Daniel Kahneman taught an intensive 9-hour course on behavioral economics.
[See Edge Master Class 07; "Thinking About Thinking";
Indeed, as one distinguished European visitor noted, the weekend involved "a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds. These are the people that are rewriting our global culture."
The Master Class is the most recent iteration of Edge's development. which began its activities under than name "The Reality Club" in 1981. Edge is different from The Algonquin, The Apostles, The Bloomsbury Group, or The Club, but it offers the same quality of intellectual adventure. The closest resemblances are to the early seventeenth-century Invisible College, a precursor to the Royal Society, whose members consisted of scientists such as Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and Robert Hooke. The Society's common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. Another, perhaps, more apt example, is the nineteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal club of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age — James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly, Benjamin Franklin.
In a similar fashion, Edge, through it's "Master Classes" is attempting to gather together those intellectuals and technology pioneers who are exploring the themes of the post-industrial Internet age.
In the coming weeks, Edge will publish the proceedings of ths year's Master Class, including streaming video and edited transcripts
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/thaler_sendhil08.html
A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICSEdge Master Class 08 By Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel KahnemanGaige House, Glen Ellen, CA, July 25-27, 2008
Look, this is science. Belief isn't an option. —Daniel Kahneman
FIRST DAY REPORT—EDGE MASTER CLASS 08 [7.26.08]
By Nathan Myhrvold
DR. NATHAN MYHRVOLD is CEO and managing director of Intellectual Ventures, a private entrepreneurial firm. Before Intellectual Ventures, Dr. Myhrvold spent 14 years at Microsoft Corporation. In addition to working directly for Bill Gates, he founded Microsoft Research and served as Chief Technology Officer.
Nathan Myhrvold's Edge Bio Page
The recent Edge event on behavioral economics was a great success. Here is a report on the first day.
Over the course of the last few years we've been treated to quite a few expositions of behavioral economics—probably a dozen popular books seek to explain some aspect of the field. This isn't the place for a full summary but the gist is pretty simple. Classical economics has studied a society of creatures that Richard Thaler, an economist at University of Chicago dubs the "Econ". Econs are rather superhuman in some ways—they do everything by optimizing utility functions, paragons of bounded rationality. Behavioral economics is about understanding how real live Humans differ from Econs.In previous reading, and an Edge event last year I learned the most prominent differences between Econs and Humans. Humans, as it turns out, are not always bounded rational—they can be downright irrational. Thaler likes to say that Humans are like Homer Simpson, Econs are like Mr Spock. This is a great start, but to have any substance in economics one has to understand that in the context of economic situations. Humans make a number of systematic deviations from the Econ ideal, and behavioral economics has categorized a few of these. So, for example, we humans fear loss more than we love gain.
Humans care about how a question is put to them—propositions which an Econ would instantly recognize as mathematically equivalent seem different to Humans and they behave differently.
Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate for his work in behavioral economics told us about priming—how a subtle influence radically shifts how people act. So, in one experiment people are asked to fill out a survey. In the corner of the room is a computer, with a screen saver running. That's it—nothing overt, just a background image in the room. If the screen saver shows pictures of money, the survey answers are radically different. Danny went through example after example like this where occurred. The first impulse one has in hearing this is no, this can't be the case. People can't be that easily and subconsciously influenced. You don't want to believe it. But Danny in his professorial way says "Look, this is science. Belief isn't an option". Repeated randomized trials confirm the results. Get over it.
The second impression is perhaps even more surprising—the influences are quite predictable. Show people images of money, and they tend to be more selfish and less willing to help others. Make people plot points on graph paper that are far apart, and they act more distant in lots of way. Make them plot points that are close together, and damned if they don't act closer. Again, it seems absurd, but cheap metaphors capture our minds. Humans, it seems, are like drunken poets, who can't glimpse a screen saver in the corner, or plot some points on graph paper without swooning under the metaphorical load and going off on tangents these stray images inspire.
This is all very strange, but is it important? The analogy that seems most apt to me is optical illusions. An earlier generation of psychologists got very excited about how the low level visual processing in our brains is hardwired to produce paradoxical results.
The priming stories seem to me to be the symbolic and metaphorical equivalent. The priming metaphors in optical illusions are the context of the image—the extra lines or arrows that fool us into making errors in judgment of sizes or shapes. While one can learn to recognize optical illusions, you can't help but see the effect for what it is. Knowing the trick does not lessen its intuitive impact. You really cannot help but think one line is longer, even if you know that the trick will be revealed in a moment.I wonder how closely this analogy carries over. Danny said today that you can't avoid priming; if he is right perhaps the analogy is close. Perhaps not.I also can't help but wonder how important these effects are to thinking and decision making in general.
After the early excitement about optical illusions, they have retreated from prominence—they explain a few cute things in vision, but they are only important in very artificial cases. Yes, there are a few cases where product design, architecture and other visual design problems are impacted by optical illusions, but very very few. In most cases the visual context is not misleading. So, while it offers an interesting clue to how visual processing works, it is a rare special case that has little practical importance.
Perhaps the same thing is true here—the point of these psychological experiments, like the illusions, is to isolate an effect in a very artificial circumstance. This is a great way to get a clue about how the brain works (indeed it would seem akin to Steven Pinker's latest work The Stuff of Thought which argues for the importance of metaphors in the brain).
But is it really important to day-to-day real world thinking? In particular, can economics be informed by these experiments? Does behavioral economics produce a systematically different result that classical economics if these ideas are factored in?I can imagine it both ways. If it is important, then we are all at sea, tossed and turned in a tumultuous tide of metaphors imposed by our context. That is a very strange world—totally counter to our intuition. But maybe that is reality.
Or, I could equally imagine that it only matters in cases where you create a very artificial experiment—in effect, turning up the volume on the noise in the thought process. In more realistic contexts the signal trumps the noise. The truth is likely some linear combination of these two extreme—but what combination? There are some great experiments yet to be done to nail that down.
Dick Thaler gave a fascinating talk that tries to apply these ideas in a very practical way. There is an old debate in economics about the right way to regulate society. Libertarians would say don't try—the harm in reducing choice is worse than the benefit, in part because of unintended consequences, but mostly because the market will reach the right equilibrium. Marxist economists, at the other extreme, took it for granted that one needs a dictatorship of the proletariat—choice is not an option, at least for the populace.
Thaler has a new creation—a concept he calls "libertarian paternalism" which tries to split the baby. The core idea (treated fully in his book Nudge) is pretty simple—present plenty of options, but then encourage certain outcomes by using behavioral economics concepts to stack the deck. A classic example is the difference between opt-in and opt-out in a program such as organ donation. If you tell people that they can opt-in to donating their organs if they are killed, a few will feel strongly enough to do it—most people won't. If you switch that to opt-out the reverse happens—very few people opt out. Changing the "choice architecture" that people have, changes choices. This is not going to work on people who feel strongly, but the majority don't really care and can be pushed in one direction or another by choice architecture.
A better example is a program called "save more tomorrow" (SMT), for 401K plans in companies. People generally don't save very much. So, the "save more tomorrow" program lets you decide up front to save a greater portion of promotions and raises. You are not cutting into today's income (to which you feel you are entitled to spend) but rather you are pre-allocating a future windfall. Seems pretty simple but there are dramatic increases in savings rates when it is instituted.
Dick came to the session loaded for bear, expecting the objections of classical economics. Apparently this is all very controversial among economists and policy wonks. It struck me as very clever, but once explained, very obvious. Of course you can put some spin on the ball and nudge people the right way using to achieve a policy effect. It's called marketing when you do this in business, and it certainly can matter. In the world of policy wonk economists this may be controversial, but it wasn't to me.
An interesting connection with the discussion of priming experiments is that many policy contexts are highly artificial—very much like experiments. Filling out a driver's license form is a kind of questionnaire, and the organ donation scenario seems very remote to most people despite the fact that they're making a binding choice rather than . So the mechanics of opt-in versus opt-out or required choice could matter a lot in these contexts.
Dick has a bunch of other interesting ideas. One of them is to require that government disclosures on things like cell phone plans, or credit card statements be machine readable disclosure with a standard schema. This would allow web sites to offer automated comparisons, and other tools to help people understand the complexities. This is a fascinating idea that could have a lot of merit. Dick is, from my perspective, a bit over optimistic in some ways—it is unclear that it will be overwhelming.
An example is unit prices in grocery stores—those little labels on store shelves that tell you that Progesso canned tomatoes are 57 cents per pound, while the store brand is 43. Consumer advocates thought these would revolutionize consumer behavior—and perhaps they did in some limited ways. But premium brands didn't disappear. I also differ on another point—must this be required by government, and would it be incorruptible were it so mandated.
In the world of technology most standards are de facto, rather than de juris, and are driven by private owners (companies or private sector standards bodies), because the creation and maintenance of a standard is a dynamic balancing act—not a static one. I think that many of the disclosure standards he seeks would be better done this way. Conversely, a government mandate disclosure standard might become so ossified by changing slowly that it did not achieve the right result. Nevertheless, this is a small point compared to the main idea which is that machine readable disclosures with standardized schema allow third party analysis and enables a degree of competition that would harder to achieve by other means.
Sendhil Mullainathan gave a fascinating talk about applying behavior economics to understand poverty. If this succeeds (it is a work in progress) it would be extremely important.He showed a bunch of data on itinerant fruit vendors (all women) in India. 69% of them are constantly in debt to money lenders who charge 5% per day interest. The fruit ladies make 10% per day profit, so half their income goes to the money lender. They also typically buy a couple cups of tea per day. Sendhil shows that 1 cup of tea per day less would let them be debt free in 30 days, doubling their income. 31% of these women have figured that out, so it is not impossible.
Why don't the rest get there? Sendhil then showed a bunch of other data arguing that poor people—even those in the US (who are vastly richer in absolute scale than his Indian fruit vendors)—do similar things with how they spend food stamps, or use of payday loans. He was very deliberate at drawing this out, until I finally couldn't stand it and blurted out "you're saying that they all have high discount rate". His argument is that under scarcity there is a systematic effect that you put the discount rate way too high for your own good. With too high a discount rate, you spend for the moment, not for the future. So, you have a cup a tea rather than double your income.He is testing this with an amazing experiment. What would these women do if they could escape the "debt trap"?
Bono, Jeffery Sachs and others have argued this point for poor nations—this is the individual version of the proposition.Sendhil is studying 1000 of these fruit vendors (all women). Their total debt is typically $25 each, so he is just stepping in and paying off the debt for 500 of them! The question is then to see how many of them revert to being in debt over time, versus the 500 who are studied, but do not have their debt paid off. The experiment is underway and he has no idea what the result will be.The interesting thing here is that, for these people, one can do a meaningful experiment (N = 500 gives good statistics) without much money in absolute. It would be hard to do this experiment with debt relief for poor nations, or even the US poor, but in India you can do serious field experiments for little money.
Sendhil also has an amusing argument, which is that very busy people are exactly like these poor fruit vendors. If you have very little time, it is scarce and you are as time-poor as the fruit ladies are cash-poor. So, you act like there is a high discount—and you commit to future events—like agreeing to travel and give a talk. Then as the time approaches, you tend to regret it and ask "why did I agree to this?". So you act like there is a high discount rate. This got everybody laughing.
The difference here is that time can't be banked or borrowed, so it is unclear to me how close an analogy it is, but it was interesting nonetheless.Indeed, I almost cancelled my attendance at this event right before hand, thinking "why did I agree to this? I don't have the time!". After much wrestling I decided I could attend the first day, but no more. Well, this is one of those times when having the "wrong" discount rate is in your favor. I'm very glad I attended.
Nathan
There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not! —Daniel Kahneman [7.27.08]
SECOND DAY REPORT—EDGE MASTER CLASS 08 [7.27.08]
By George Dyson
GEORGE DYSON, a historian among futurists, is the author Baidarka; Project Orion; and Darwin Among the Machines.
George Dyson's Edge Bio Page
The weekend master class on behavioral economics was productive in unexpected ways, and a lot of good ideas and thoughts about implementing them were exchanged.
Day 2 (Sunday) opened with a session led by Sendhil Mullainathan, followed by a final wrap-up discussion before we adjourned at noon. Elon Musk, Evan Williams, and Nathan Myhrvold had departed early. In the absence of Nathan's high-resolution record, a brief summary, with editorial comments, is given here.
"I refuse to accept however, the stupidity of the Stock Exchange boys, as an explanation of the trend of stocks," wrote John von Neumann to Stanislaw Ulam, on December 9, 1939. "Those boys are stupid alright, but there must be an explanation of what happens, which makes no use of this fact." This question led von Neumann (with the help of Oskar Morgenstern) to his monumental Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a precise mathematical structure demonstrating that a reliable economy can be constructed out of unreliable parts.
The von Neumann and Morgenstern approach (developed further by von Neumann's subsequent Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms From Unreliable Components) assumes that human unreliability and irrationality (by no means excluded from their model) will, in the aggregate, be filtered out. In the real world, however, irrational behavior (including the "stupidity of the stock exchange boys") is not completely filtered out. Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, and their colleagues are developing an updated theory of games and economic behavior that does make use of this fact.
Sendhil Mullainathan opened the first hour, on the subject of scarcity, by repeating the first day's question: what is it that prevents the fruit vendors (who borrow their working capital daily at high interest) from saving their way out of recurring debt? According to Sendhil, many vendors do manage to escape, but a core group remain trapped.
Sendhil shows a graph with $$ on the X-axis and Temptation on the Y-axis. The curve starts out flat and then ascends steeply upward before leveling off. The dangerous area is the steep slope when a person begins to acquire disposable income and meets rapidly increasing temptations.
"To understand the behavior you have to understand the scale." Thaler interjects: "It's a mental accounting problem—but I think everything is a mental accounting problem." All human beings are subject to temptation, but the consequences are higher for the poor. Conclusion: temptation is a regressive tax.
Paul Romer notes that the temptation of time is a progressive tax, since time, unlike money, is evenly distributed, and wealthy people, no matter how well supplied with money, believe they have less spare time. Bottom line: the effects of temptation do not scale with income.
How best to intervene? Daniel Kahneman notes: "Some cultures have solved that problem... there seems to be a cultural solution." Sendhil, whose field research may soon have some answers, believes that lending at lower interest rates may help but will not solve the problem, and adds: "It would be better for the microfinanciers to come in and offer money at the same rate as the existing lenders, and then make the payoff in some other ways." The problem is the chronic effects of poverty, not the lending institutions (or lack thereof).
Sendhil moves the discussion to the subject of "depletion"—when judgment deteriorates due to the effects of stress. Clinical studies and real-world examples are described. Mental depletion correlates strongly with high serum cortisol (measurable in urine) and low glucose. Poverty produces chronic depletion, and decisions are impaired. High-value decisions are made under conditions of high stress. This results in what Sendhil terms the scarcity trap.
During the mid-morning break (with cookies), Richard Thaler shows videos from a 40-year-old study (Walter Mischel, 1973) of children offered one cookie now or two if they wait. The observed behavior correlates strongly, by almost any measure, with both the economic success of the parents and the child's future success. Hypothesis: small behavioral shifts might produce (or "nudge") large economic results.
After the break we begin to wrap things up. Richard Thaler suggests a "nudge" model of the world. The same way a digital camera has both an "expert mode" and an "idiot mode," what the economy needs is an "idiot mode" resistant to experts making mistakes.
Thaler notes that Government is really bad at building systems that can be operated in "idiot mode"—just compare private-sector websites vs. public-sector. Imagine if the Government had designed the user interface for Amazon!
Sendhil makes a final comment that elicits agreement all around: "R&D in the poverty space has huge potential returns and there is too little thinking about that."
Daniel Kahneman concludes: "There's new technology emerging from Behavioral Economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!" The meeting adjourns.
My personal conclusions: retreating to the luxury of Sonoma to discuss economic theory in mid-2008 conveys images of Fiddling while Rome Burns. Do the architects of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook have anything to teach the behavioral economists—and anything to learn? So what? What's new?? As it turns out, all kinds of things are new. Entirely new economic structures and pathways have come into existence in the past few years. More wealth is flowing ever more quickly, and can be monitored and influenced in real time. Models can be connected directly to the real world (for instance, Sendhil's field experiment, using real money to remove real debt, observing the results over time). The challenge is how to extend the current economic redistribution as efficiently (and beneficently) as possible to the less wealthy as well as the more wealthy of the world.
A time of misguided economic decisions, while bad for many of us, is a good time for behavioral economics. As Abraham Flexner argued (26 September 1931) when urging the inclusion of a School of Economics at the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study: "The plague is upon us, and one cannot well study plagues after they have run their course." All the more so amidst the plagues of 2008.
It was Louis Bamberger's wish (23 April 1934), upon granting Abraham Flexner's request, that "the School of Economics and Politics may contribute not only to a knowledge of these subjects but ultimately to the cause of social justice which we have deeply at heart."
George Dyson
ON "A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS"
W. Daniel Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, NEW Daniel Kahneman, NEW Nathan Myhrvold
...
John Brockman, Editor and PublisherRussell Weinberger, Associate Publishermailto:editor@edge.orgCopyright © 2008 By Edge Foundation, IncAll Rights Reserved.
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Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world.
The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.
I particularly like to follow the articles and doings of their "Third Culture". You can read their full description of what's meant by Third Culture here: http://www.edge.org/about_edge.html
but a summary of the concept reads:
The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.
Now all of this is coming from a group of Americans whose cultural base is a European Western civilization perspective. That's very important to keep in mind. Everyone does not think like these folks do. But it's important to know how and what they are thinking, as most of them occupy powerful and influential positions in both society and their respective fields. For that reason....I like to know what's on their minds.
And I think you should know also.
On this blog, I spend a lot of time encouraging you to know and listen to the intelligence of your own Heart. If you've been practicing that, by now you might have experienced that often times, doing so, can place one in opposition to the 'powers that be'. Maybe even in conflict with one of the policies of one of these guys that are a member of the mind set of EDGE members. Knowing what they base their thinking on, and how they come up with their decisions, plans and solutions can be quite fascinating, and really a revelation.
I have friends that think that there those that launch conspiracies and actual plots to undermine, subvert,oppress and destroy certain groups, and the freedoms and activities of segments of the population. Paying attention over the years, I've come to believe that we're giving these Devious Entities way more credit than they deserve.
I've come to believe that they're not smart enough to actually concoct the schemes that we might think they are behind. I think that they're actually just blundering their way through the World....stupid, blind, ignorant, greedy, and basically very deeply hurt and sick psyches. They represent humanity in 'arrested development' so they are perpetually immature, and act this out on a global playground.
For various reasons, they are disconnected from a deep feeling of connectedness to All of Life. So instead of relying upon the Love and Intelligence of the Heart, they push their center of consciousness up in to brain, and thus, they like to THINK. Alot.
And the thinking goes on and on and on. And they like to just think up stuff. Abstract reasoning and rationalsim. To quote, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, " Since the Middle Ages, our Occident (Western culture) has been blinded, particularly by the cerebration of the Greek Eleatics who preferred reasoning to experimentation. The beginning of this disquieting period of 'argurers' can be situated with the Eleatic school around 550 or 500 B.C."
He goes on "No sooner had a doctrine seen the light of day than a rejoinder was being born, either a contradiction or an extolling of the idea expressed. To contradict, and to argue, have always been part of the intelligent and subtle temperment of the Greek".
I include this, because the people that live from the Third Culture mentality, and those that I spoke of that produced that tasteless cover of 'The New Yorker Magazine' featuring the Obamas, are all the descendants of Western intellectualism that began with Greek philosophers.
The sad part is that the philosphical and intellectual system the world operates upon today is a deviation of the teachings Greek students ~later to be know as 'philosophers' received in the temples in Egypt. DEVIATION is the key word in that sentence.
De Lubicz said that the Greeks "searched for answers that reason could accept". The problem was, they were dealing with trying to understand levels of Life, that don't fit within rational terms. And here is where one of the first major deviations in man's wholesome thinking date from: They (the Greeks) attributed a physical character to metaphysical principles.
Now don't give up on me....I'm not trying to loose you here. I'm telling you all of this so that you can understand that many of the ideals, concepts and ways which we've been programmed to live and see our world by, conflict with what 'our inner truth' tells us, because they are out of alignment with an organic understanding and ordering of the flow of Life.
I'm suggesting that one's tinge or roar of inner rebellion, is one's innate reaction to these critical deviations in fundamental understandings about how Life works that were suffered long ago. These misunderstandings were allowed to go uncorrected, and thus, continue, flourish and proliferate. Right up to today, where we actually have a President with the intellectual capacity of George W. Bush. And groups like EDGE's Third Culture, quite full of themselves, are on top of the world, influencing society, directing and naming the flow of human civilization.
Okay....I'll get back to the point.
And that is that I want you to check out how these folks are thinking about economics. I'm directing you to a conference they just had where the keynote speakers discussed Behavioral Economics. New to me, but this is something that's been a topic for some time. So if you're loosing your home, or now earning minimum wage because Arnold is your Governor, then I want you to understand where the thinking for the policies that allow you to be in those circumstances stems from.
Because as I said.....these guys....and they are 99.9% men....are simply wingin' it. Just making up stuff....They ain't got a clue. And that's why everything is a mess. But look at the names and the companies in attendance. There's genius present yes. Just notice how it's being directed.
Now. Once you understand this, I'm counting on you to join me in opening yourself up to receive BETTER IDEAS from Cosmic Consciousness, for the needs of our world. DIVINE IDEAS, captured in your meditation and contemplation of the moment. The solutions will come from within YOU.
Not in an economic stimulus of $600. They will be organic, expressions of God/Allah/Cosmic Consciousness/Enlightenment simply Being the Divine Operation. A quote that I've claimed daily is from Judge Thomas Troward. He declares ,"The Divine operation is always for expansion and fuller expression, and this means the production of something beyond what has gone before, something entirely new, not included in past experience, though proceeding out of it by an orderly sequence of growth". You and I are those centers of such Divine Operation.
So Beloveds, check out the reports from this conference and acquire the information you need to understand how those that have made our world what it is, are thinking. There are some interesting and stimulating ideas presented. You can clearly get a glimpse into the minds of those whose purpose in life is to manipulate you for their ends and needs. And unfortunately, that is usually to add to their or someone else's profit margin.
Do remember, what the Prophet Bob said,
"They made their world so hard
Every day we got to keep on fighting
They made their world so hard
Every day the people are dying".
Bob knew, ...and he was telling us that this ain't the way it's supposed to be. Let me know what you get out of this. You're the best and the brightest on the planet.
Kentke
Click on the links and explore the website for more info.
"Retreating to the luxury of Sonoma to discuss economic theory in mid-2008 conveys images of Fiddling while Rome Burns. Do the architects of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook have anything to teach the behavioral economists—and anything to learn? So what? What's new?? As it turns out, all kinds of things are new. Entirely new economic structures and pathways have come into existence in the past few years." —George Dyson
A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS Edge Master Class 08
By Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel KahnemanGaige House, Glen Ellen, CA,
July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT
RICHARD H. THALER is considered to be one of the founders of behavioral economics—the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
Richard Thaler's Edge Bio Page
SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University.
Sendhil Mullainathan's Edge Bio Page
DANIEL KAHNEMAN is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, and Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.
Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio Page
ATTENDEES: Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; W. Daniel Hillis, Computer Scientist; Cofounder, Applied Minds; Author, The Pattern on the Stone; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist; Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Salar Kamangar, Google; France LeClerc; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Elon Musk, Physicist; Founder, Telsa Motors, SpaceX; Nathan Myhrvold, Physicist; Founder, Intellectual Venture, LLC; Event Photographer; Sean Parker, The Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Director of the Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; coauthor of Nudge; Anne Treisman, Psychologist, Princeton University; Evan Williams, Founder, Blogger, Twitter
INTRODUCTION
This edition of Edge is a prelimanary report of tne second annual Edge "Master Class," which occured July 25-27 in Sonoma, which was followed on July 28th by a San Francisco dinner.
Below we present a summary of the Master Class by Nathan Myhrvold (Day 1) and George Dyson (Day 2) as well as some spirited exchanges among the attendees regarding the reports. Also, you will find the photo galleries of both the Master Class and the dinner.
A year ago, Edge convened the first "Master Class" in which psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman taught a 9-hour course on "Thinking About Thinking". Among the attendees were a "who's who" of the new global business culture. This year, to continue this discussion, Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, one of the fathers of Behavioral Economics, and Sendhil Mullinaithan, a brilliant young Harvard economist, along with Daniel Kahneman taught an intensive 9-hour course on behavioral economics.
[See Edge Master Class 07; "Thinking About Thinking";
Indeed, as one distinguished European visitor noted, the weekend involved "a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds. These are the people that are rewriting our global culture."
The Master Class is the most recent iteration of Edge's development. which began its activities under than name "The Reality Club" in 1981. Edge is different from The Algonquin, The Apostles, The Bloomsbury Group, or The Club, but it offers the same quality of intellectual adventure. The closest resemblances are to the early seventeenth-century Invisible College, a precursor to the Royal Society, whose members consisted of scientists such as Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and Robert Hooke. The Society's common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. Another, perhaps, more apt example, is the nineteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal club of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age — James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly, Benjamin Franklin.
In a similar fashion, Edge, through it's "Master Classes" is attempting to gather together those intellectuals and technology pioneers who are exploring the themes of the post-industrial Internet age.
In the coming weeks, Edge will publish the proceedings of ths year's Master Class, including streaming video and edited transcripts
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/thaler_sendhil08.html
A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICSEdge Master Class 08 By Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel KahnemanGaige House, Glen Ellen, CA, July 25-27, 2008
Look, this is science. Belief isn't an option. —Daniel Kahneman
FIRST DAY REPORT—EDGE MASTER CLASS 08 [7.26.08]
By Nathan Myhrvold
DR. NATHAN MYHRVOLD is CEO and managing director of Intellectual Ventures, a private entrepreneurial firm. Before Intellectual Ventures, Dr. Myhrvold spent 14 years at Microsoft Corporation. In addition to working directly for Bill Gates, he founded Microsoft Research and served as Chief Technology Officer.
Nathan Myhrvold's Edge Bio Page
The recent Edge event on behavioral economics was a great success. Here is a report on the first day.
Over the course of the last few years we've been treated to quite a few expositions of behavioral economics—probably a dozen popular books seek to explain some aspect of the field. This isn't the place for a full summary but the gist is pretty simple. Classical economics has studied a society of creatures that Richard Thaler, an economist at University of Chicago dubs the "Econ". Econs are rather superhuman in some ways—they do everything by optimizing utility functions, paragons of bounded rationality. Behavioral economics is about understanding how real live Humans differ from Econs.In previous reading, and an Edge event last year I learned the most prominent differences between Econs and Humans. Humans, as it turns out, are not always bounded rational—they can be downright irrational. Thaler likes to say that Humans are like Homer Simpson, Econs are like Mr Spock. This is a great start, but to have any substance in economics one has to understand that in the context of economic situations. Humans make a number of systematic deviations from the Econ ideal, and behavioral economics has categorized a few of these. So, for example, we humans fear loss more than we love gain.
Humans care about how a question is put to them—propositions which an Econ would instantly recognize as mathematically equivalent seem different to Humans and they behave differently.
Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate for his work in behavioral economics told us about priming—how a subtle influence radically shifts how people act. So, in one experiment people are asked to fill out a survey. In the corner of the room is a computer, with a screen saver running. That's it—nothing overt, just a background image in the room. If the screen saver shows pictures of money, the survey answers are radically different. Danny went through example after example like this where occurred. The first impulse one has in hearing this is no, this can't be the case. People can't be that easily and subconsciously influenced. You don't want to believe it. But Danny in his professorial way says "Look, this is science. Belief isn't an option". Repeated randomized trials confirm the results. Get over it.
The second impression is perhaps even more surprising—the influences are quite predictable. Show people images of money, and they tend to be more selfish and less willing to help others. Make people plot points on graph paper that are far apart, and they act more distant in lots of way. Make them plot points that are close together, and damned if they don't act closer. Again, it seems absurd, but cheap metaphors capture our minds. Humans, it seems, are like drunken poets, who can't glimpse a screen saver in the corner, or plot some points on graph paper without swooning under the metaphorical load and going off on tangents these stray images inspire.
This is all very strange, but is it important? The analogy that seems most apt to me is optical illusions. An earlier generation of psychologists got very excited about how the low level visual processing in our brains is hardwired to produce paradoxical results.
The priming stories seem to me to be the symbolic and metaphorical equivalent. The priming metaphors in optical illusions are the context of the image—the extra lines or arrows that fool us into making errors in judgment of sizes or shapes. While one can learn to recognize optical illusions, you can't help but see the effect for what it is. Knowing the trick does not lessen its intuitive impact. You really cannot help but think one line is longer, even if you know that the trick will be revealed in a moment.I wonder how closely this analogy carries over. Danny said today that you can't avoid priming; if he is right perhaps the analogy is close. Perhaps not.I also can't help but wonder how important these effects are to thinking and decision making in general.
After the early excitement about optical illusions, they have retreated from prominence—they explain a few cute things in vision, but they are only important in very artificial cases. Yes, there are a few cases where product design, architecture and other visual design problems are impacted by optical illusions, but very very few. In most cases the visual context is not misleading. So, while it offers an interesting clue to how visual processing works, it is a rare special case that has little practical importance.
Perhaps the same thing is true here—the point of these psychological experiments, like the illusions, is to isolate an effect in a very artificial circumstance. This is a great way to get a clue about how the brain works (indeed it would seem akin to Steven Pinker's latest work The Stuff of Thought which argues for the importance of metaphors in the brain).
But is it really important to day-to-day real world thinking? In particular, can economics be informed by these experiments? Does behavioral economics produce a systematically different result that classical economics if these ideas are factored in?I can imagine it both ways. If it is important, then we are all at sea, tossed and turned in a tumultuous tide of metaphors imposed by our context. That is a very strange world—totally counter to our intuition. But maybe that is reality.
Or, I could equally imagine that it only matters in cases where you create a very artificial experiment—in effect, turning up the volume on the noise in the thought process. In more realistic contexts the signal trumps the noise. The truth is likely some linear combination of these two extreme—but what combination? There are some great experiments yet to be done to nail that down.
Dick Thaler gave a fascinating talk that tries to apply these ideas in a very practical way. There is an old debate in economics about the right way to regulate society. Libertarians would say don't try—the harm in reducing choice is worse than the benefit, in part because of unintended consequences, but mostly because the market will reach the right equilibrium. Marxist economists, at the other extreme, took it for granted that one needs a dictatorship of the proletariat—choice is not an option, at least for the populace.
Thaler has a new creation—a concept he calls "libertarian paternalism" which tries to split the baby. The core idea (treated fully in his book Nudge) is pretty simple—present plenty of options, but then encourage certain outcomes by using behavioral economics concepts to stack the deck. A classic example is the difference between opt-in and opt-out in a program such as organ donation. If you tell people that they can opt-in to donating their organs if they are killed, a few will feel strongly enough to do it—most people won't. If you switch that to opt-out the reverse happens—very few people opt out. Changing the "choice architecture" that people have, changes choices. This is not going to work on people who feel strongly, but the majority don't really care and can be pushed in one direction or another by choice architecture.
A better example is a program called "save more tomorrow" (SMT), for 401K plans in companies. People generally don't save very much. So, the "save more tomorrow" program lets you decide up front to save a greater portion of promotions and raises. You are not cutting into today's income (to which you feel you are entitled to spend) but rather you are pre-allocating a future windfall. Seems pretty simple but there are dramatic increases in savings rates when it is instituted.
Dick came to the session loaded for bear, expecting the objections of classical economics. Apparently this is all very controversial among economists and policy wonks. It struck me as very clever, but once explained, very obvious. Of course you can put some spin on the ball and nudge people the right way using to achieve a policy effect. It's called marketing when you do this in business, and it certainly can matter. In the world of policy wonk economists this may be controversial, but it wasn't to me.
An interesting connection with the discussion of priming experiments is that many policy contexts are highly artificial—very much like experiments. Filling out a driver's license form is a kind of questionnaire, and the organ donation scenario seems very remote to most people despite the fact that they're making a binding choice rather than . So the mechanics of opt-in versus opt-out or required choice could matter a lot in these contexts.
Dick has a bunch of other interesting ideas. One of them is to require that government disclosures on things like cell phone plans, or credit card statements be machine readable disclosure with a standard schema. This would allow web sites to offer automated comparisons, and other tools to help people understand the complexities. This is a fascinating idea that could have a lot of merit. Dick is, from my perspective, a bit over optimistic in some ways—it is unclear that it will be overwhelming.
An example is unit prices in grocery stores—those little labels on store shelves that tell you that Progesso canned tomatoes are 57 cents per pound, while the store brand is 43. Consumer advocates thought these would revolutionize consumer behavior—and perhaps they did in some limited ways. But premium brands didn't disappear. I also differ on another point—must this be required by government, and would it be incorruptible were it so mandated.
In the world of technology most standards are de facto, rather than de juris, and are driven by private owners (companies or private sector standards bodies), because the creation and maintenance of a standard is a dynamic balancing act—not a static one. I think that many of the disclosure standards he seeks would be better done this way. Conversely, a government mandate disclosure standard might become so ossified by changing slowly that it did not achieve the right result. Nevertheless, this is a small point compared to the main idea which is that machine readable disclosures with standardized schema allow third party analysis and enables a degree of competition that would harder to achieve by other means.
Sendhil Mullainathan gave a fascinating talk about applying behavior economics to understand poverty. If this succeeds (it is a work in progress) it would be extremely important.He showed a bunch of data on itinerant fruit vendors (all women) in India. 69% of them are constantly in debt to money lenders who charge 5% per day interest. The fruit ladies make 10% per day profit, so half their income goes to the money lender. They also typically buy a couple cups of tea per day. Sendhil shows that 1 cup of tea per day less would let them be debt free in 30 days, doubling their income. 31% of these women have figured that out, so it is not impossible.
Why don't the rest get there? Sendhil then showed a bunch of other data arguing that poor people—even those in the US (who are vastly richer in absolute scale than his Indian fruit vendors)—do similar things with how they spend food stamps, or use of payday loans. He was very deliberate at drawing this out, until I finally couldn't stand it and blurted out "you're saying that they all have high discount rate". His argument is that under scarcity there is a systematic effect that you put the discount rate way too high for your own good. With too high a discount rate, you spend for the moment, not for the future. So, you have a cup a tea rather than double your income.He is testing this with an amazing experiment. What would these women do if they could escape the "debt trap"?
Bono, Jeffery Sachs and others have argued this point for poor nations—this is the individual version of the proposition.Sendhil is studying 1000 of these fruit vendors (all women). Their total debt is typically $25 each, so he is just stepping in and paying off the debt for 500 of them! The question is then to see how many of them revert to being in debt over time, versus the 500 who are studied, but do not have their debt paid off. The experiment is underway and he has no idea what the result will be.The interesting thing here is that, for these people, one can do a meaningful experiment (N = 500 gives good statistics) without much money in absolute. It would be hard to do this experiment with debt relief for poor nations, or even the US poor, but in India you can do serious field experiments for little money.
Sendhil also has an amusing argument, which is that very busy people are exactly like these poor fruit vendors. If you have very little time, it is scarce and you are as time-poor as the fruit ladies are cash-poor. So, you act like there is a high discount—and you commit to future events—like agreeing to travel and give a talk. Then as the time approaches, you tend to regret it and ask "why did I agree to this?". So you act like there is a high discount rate. This got everybody laughing.
The difference here is that time can't be banked or borrowed, so it is unclear to me how close an analogy it is, but it was interesting nonetheless.Indeed, I almost cancelled my attendance at this event right before hand, thinking "why did I agree to this? I don't have the time!". After much wrestling I decided I could attend the first day, but no more. Well, this is one of those times when having the "wrong" discount rate is in your favor. I'm very glad I attended.
Nathan
There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not! —Daniel Kahneman [7.27.08]
SECOND DAY REPORT—EDGE MASTER CLASS 08 [7.27.08]
By George Dyson
GEORGE DYSON, a historian among futurists, is the author Baidarka; Project Orion; and Darwin Among the Machines.
George Dyson's Edge Bio Page
The weekend master class on behavioral economics was productive in unexpected ways, and a lot of good ideas and thoughts about implementing them were exchanged.
Day 2 (Sunday) opened with a session led by Sendhil Mullainathan, followed by a final wrap-up discussion before we adjourned at noon. Elon Musk, Evan Williams, and Nathan Myhrvold had departed early. In the absence of Nathan's high-resolution record, a brief summary, with editorial comments, is given here.
"I refuse to accept however, the stupidity of the Stock Exchange boys, as an explanation of the trend of stocks," wrote John von Neumann to Stanislaw Ulam, on December 9, 1939. "Those boys are stupid alright, but there must be an explanation of what happens, which makes no use of this fact." This question led von Neumann (with the help of Oskar Morgenstern) to his monumental Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a precise mathematical structure demonstrating that a reliable economy can be constructed out of unreliable parts.
The von Neumann and Morgenstern approach (developed further by von Neumann's subsequent Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms From Unreliable Components) assumes that human unreliability and irrationality (by no means excluded from their model) will, in the aggregate, be filtered out. In the real world, however, irrational behavior (including the "stupidity of the stock exchange boys") is not completely filtered out. Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, and their colleagues are developing an updated theory of games and economic behavior that does make use of this fact.
Sendhil Mullainathan opened the first hour, on the subject of scarcity, by repeating the first day's question: what is it that prevents the fruit vendors (who borrow their working capital daily at high interest) from saving their way out of recurring debt? According to Sendhil, many vendors do manage to escape, but a core group remain trapped.
Sendhil shows a graph with $$ on the X-axis and Temptation on the Y-axis. The curve starts out flat and then ascends steeply upward before leveling off. The dangerous area is the steep slope when a person begins to acquire disposable income and meets rapidly increasing temptations.
"To understand the behavior you have to understand the scale." Thaler interjects: "It's a mental accounting problem—but I think everything is a mental accounting problem." All human beings are subject to temptation, but the consequences are higher for the poor. Conclusion: temptation is a regressive tax.
Paul Romer notes that the temptation of time is a progressive tax, since time, unlike money, is evenly distributed, and wealthy people, no matter how well supplied with money, believe they have less spare time. Bottom line: the effects of temptation do not scale with income.
How best to intervene? Daniel Kahneman notes: "Some cultures have solved that problem... there seems to be a cultural solution." Sendhil, whose field research may soon have some answers, believes that lending at lower interest rates may help but will not solve the problem, and adds: "It would be better for the microfinanciers to come in and offer money at the same rate as the existing lenders, and then make the payoff in some other ways." The problem is the chronic effects of poverty, not the lending institutions (or lack thereof).
Sendhil moves the discussion to the subject of "depletion"—when judgment deteriorates due to the effects of stress. Clinical studies and real-world examples are described. Mental depletion correlates strongly with high serum cortisol (measurable in urine) and low glucose. Poverty produces chronic depletion, and decisions are impaired. High-value decisions are made under conditions of high stress. This results in what Sendhil terms the scarcity trap.
During the mid-morning break (with cookies), Richard Thaler shows videos from a 40-year-old study (Walter Mischel, 1973) of children offered one cookie now or two if they wait. The observed behavior correlates strongly, by almost any measure, with both the economic success of the parents and the child's future success. Hypothesis: small behavioral shifts might produce (or "nudge") large economic results.
After the break we begin to wrap things up. Richard Thaler suggests a "nudge" model of the world. The same way a digital camera has both an "expert mode" and an "idiot mode," what the economy needs is an "idiot mode" resistant to experts making mistakes.
Thaler notes that Government is really bad at building systems that can be operated in "idiot mode"—just compare private-sector websites vs. public-sector. Imagine if the Government had designed the user interface for Amazon!
Sendhil makes a final comment that elicits agreement all around: "R&D in the poverty space has huge potential returns and there is too little thinking about that."
Daniel Kahneman concludes: "There's new technology emerging from Behavioral Economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!" The meeting adjourns.
My personal conclusions: retreating to the luxury of Sonoma to discuss economic theory in mid-2008 conveys images of Fiddling while Rome Burns. Do the architects of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook have anything to teach the behavioral economists—and anything to learn? So what? What's new?? As it turns out, all kinds of things are new. Entirely new economic structures and pathways have come into existence in the past few years. More wealth is flowing ever more quickly, and can be monitored and influenced in real time. Models can be connected directly to the real world (for instance, Sendhil's field experiment, using real money to remove real debt, observing the results over time). The challenge is how to extend the current economic redistribution as efficiently (and beneficently) as possible to the less wealthy as well as the more wealthy of the world.
A time of misguided economic decisions, while bad for many of us, is a good time for behavioral economics. As Abraham Flexner argued (26 September 1931) when urging the inclusion of a School of Economics at the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study: "The plague is upon us, and one cannot well study plagues after they have run their course." All the more so amidst the plagues of 2008.
It was Louis Bamberger's wish (23 April 1934), upon granting Abraham Flexner's request, that "the School of Economics and Politics may contribute not only to a knowledge of these subjects but ultimately to the cause of social justice which we have deeply at heart."
George Dyson
ON "A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS"
W. Daniel Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, NEW Daniel Kahneman, NEW Nathan Myhrvold
...
John Brockman, Editor and PublisherRussell Weinberger, Associate Publishermailto:editor@edge.orgCopyright © 2008 By Edge Foundation, IncAll Rights Reserved.
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If it's any consolation, I am a Buddhist female of mixed Asian ancestry and I am applying to PhD programs in economics to study decision architecture within behavioral economics. So maybe the field can be 99.8% white dudes in the near future :)
ReplyDeleteThanks Annitah for letting us know that you check us out here, and more importantly, for alerting us to how this topic relates to your Life.
ReplyDeleteYou've got our whole hearted support of your pursuing these graduate studies. I speak for the Soul of humanity in declaring that creative genius expressing through the totality of Your Life, is just what the world has been waiting for. Keep us informed of your revelations and academic experiences.
Yes, your direction brings great consolation. As it's said in the 'hood, "You go girl!!!"
interesting!!
ReplyDelete