beharioval economics
razib | June 29, 2009Arnold Kling highlights this section from a Scientific American article, The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts:
But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators.
One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested…
razib | May 29, 2009Felix Salmon pointed me to The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street today. There really is a boom in these sorts of books recently! Are we overdoing the "irrationality" bit? Probably. Mike offers up some skepticism about the creeping of irrationality as an explanation for everything.
razib | May 13, 2009
When I found out a while back that Jonah Lehrer's next book was titled How We Decide, I knew I was going to check it out. It's no coincidence that I recently reviewed Predictably Irrational, I blog because I'm interested in reducing the human animal down its basic units of organization. Due to my disciplinary focus I generally touch upon behavior genetics or the inferences of human history one can glean from evolutionary genetics. History, psychology and economics are all domains which have piqued my interest. But I'll be honest and admit that I tend to avoid neuroscience because there's a…
razib | April 29, 2009
In the wake of Predictably Irrational, check out Tyler Cowen's endorsement of Geoffrey Miller's new book, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. Miller is a good writer, so I'm assuming it will be a page-turner, but he does tend to be "provocative" in all the best & worst ways when it comes to popular science. Evolutionary psychologists have a tendency to make everything about sex & status, but within the field it seems Miller does come off as the "pimp daddy" always talking about the "bling" and "b**tches" as the raison d'être.
razib | April 26, 2009The episode is titled "your brains & your genes." There's more emphasis on economics than you think.