Part II of II, by Claudio Grass Slippery slope However, interesting as those experiments and observations might be, they are still the result of specific parameters within a particular setting and an environment that doesn’t resemble real life. Serious and honest behavioral economists both understand and freely admit this. Just because there was one experiment in which 12 university students chose to receive 1 chocolate today rather than 2 tomorrow, one cannot extrapolate from...
Read More »The weaponization of Economics
Part I of II, by Claudio Grass The field of economics has long and often very embarrassing history of absurd theories, blatantly wrong assumptions and hypotheses, spectacularly wrong predictions and entirely avoidable policymaking blunders; a few of them hilarious, most of them catastrophic, some of them literally murderous. Overconfidence and a generous amount of hubris appear to be at the heart of the problem, as is so often the case nearly every time that “experts” and...
Read More »A Biased 2017 Forecast, Part 1
“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” – Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to see a live one hour interview with Michael Lewis at the Annenberg Center about his new book The Undoing Project. Everyone attending the lecture received a complimentary copy of the book. Being a huge fan of Lewis after...
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