Plato knew a lot about behavioural economics
aeon.co
aeon.co
Edit: actually, I'm not clear on the difference between the endowment effect and loss aversion.
I, honestly, have never used the services of a call-girl but I can relate to the concept.
Same thing happens to freelance developers and why some add kill switches[1]. You deliver, the client then says "It's not quite what I asked for, I'll give you Nothing/10%/50%/80% of what we agreed".
Obviously it's worse for call girls as they can't take you to court in most countries, hence why they always ask for money up front. Their post-service negotiating position is extremely weak. So no money up front, no service.
[1] I personally think that as long as you make it clear to the client + part of the contract that they only have a temporary licence key until full-payment, kill switches are fine. Adding it on the sly is not.
It does call into question the feasibility of the book's objective of correcting human biases and cognitive errors. We've been trying to do that for 2500 years.
He may have said what we've heard repeatedly but also backed it up with actual research.
> Think of it like this: the takeaway of Bartels’ post is that something like a 1% exists. (It’s actually more like a 10% for the purposes of the study he cites.) I refer back to Occupy’s figuration for two reasons. One, I imagine that Bartels would be rather sympathetic to the liberal-progressivist ends to which this slogan was put, or at least not hostile. Two, it’s a figure that drew upon pop economic knowledge, that attempted to derive from the latter the kind of epistemic aura that numbers hold for Serious People. It would have been utterly natural for Bartels to have referred to this figure, to the social movement that buoyed it, to the knowledges that sustained it. Instead, he directs us to “a flurry of commentary” surrounding McCutcheon v. FEC, a case adjudicated well, well after Occupy. If Occupy was a movement touting an idea whose time had come, Bartels refuses to validate forms of knowing that know too soon, forms of knowing that short circuit the positivist time of coming-to-know with the punctuality of a deeply plebeian “Shit’s fucked up and bullshit!”
http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2014/04/ideas-whose-time-has-be...
-- Denis Diderot, 1755
Really? Lots of things have survived that long.
Some religions disavow others, so some of them must be errors, no?
Robbery/murder/unprovoked aggression?
We sure we want to consider every recurring instinctual behavior "essential" just because it's old?
Many "societies as a whole" have also collapsed in that 2500 years, too, so would you even want to conclude it's working that well?
Only if you think the purpose of a religion is to be the truth.
Kahneman later writes that the only way to avoid cognitive biases that he's seen is to know them and be vigilant for them. And even that doesn't work a good deal of the time. I remember that passage being a very sobering part of the book.
I would say that the book is Kahneman's attempt to actually add to that 2500 year effort by making the observations more formalized, but available to a wider audience.
> We've been trying to do that for 2500 years.
Who is "we" though? It's never everybody, right? So all this shows is that the few can't pick up the slack for everybody. Not everybody can be intelligent, but everybody can strive for more intellectual integrity than they currently have. That was true "then", and it will stay true always until the failure to follow through did us in.
There's a reasonable argument to be made here, but they did not make it.