How Obama used behavioral economics to win the election, and how he's using it to govern

We were evolved to be rational, but only in the environment that we evolved from. The environment we have now is far from small hunter-gatherer tribes, yet we are still equipped with the same rationale mechanisms. Hence, it's not working out perfectly.

Maybe if we restructure our society to simulate what it once was or at least some parts of it, we can better utilize our rationale mechanisms.

I thus thus didn't use a straw man, but rather the operational definition of rationality traditionally employed by mainstream lines of economics.

You're onto something with your definition in that a lot of friction and inefficiency today originates from people not coping well with an environment that is fast-changing and very different from our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.

The public always has the ability to "grow up" as you put it but they do not want to. People are not motivated to take action if there isn't an immediate risk to their own personal well being. Risk has been taken out of many things that we do so now we can make ignorant choices without immediate consequences.

We keep falling off the bike, but instead of scraping our knee and learning not to fall, we have a security net there to save us over and over again.

I don't blame the government for treating us like 5 year olds when that is how a majority of people act.

What's "unnecessary"? Energy drives modern technology, from your desk to your home to your doctor's office. Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary.

Really? This is your complaint? By 'unnecessary,' we can reasonably presume that the author means 'needlessly inefficient.' That much is evident to any sincere reader of the article who cares enough about the pursuit of knowledge to abide by the principle of charity: Put the best face on the argument before you refute it, otherwise you are not contributing.

The straw-man argument, "Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary," is wholly beside the point.

And while most scientists think our emissions are going to cause an increase in mean global temperatures over the next few centuries, "boiling the planet" is a long way off.

Again, this cannot be a serious complaint. The phrase 'boiling the planet' is clearly a metaphor. A surface reading would be that we're just raising the temperature of the planet to an unhealthy extreme. A more nuanced reading reveals that the author means that we are raising the temperature of the planet to such a high temperature that we are going to cause irreversible change, such as when one boils food and finds that no amount of refrigeration will bring it back to it's former state. More simply, we are doing something analogous to sterilizing the planet, though to a lesser degree, in that many species may ultimately be made extinct.

That's not entirely a rhetorical question, I honestly don't follow dead tree media and never got into it much as a kid.

This is evident from the shallowness of your misguided critique. More practice at reading, dead-tree media or otherwise, might have made you a skillful enough reader to have been able to follow the plot here.

Saul Griffith via Long Now lays out a nice engineer's estimation of factor 7-9x required drop in personal energy use; mostly through deprival: we become vegetarians, travel little, etc. Let's hope that's unnecessary.

http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recal...

Anyone who has followed Time Magazine at all knows that this is typical of its writing.

Or to put it in hacker news terms, flag the article (it's about politics and doesn't belong here) and move on.

> Again, neither your sarcastic disdain nor your parroting of a right-wing canard make this statement any less true as it pertains to this article.

Hmm. Did govt know best during the Bush years?

Do you really want to argue that general skepticism towards govt is wrong? If it isn't, do you really want to argue that it's a "right-wing canard"?

Hint: saying that someone is "right-wing" or taking a right-wing position isn't actually a cogent argument. The folks who care about the lables either already agree or strongly disagree. The undecided don't care about the labels or the tribes. (Clue: "destroy Bush" was only the goal of leftwing fanboys.)

- push to eliminate US nuclear weapons

- encouraging an international currency and removing the US dollar from a position of power

- spending $3.55 trillion for 2010 ($400bn over '09), when we've already committed $12.8 trillion to the recession

- increasing the marginal tax rate to the highest levels since Clinton

- letting North Korea get away with launching missiles over Japan

- taking over private businesses and forcing out their CEOs

I guess you always need a Carter to usher in a Reagan.

...And bring on the drive-by downmods with no responses.