— Dan Ariely
A TED.com talk on irrational behavior.
Posts tagged “Economics”
“I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on the back of my boyfriend’s bicycle.”
Ma Nuo, China’s most recognizable bai jin nu (gold-digger). As China rises in economic status, some economic problems are becoming interesting.
China’s real estate boom spells trouble for boyfriends - latimes.com
Bargaining Power Grows for Striking Chinese Workers - NYTimes.com
Does buying an iPad support the rising economic class of China’s manufacturing workers? It seems likely.
“One reason new technologies make face-to-face contact and proximity more valuable is that technological change increases the returns to being smart, and human beings get smart by hanging around other smart people.”
Edward L. Glaeser
![Fantastic
smartercities:
courtenaybird:
ladydata:
Flashy data visualization, sortable with a click? Yes, please.
lookbothways:
“I can’t get over how nicely done this visualization of income in New York City is.” [Via Felix Salmon]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ku17rguGi91qz6ljpo1_500.png)
Fantastic
Flashy data visualization, sortable with a click? Yes, please.
“I can’t get over how nicely done this visualization of income in New York City is.” [Via Felix Salmon]
American economists Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, who study the way economic decisions are made outside markets, were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics Monday.Ms. Ostrom’s work challenged the view that when people share a finite resource, they will end up destroying it — what is known as the tragedy of the commons. That view argues that resources that are important for the common good need to be highly regulated or privatized.
As a graduate student in the early 1960s at the University of California, Los Angeles, Ms. Ostrom researched the way water was being managed in Southern California. Groundwater levels were falling, and saltwater was seeping into the system. But rather than collapsing into a tragedy of the commons, communities and water producers hashed out a solution. That led her to explore situations throughout the world where resources were commonly held, and she found that people often developed institutions, networks and other ways of interacting that solved problems.
Mr. Williamson’s work is driven by two key ideas. The first is that a contractual agreement can never be complete; there are always contingencies that haven’t been accounted for. The other is that people act opportunistically within the gray area of contracts to make sure they benefit the most, and that can lead to problems.
“Googlenomics actually comes in two flavors: macro and micro. The macroeconomic side involves some of the company’s seemingly altruistic behavior, which often baffles observers. Why does Google give away products like its browser, its apps, and the Android operating system for mobile phones? Anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google, Varian says. And since using the Web without using Google is like dining at In-N-Out without ordering a hamburger, more eyeballs on the Web lead inexorably to more ad sales for Google.
The microeconomics of Google is more complicated. Selling ads doesn’t generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users’ tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It’s a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google’s future but the future of anyone who does business online.
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And so it begins, the first (non-intro) post and let us all dwell on the economy. Left column it is.
Each block in this histogram represents one year of stock returns, using data since 1825. The most recent observation, based on 2008 returns to date, is the dark block in the far left tail. The figure gives a good sense of how historically extraordinary this year’s bad news has been.
