Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You might call it soulful, you might call it artistic, you might call it willful or capricious or whatever.
Well, you might say that you can explain nine-tenths of behaviour, but there's this little bit that occasionally comes along, throws a spanner in the works, and then we get a crisis.
I've come just around the corner from Broadcasting House in London to see a bit of life in all its messy, disorganised, weird street variety.
And I'm sitting outside a cafe with the economist and journalist Tim Harford of Radio 4's More or Less and the Financial Times, but also, particularly for our purposes today, author of a book called The Logic of Life.
We're going to see how much logic we can observe.
Tim, can we find rational, logical explanations for some of the odder characteristics in people's economic
existence?
Well, we can try and economists have tried with growing confidence over the decades.
So I suppose you could start with Gary Becker, Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago, who's produced theories of rational discrimination, rational drug addiction and rational crime.
So Becker is a theorist, so he would start by saying, let's think about the incentives that a criminal faces.
What are the career options available to him or her?
What are the benefits of committing a crime?
What is the likelihood of being caught?
What is the cost of punishment?
And Becker puts all this down in a theoretical model.
Very, very interesting thinker.
When I met him at Chicago a few years ago, he parked his car illegally before we went to lunch.
I looked at him and he said, well, I don't think they'd check that carefully, I'll be fine.
So I said, well, was that a rational crime?
And he said, well, yes, it was.
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