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
So that's the Becker school of thought.
I can see you're tucking heartily into your second coffee there, Tim.
Are you addicted and is that rational?
I'm addicted and it's perfectly rational, at least according to Gary Becker.
All kinds of things happen to you when you're addicted.
You build up a tolerance.
You get withdrawal symptoms if you stop.
Well, there are also presumably benefits to being addicted.
Various drugs feel good.
Caffeine feels great.
And so the rational addict weighs up the costs and benefits and may well decide to become addicted.
Tim and others write compellingly about how much human behaviour we can make sense of if only we figure out the incentives.
And it makes perfect sense to push this as far as possible.
Maybe you've seen the latest fashionable twist, nicknamed the Nudge Unit, set up to advise David Cameron on policy to encourage us to do the right thing and said to be highly influential.
In the nudge unit, they don't always rate our logical powers to choose for our own good, but they do think they can change us with better incentives.
The nudge theory comes from economist Richard Thaler.
So if you hear that you can have the rational junkie, for example, I mean, how do you respond to that?
I can't resist noting how accessible this makes economics.
After all, it starts with introspection by any of us asking, what kind of economic creature am I?
If I had to say where this story of economics ends so far, my guess is that it would be here, with the search to connect a theory of people with a theory of the system.
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