Steven Levitt
speaker
124 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2014
last heard Jun 2014
Steven Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So the best advice I can give you is if you're out there and you're wavering back and forth between going on a diet, the data say go on the diet.
I think the biases that humans have suggest that there's not enough quitting going on, not enough changing going on, because...
We should be clear about that.
By quitting, we really mean changing the status quo, doing something different.
It tends to be that you pay the costs right away and reap the benefits later.
So when you quit your job today, you stop getting a paycheck.
You have to tell your parents that you quit your job.
You have to move back home with your parents.
What do you have to do?
Painful things.
And then you do it in the long run because you think someday you'll be on a career path which is more rewarding.
And in general, we know that humans...
They weigh the near future more heavily than the distant future.
And so if the costs come first, they're unlikely to want to pay those costs, even though they might get a long-term return.
I think there's also some evidence that humans aren't that good at thinking about what economists call opportunity cost.
That even though today I feel like I should change, I think to myself, okay, I could change today or...
I could stick with it for one more day and I could quit tomorrow.
And so it's easy in this world of option value to always put off the decision.
And one of the benefits, if you want to call it, of this little coin toss experiment is that the coin toss is actually – this is a case where I think you could argue from a behavioral economics perspective that imposing a constraint, forcing someone to actually decide today, I'm either going to quit or I'm not going to quit –
has a real benefit to the person.
Showing 101–120 of 124 · page 6 of 7
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