Using Psychology To Save You From Yourself {0bamas plan for you "Behavioral Economics"}

NPR ^ | June 8, 2009 | Alix Spiegel

[Tigen]

This is the story of how obscure psychological research into human decision-making first revolutionized economics and now appears poised to remake the relationship between the government and its citizens.

Cass Sunstein, President Obama's pick to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was a vocal supporter of the program, because it was an economic policy that shaped itself around human psychology. Sunstein is just one of a number of high-level appointees now working in the Obama administration who favors this kind of approach.

All are devotees of behavioral economics — a school of economic thought greatly influenced by psychological research — which argues that the human animal is hard-wired to make errors when it comes to decision-making, and therefore people need a little "nudge" to make decisions that are in their own best interests.

And that is exactly what Obama administration officials plan to do: By taking account of human psychology, they hope to save you from yourself.

[DrC]

Who will protect us from Obama?

[PORD]

“the human animal is hard-wired to make errors when it comes to decision-making, and therefore people need a little “nudge” to make decisions that are in their own best interests.”

Now I understand, the Obamaites are not human and therefore their decisions are infallible, even if the facts say different?????

[R. Scott]

The main point of contention, says Thaler, was the suggestion that humans are less than perfectly rational when it comes to decision-making. For the majority of the 20th century, and for the most part even today, the human beings imagined by economists and placed at the center of their economic models have had a Spock-like rationality.

I believe it. If I had been perfectly rational all my life I'd be a wealthy man by now - if I hadn't died of boredom. I spent a lot of money on wine, women and song. I don't regret a dime of it.

[TimSkalaBim]

Fascinating stuff, in the sense that NPR spells out another variant in a long line of agenda-driven rationalizations for totalitarianism wearing the cloak of "economics". One of the most annoying misdirections this school of thought employs is the following:

For the majority of the 20th century, and for the most part even today, the human beings imagined by economists and placed at the center of their economic models have had a Spock-like rationality.

Never. No real economist has ever imagined any such thing. There is a difference between irrationality and not having perfect information which neither the NPR author or the subjects of this article mention or even demonstrate awareness of, and might just provide an explanation for why people (gasp!) sometimes make bad decisions.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

Too much wisdom will drive a man insane — Solomon.

We don’t want a nanny state controlling our decisions.

Wasting money has consequences. Simple. And when it comes to spending cash on riotous living — Obama [smoker] and his pizza chef, Pelosi and her squadron of jetsetting junkets. HYPOCRITES!

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

Obama: “Half of my letters brand me an idiot”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2468312/posts

Filing this in ...

Obama-nomics link-list
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2464021/posts

[gov_bean_ counter]

a Spock-like rationality

Would that be the rationality that suggests people will continue to produce at their maximum level of efficiency even as they retain less and less of the fruits of their labor???

[R. Scott]

We don’t want a nanny state controlling our decisions.

By no means!
But I doubt 0bama will have much luck using psychology. First, he'd have to find something that actually worked. As noted in the article, tossing a telephone pole didn't indicate the best leaders. It would take years of research to find a working ploy, and one size does not fit all. He'd need a separate ploy for every subset of every subculture. What might work on a wall street broker would not work on a construction worker - and even at that all brokers and workers don't think alike.

[R. Scott]

That would only seem rational to true believer dedicated Marxists.

[gov_bean_ counter]

And with your post we close the loop.

[Condor51]

Mw thinks Cass Sunstein and his 'mentor', Daniel Kahneman, the 'inventor' of behavioral economic, need to go play with Schrödinger's cat.

That'll keep em busy for a while.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

“But I doubt 0bama will have much luck using psychology.”

Not even on himself.

[dead]

"Merely accepting the fact that people do not necessarily make the best decisions for themselves is politically very explosive. The moment that you admit that, you have to start protecting people," Kahneman says.

In other words, if the human brain is hard-wired to make serious errors, that implies all kinds of things about the need for regulation and protection.

This article makes me want to punch somebody from the Obama Administration in the mouth.

Seriously, these pompous arrogant asses make me sick.

[wendy1946]

The city of Greensboro, N.C., has experimented with a program designed for teenage mothers. To prevent these teens from having another child, the city offered each of them $1 a day for every day they were not pregnant. It turns out that the psychological power of that small daily payment is huge. A single dollar a day was enough to push the rate of teen pregnancy down, saving all the incredible costs — human and financial — that go with teen parenting.

I'm convinced we're looking at that one the wrong way and have been for the past 80 years. Germany and Russia are presently in danger of collapse due to staggeringly low birth rates and the only thing keeping our own birth rate above water at present is immigrants, many if not most of whom are detrimental to the economic health of the country.

None of them are terribly worried about birth rates or teen pregnancies. In real life, the only choice we seem to have is WHOSE teens will be having kids, theirs or ours, and under what conditions and circumstances. The conclusion I'm coming to is that we actually need some sort of a conservative welfare system which would again make it both economically feasible and respectable for our own people to marry and start families at 17 or 20 as we are biologically programmed to do, and not at 35 or 40 when careers stand in the way and it's basically too late to have any more than 1.4 children.

[jazminerose]

Behavior psych as taught by BF Skinner was hot stuff in the 1970’s & pretty much deemed useless shortly after that.

It works fine when teaching a chicken to play the piano but gets a bit more complex with humans as it’s impossible to control enough extraneous variables.

Of course, Obamanutz aren’t much brighter than chickens & they can at least be taught a job.

[Oceander]

Behavioural Econ does have some very good insights, as people do have certain innate tendencies that violate the traditional conception of the rational decision-maker (funny, however, that no-one's noticed, least of all the liberals, that this is the same thing as an inborn, fixed human character, which is something conservatives have always argued existed).

However, that cannot logically be the grounds on which one group of people decides to take over making decisions for another group of people because the group that would attempt the takeover suffers from precisely the same decision-making flaws and would therefore be unable, in general, to make decisions for someone any better than that person could make for themselves.

Furthermore, behavioural econ doesn't say that the traditional conception is totally invalid, just that it needs tweaking, which means that most of the theories based on that traditional conception are still valid, including the fact that the closer one is to the facts and circumstances, the better a decision-maker one is, and that one has to have some skin in the game to make a really economically efficient decision. As such, any group of strangers, no matter how much they may have deluded themselves into thinking they can make decisions for us better than we could for ourselves, is simply wrong. Period.

That is the essential conceit of socialism, and the basic, fundamental, unalterable reason why it cannot logically work. Given that, it is, in essence, nothing more than thievery and fraud, no matter how much nice altruistic-sounding rhetoric its proponents dress it up in. To paraphrase our most infamous socialist right now, no matter how much lipstick you put on that pig, it's still just a pig, and an ugly one at that.

[timetostand]

the human animal is hard-wired to make errors when it comes to decision-making<<<<< That’s for sure, electing this muzzie POS is primary evidence!

[dubyagee]

Explains alot...just damn.

[Anima Mundi]

Good points. They group of people are still people and can’t exempt themselves from the rule about what they say people do.

Also, the “right” decision is subjective and often unknowable except in hindsight. What seems like a bad decision offers an individual valuable opportunities to fail and then learn from the failure. Who has not seen bad decisions which somehow turned out to be right for the person or seemingly good decisions that went wrong. The outcome of any decision depends on future unknown events.