Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Obamanomics

I posted before (here) about an 8,000 word article on Barrack Obama's economic policy agenda, in an August edition of Sunday's New York Times. The article says: "As anyone who has spent time with Obama knows, he likes experts, and his choice of advisers stems in part from his interest in empirical research... James Heckman, a Nobel laureate who critiqued the campaign’s education plan at (Austin) Goolsbee’s request, said, “I’ve never worked with a campaign that was more interested in what the research shows.”"

I also mentioned here, that according to an article in the New Republic, Richard Thaler "presides as a kind of in-house intellectual guru, consulting regularly with Obama's top economic adviser (Austin Goolsbee)...If you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama's savings plan exploits this so-called 'status quo' bias."

Also, Dan Ariely suggested that Barrack Obama may be the presidential candidate to appreciate behavioural economics. Ariely describes this on YouTube (here); thanks to Seattlest.com for the link. Finally, if you want to know what Obama has been reading, check out this post about GoogleReader's "power-reader" feature.

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