Saturday, October 13, 2012

Weekend Links


1. Online resources for Erik Angner's textbook on behavioural economics available on this link 

2. Morgan Stanley's reading list for finance has a lot of useful links and resources

3. Harvard Business Blog by Robert Plan "Big Data Doesn't Work if You Ignore the Small Things that Matter"

4. Had posted this before but Angus Deaton's memoir of a life spent as an applied economist is a funny and insightful read. His description as to how he came to the work that propelled him to being one of the world's leading economists by working out practical problems in the estimation of models is particularly interesting. 

5. Brainpickings post on "From Ptolemy to George Eliot to William Blake, a Private History of Everyday Happiness"


7. Recent piece in Nature news on Kahneman's plea to bolster the research on priming through more replication. 

8. Jean-Emmanuel De Neve's webpage has a number of videos of talks and lectures on behavioural economics

9. I have been reading again around the topic of the interaction of psychology, politics and the market over the 20th century. I think it is important to understand how previous attempts to bring psychology into large-scale policy making played out. Edward Bernays 1928 work on propaganda contains some memorable quotes. Bernays, Freud's nephew, is the figure at the center of the Adam Curtis documentary Century of the Self (h/t to Ken McKenzie for making me understand the relevance of this to what I do). Among other things, the documentary credits him with the development of public relations and the creation of a rising trend in female smoking. Reading about him and understanding his influence and the ideas that drove him and made him famous is interesting in understanding some potential pitfalls in approaches that seek to control and shape human behaviour. I fundamentally dont believe the current integration of psychology leads to the more pessimistic extremes in previous attempts to do so. But it's clearly an issue people should read and think about. 

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