Friday, June 12, 2020

Some recent podcasts on behavioural economics and policy

I have not listened to as many podcasts and lectures as I might have expected during the last few months. I have been involved in a number of events as speaker and organiser and, other than that, have been trying to find an equilibrium in a world where far more talks are now readily available. I am increasingly starting to find ways to reduce the feeling of choice overload and also to just enjoy the opportunity to be able to listen to events that normally I would have had to travel to attend. I have had a few experiences recently of really enjoying a session and even more so from realising how much travel it would have involved in pre-covid times. I have also had a couple of experiences in organising of realising that our audience was now multiples of anything we would normally have in-person and that the quality of the interaction was also good in terms of very busy Q+A sessions. I am trying to think clearly about the benefits of having events in person - certainly in developing research centres and programmes I have many good memories of bringing many good speakers to our venues and having very rich interactions with students and researchers. Would be interested in talking to people about this as things progress. I am aware I am speaking about online events as if they are a new development but, in effect, there is a very different context for them now that so many of us have integrated the technologies into our natural way of working.

Below are a few events from the topic matter of the blog that I found very interesting in the last week or so:

1. This House of Lords session on the input of behavioural science into the UK covid response was very interesting and wide-ranging. Heard from SPI-B members who are very prominent UK thinkers across these areas Lucy Yardley, Susan Michie, and David Halpern.

2. The LSE covid policy response page has regular events on all aspects of public policy during the covid pandemic. 

3. Pete Lunn of ESRI Dublin was interviewed recently as part of the Irish economy podcast on behavioural science, experiments, and public policy. 

4. Hetan Shah, director of the British Academy, interviewed Cass Sunstein during the week on "confronting covid: nudge and sludge". 

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