I am entering into my sixth and final year as the head of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. I have and continue to put a lot into this role and there has been a lot of movement in the Department over the time I have been there, including hiring, extensions of programmes, new executive options, new philanthropy lines, etc., I gave a few reflections before and at some point I might attempt a lessons-learned piece but definitely quite a bit down the line. Things that go well tend to habituate quickly in your mind. Things that have gone less well take longer to shake off. I think we have created a Department with a huge potential over the next decades and I will be giving it a good push in the last year.
I wrote in another post about the type of things I have been working on from a research perspective. I am continuing to work on these topics. The FORGOOD initiative has also moved into a much more active phase, including rolling out our first cohort of industry participation this year. We have built a range of materials for use by cohort members and I have been enjoying engaging with a lot of people on this.
I have been running a lot and strength training in the time I have been at LSE. I started running half-marathons in 2017 and ran my first marathon in the Connemara hills back in April and am doing my second in Dingle in Kerry this week. For any readers who have shared my early career path of health neglect and over-weighting of academic life, I have to recommend at least trying running or long walks as an antidote. Walking in Scotland when I worked there was my first very structured attempt to create a proper space away from work and that led to running and to a range of other health activities.
For most of my life, I also had a very bizarre relationship with money and took precisely zero account of all that I learned about investment returns and human behaviour. In the last few years, that has changed as well. I don't know whether I should be annoyed or reassured as a behavioural economics devotee that I have left it all a bit too late to be a fully effective strategy. Anyone in your 20s or 30s with a reasonable research job reading this for god sake set up a low fee investment account of some type and start contributing to it, and spend a bit of time looking at your pension options. It is insane how much you can alter your financial trajectory at this stage. A couple of years ago I also stopped drinking alcohol and I have yet really to come to a conclusion as to whether this is something I want to do permanently. But everything combined has definitely given a stronger buffer around academic stress.
In terms of things I have been reading, watching, or listening to, I still feel a bit homeless when it comes to social media. I post the odd time on Linkedin, mostly professional updates with some attempt at authenticity. I have not changed my view that X is fatally compromised in terms of how it is run. And Bluesky just have never managed to break out of its very heavily US progressive base (though some colleagues really have used it effectively so I don't want to be too negative). I have been playing around with AI a bit and still count myself among the sceptics. One use I have found is that Gemini can increasingly do things in gmail like add things to calendars if you ask it, so that alone is worth at least some of the trillions. I do enjoy playing with GPT-5 and I think the changes in its tone etc., have been very positive. I use it to try to structure my to-do list from time to time. It is still not doing anything in my world that is transforming how I work but maybe if they stop constantly making bullshit claims and start finding low-level useful things it can do, this could be a path to converting people like me.
Cass Sunstein has posted a bit about listening to conservative talk radio. I have partly been influenced by him to listen to a few of them and partly listening to personal finance podcasts brought me into their orbit. I like listening to Dave Ramsey in particular. He is an evangelical (in every sense of the term) advocate of debt-free living. His main advice is to get rid of any high interest debt with a massive degree of intensity ("your friends should think you have joined a cult"), build up an emergency fund, invest a solid portion of your income in diversified stock funds, and pay off your mortgage as early as possible. He has a number of best-selling books on this broad theme. His radio shows mostly involve people ringing in with various debt problems and invariably involves him advising them to sell some debt-carrying assets, cut up their credit cards, try to build their income, and find some way to get to debt-zero, with an emergency fund, and the beginning of a saving and investment trajectory. I find a lot of what he says about the negatives of debt intuitively appealing and listening to his callers often brings to life many of the things I have thought about over the years on financial behaviour. He will often start talking about how financial wisdom can be found in scripture, or his love of guns, or the importance of the nuclear family above any other family structure. There are lots of things he says that should make me just turn off the channel but I grew up around many people who I thought were decent and I was able to trust and be around who often said things that I would never hear in my current environments. Truthfully I am unlikely to convert to Ramsey's type of Christian practice, or start being enthusiastic about gun ownership, or feel that my friends living together who haven't got married are doing something sinful. But, as one example, he has made me think on several occasions, whether getting in debt to gain a higher education is a sensible option for everyone, and in general listening to a conservative perspective on how to get out of poverty is a useful counter-balance to the stuff I would generally listen to.
Similarly, listening to some small t Trump supporting US podcasts has been interesting to at least get some sense of where Americans are going - I do find myself shouting a little bit at the "radio" at the complete refusal of nearly all of them to recognise that Trump's policies are not likely to reduce the US deficit. But you do hear more clearly what is driving a lot of the population in terms of fears of crime, and it makes it feel less alien to hear regular people ringing in and giving their views. I also hope former students reading would recognise that this is not some fanciful new direction on my behalf and I have always spent time trying to be where people are in terms of reading and listening (partly influenced by Arthur Conan Doyle's idea of having Sherlock Holmes be a voracious reader of agony columns, showbiz press etc., which somehow got under my skin reading the books as a kid). Truthfully most of my podcast listening is either football shows (Football Cliches is excellent if you are someone who enjoys the premier league and jokes about language) and various multi-presenter podcasts where middle-aged progressives try to come to terms with how disorderly everything has become.
A more research driven podcast that I have been enjoying the last few weeks is Rational Reminder which does deep dives into a lot of behavioural personal finance. There are nearly 400 episodes and the quality is very high, including some great episodes on things like how Vanguard and Dimensional work, and a lot of episodes on investor behaviour.
On less behavioural related matters, I enjoyed Bodkin a lot more than I thought I would from the reviews. A bit like Only Murders in the Building with a darker Irish feel.
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