The Hesitant Hand

Making my way slowly through "The Hesitant Hand" by Steven Medema, slowly as its a book to really immerse yourself in - a real gem and the type of book that makes me grateful for scholarship practiced strictly for its own sake. The book examines the history of the concept of rational self-interested man in Economics, from Adam Smith to the present.

Well I say from Adam Smith, but thankfully he gives a brief tour of Greek and scholastic thought in the first chapter. In discussing the Greeks, there are a few paragraphs that have a lot of resonance at present. Medema locates the fable of King Midas in Greek attitudes to finance, with Midas destroying himself through the pursuit of money much in the same way as Greek states often destroyed themselves in financial disasters. He partly locates Aristotle and Plato's concern for finding the true nature of well-being in their observance around them that looking for it merely in money and acquisition frequently lead to ruin. The parallels with the current environment are, of course, marked and, in the Irish case, you will find no shortage of links on the internet talking about various Irish financiers having a "Midas touch". For Plato and Aristotle, their solution to the problems of happiness lay partly in having strongmen control countries and keeping population and economic activity at a stationary level, aspects of which ended up with Plato becoming one of Popper's enemies of freedom. Whatever their views on how it should be achieved, their ideas on the nature of well-being as being more than acquisiton are certainly making a resurgence and probably for similar reasons as when they were first formed.

The Arctic Monkeys on Behavioural Economics

The Arctic Monkeys’ third single, Leave Before The Lights Come On, was released as a music video in August 2006, only months after the band’s debut album. The video, filmed in Sheffield’s Cultural Industries quarter, features English actors Kate Ashfield and Paddy Considine, shown below (HT: The Inspiration Room).

Ashfield’s character opens the music video standing on the edge of a tall building, apparently preparing to jump. On the pavement below Considine’s character is halted in his tracks by a shoe falling from above. He races up the stairs to coax the woman back from the edge. There's more to the story than this, but the premise is that Ashfield is about to engage in irrational behaviour. Or is she? Alex Turner has the following to say on the matter - the opening lines from the song:

Well this is a good idea,
You wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t,
You wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t one?

Watch the video here.