Bryan wrote:
===
This is almost orthogonal to my original point, but not quite. It
wouldn't be interesting if the expected cost of bad judgment was
$100/year, would it? So even taking a policy perspective, expected
value of error matters.
Agreed, but I think
Let me second Bill's point. It's because decision heuristics are
usually so useful that we can be lulled into following them when doing
so is downright irrational!
Alex
--
Dr. Alexander Tabarrok
Vice President and Director of Research
The Independent Institute
100 Swan Way
Oakland, CA,
Regarding the exchange between W. Dickens and B. Caplan over decision heuristics:
__
I encourage you to browse, if you haven't, the following:
FAMA, EUGENE F., "Market Efficiency, Long-term Returns, and Behavioral Finance," The
Journal of Financial
Sure, some important real world applications exist. But why is that
interesting? I would think that the interesting question is: what's the
*expected value* of the loss, averaging over situations of all
importance levels?
So would you argue that the interesting question about government
Bill's comment was interesting. The main thing I got from Harris is
that you *can* affect how much fun your kid has while he/she is around
you, and how much they like you in the future. As she says, you don't
spend time with your spouse in order to "mold" her, but to have fun
together; why
William Dickens wrote:
However, Harris goes on to say that there are appreciable "neighborhood
effects." It doesn't matter if your dad stays around, but if all kids
in a peer group lack dads, this makes them all (environmentally) worse
off.
I don't think JRH would agree with this. She
All three of the other admitted readers of the Harris book - Bill,
Robin, and Alex - are parents. Has this in any way affected your
"parental investment" or anything like that?
My own take:
The behavioral genetic literature shows that while the *marginal*
benefits of parenting are less than
