“It’s not rocket science”, is a phrase commonly invoked to indicate a topic’s simplicity. As Duncan Watts laments in his book, Everything is Obvious, this refrain is often unfairly applied to social science: “Well, I’m no rocket scientist, and I have immense respect for the people who can land a machine the size of a…
Archives for August 2019
Well, Technically
Do you remember learning about fungibility in Econ 101? It’s the idea that a good or asset can be interchanged with another similar good or asset. The part we didn’t learn about is when this is technically true, but pragmatically irrelevant. Enter behavioral economics. One of the first behavioral economics ideas I understood was the…