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Showing posts from May, 2019

What is cognitive economics?

What's happening inside your head right now? What thoughts, feelings, ideas are spinning around in there? Are they important to you? If you were not able to think those thoughts, would you care? How much does your internal mental experience matter to you? To an economist: not at all. Traditional economics explicitly rules out any consideration of how people think, and what is going on in their minds or hearts. Economists only trust what they can observe: specifically, the things you buy and sell. This can include selling your labour (for a wage) and buying and selling services, but in practice it mostly means the physical goods that we buy and consume. Yet most of us know there is more to life than buying and selling. The activities inside our heads are a major – maybe the major – contributor to our quality of life. Are you happy? Do you have purpose in your life and work? Do you feel appreciated? Are you looking forward to the future or anxious about it? Our state of mind i

Why endings matter [spoiler-free Game of Thrones references]

It probably has not escaped your notice that the Game of Thrones TV series finished this week. If you use social media at all, I suspect you also saw some anguished squawks about how awful the ending was. How the incompetent writers screwed it all up. Maybe you even signed the petition, along with 1.5 million others, to have the last series remade with a different conclusion. Personally I thought it wasn't a bad outcome, but I seem to be in the minority. Either way, why does this have such significance? I read a counterargument a few days ago: You've had 70 hours of enjoyment already – it's in the bank. You enjoyed episode 1, 2, 3, …and you can't go back and "unenjoy" them now. One bad hour at the end can't rewind the clock and eliminate the last 8 years of pleasure? Yet this feels wrong. The ending can ruin the beginning. Why should this be? A model from cognitive economics may have the answer. The theory of " cognitive goods " says tha