Knowing and Making

The following excerpt appeared today on the right-hand side of various BBC blogs : The link points to:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/andrewharding/2011/03/squabble_over_mandelas_missing.html But when you click on it, Mandela's [what?] is not the only thing that's missing. The post itself has been taken down from Andrew's blog . Libel threat? Quick change of mind for extra fact-checking? BBC risk-aversion? I wonder. Quite strange that the post remains highlighted in the "Latest from BBC Blogs" on all the other reporters' blog pages (and for that matter, on Andrew's too). Maybe we'll find out if we keep refreshing the page long enough.

You may have heard this one before. At the end of an interesting BBC programme this evening ( The Foods That Make Billions ) a commentator suggested that the problem with modern capitalism is that it sustains itself by creating desires in consumers, instead of simply satisfying desires they already have. Is this true, and if so is it a bad thing? Certainly our preferences are not simple, static attributes, waiting in the back of our heads to be satisfied by the products we buy. Preferences - insofar as they even exist - are formed dynamically, influenced by biology, cognition, the environment and the social groups we are in. Would it be surprising if they were also influenced by people who sell products? To understand if that's a good thing, let's think through some of the things that happen in a consumer's mind. Not the rational consumer which generates stable continuous utility from consumption, but a real consumer with the cognitive patterns we see in actual people...

The BBC covers the potential for behaviour change projects to improve public health. The article mixes up a few different kinds of interventions, though: Classic nudge-style policies: changing defaults, trying to influence social norms. Incentive-based policies: shopping vouchers for dieters. Full-blown regulation: banning branded cigarette packages. The oddest thing about this confusion is the last sentence of the article: The mandatory wearing of seat belts and the introduction of the ban on smoking in public places are two examples where legislation fundamentally altered, and some would say restricted, the choices of individuals. Some would say ??? The last couple of months seem to have seen a surge in mainstream interest in behavioural economics, which is good news - but also quite a few misunderstandings about what it is. Some people understand it better, though - for example the OFT, which has carried out some behavioural experiments and released an interesting report ...

A surprising article on the BBC today, explaining How to get off a busy train . I guess the BBC does have an educational mission. But however obvious getting off a train might be, reading the article prompted a few ideas. The article is mainly about how passengers should behave, but acknowledges the role of the train's design in influencing that behaviour. And some of those design choices are very reminiscent of the "choice architecture" discipline we know from books like Nudge. But this is a problem we wouldn't normally associate with economics at all. It's a product design - or even an architecture - question. So is the domain of Nudge really economics? Or is it in fact design, ergonomics or something else? The stuff of economics is normally about how we allocate our wealth and material resources; about how we respond to incentives; how we trade and deploy limited amounts of capital and labour to produce maximum utility. Design problems, on the other han...

News headlines naturally need to be compact and punchy, and they have a certain distinct grammar which is recognisable at a glance. Often a noun is used as an adjective, or a verb elided, as in "Labour leader vote close". But the headline I saw on the BBC website today takes this principle just about to its outer limit. Six nouns are converted into adjectives one after the other, each one raising the stakes of an extraordinary portmanteau noun phrase: MS charity respite home closure protest vote fails The story is here , if you can figure out quite what it means.

See that "Most believe retirement is over" link on the right? When you click on it, you get the article on the left . Which says that fully 8% of people expect never to retire. I know that the definitions of some words are variable, and subjective, and that reasonable people can disagree even on the meaning of "majority". The US Senate certainly does. But it's rather difficult to stretch the definition of "most" to mean 8% of people .

I am really confused by this article . The UK operation of Zurich Insurance has been fined £2.27m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for losing personal details of 46,000 customers. What is "losing"? Did the data get accidentally deleted? Or was it accidentally leaked to, or stolen by, miscreants? "Lost" data implies deletion - say, a disk failed and the backup was faulty. Not an uncommon occurrence, and you might need to ask your customers to confirm their details to you again. But: "The firm also failed to ensure that it had effective systems and controls to prevent the lost data being used for financial crime." Also, they were penalised over £2 million for the loss. Both of these imply that someone else actually got the data. But how do they know it went? Zurich said that it had no evidence the data had been misused. So it's very unlikely that they somehow discovered a third party had copied it. And yet, the comment on the case from a ...

Another month, another inflation figure, and another short BBC interview. This time I managed to capture the video for your entertainment - sorry about the low quality. I will figure out how to improve it for next time. Assuming there is inflation again next month...

I was on BBC World this morning to discuss the latest UK GDP figures and why the UK is the last major economy still in recession (hoping to get a clip to upload later). Here is a summary of my views, some of which I got across in the interview. Any of these could be an article in themselves, but there isn't much time to discuss them on an hourly business news update! Our recession has been worse mainly because we are dependent on the financial sector. We did very well out of this before the recession, but having reached a higher peak we had further to fall. However, employment figures have been relatively very healthy, meaning that the pain of the recession has been less than it could have been. Also, fiscal and monetary action have mitigated the risk of a deeper depression. We are now gradually edging out of recession but there is a risk that tax rises and government spending cuts will put a brake on growth. To combat this, continued aggressive monetary policy is needed. Becau...

Paul Krugman has been cheerleading for Britain for a while. I'm not sure I agree with him that the pound is cheap, but it's good to see we that some of our signs of robustness are visible from outside. Why is our economic performance so good? This is one - charming - theory .

Best article title I've seen since Super Cally Go Ballistic, Celtic are Atrocious and Diana fund pays out to Gypsies and Asylum Seekers in the Express .

Stephen Carter's Digital Britain report, published this afternoon, will propose that the licence fee be shared out among other broadcasters as well as the BBC. I guess the idea is to ensure a diversity of voices and that there is some competition within the public-funded media. But the BBC is already providing that on its own. Robert Peston today : perhaps the prime minister over-egged it this morning (surely not) when he wrote in the Times that "a fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water". And yet, what did one of his colleagues at the BBC write last week but: The Communications Consumer Panel, which advises Ofcom on broadband issues, recently conducted research among 2,000 people, both on and offline. It found that 73% described broadband as essential a utility as water or electricity. Now maybe Robert Peston does think that part of his role is to conduct a robust internal debate ...

From the FT:  Acrimony dashes Doha hopes : Normally, the closing session of the forum displays ritualistic expectation that the trade round will be completed in the coming year, but there was little such optimism in 2009. From the BBC:  Ministers promise 2009 trade deal Trade ministers from 24 countries have pledged that they will agree a new world trade deal by the end of 2009...most of these talks in previous years ended with similarly optimistic statements Huh?