Knowing and Making

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...

Several old political problems turn out to be based on the same underlying question. Here are some examples. Should we tax the rich more? The "yes" argument says rich people need the money less (that is, poor people's utility from wealth is higher), and wealth partly arises from luck and therefore is a legitimate target for taxation. The "no" argument says that if people expect to be taxed when they're rich (and receive handouts when they're poor) they have less incentive to earn wealth, and therefore less wealth will be produced by society. Should we pay higher unemployment benefits? The "yes" argument: people are unemployed through no fault of their own; their spending will support the economy; it's moral to share resources with the poor; if it happened to you, you'd want benefits too. The "no" argument: it gives people an incentive not to work; it requires confiscation of resources from hardworking people to pay those w...

I presented this paper today at the conference of the Cass Behavioural Finance Working Group . In summary, it replaces the concept of "news" or "information" in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis with a model of beliefs , reflecting the idea that nobody in a market has objective, indisputable knowledge  about anything, only beliefs of different levels of confidence. Slides here ; will tell you more later.