The economics of getting off a train
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...