In 2002, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Why did this happen? Because it is psychology that can explain why traditional economic models do not work. Let's take Adam Smith, the founder of political economy and apologist for the market economy. The main character of his theoretical constructions is a certain "economic man", an absolute egoist, a rational person seeking exclusively to improve his own well-being. In Smith's model, these "economic men" freely exchange goods, and the market laws of supply and demand keep prices in equilibrium. What happens in reality? But here’s the thing: an absolutely liberal economic model doesn’t work even in the United States.

How does our behavior violate economic laws?

To begin with, let's take utility theory the end of the 19th century. One of its prerequisites - utility maximization - assumes that the consumer, with certain restrictions (in particular, income, prices), chooses a set of goods and services that fully satisfies existing needs. In other words, every person knows exactly what he wants, in what quantity and what of it he can buy right now. Does this seem true?

That "economic man" does not exist, and people do not always behave rationally (or, more precisely, they constantly act irrationally!), scientists even guessed before Kahneman. However, his merit is that he not only pointed out the irrationality of human behavior, but also identified a whole series of principles that this very irrationality follows. And these findings already allow us to create new, more accurate economic models.

I thought quickly, I bought it quickly

So what is Kahneman's main idea? The fact is that a person has two fundamentally different systems of thinking: "slow" And "fast". “Slow” is engaged in thinking about new and complex problems, considers connections between phenomena from a logical point of view, and makes balanced and rational conclusions. Unfortunately, it requires a lot of volume "random access memory" and cannot work constantly. Therefore, there is a “quick” system for making a decision about what bread to buy today.

"Fast" system thinking is based on stereotypes and comparisons, it operates on a well-established track and, thanks to this, does not require special expenditure of energy. The solutions it produces arise instantly and are perceived as prompts from intuition. Having a “fast” system makes our life a lot easier, but, unfortunately, it brings a number of common errors.

Librarian or farmer?

Firstly, this "intuition" does not take into account statistical data. In the article “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristic Methods and Errors” and in the book "Think slow, decide fast" Kahneman gives a clear example of this.

Let's say a former neighbor describes a person like this:

Steve is shy and introverted, always ready to help, but he has little interest in people or the real world. Meek and orderly, Steve seeks order and structure in everything, and is very attentive to detail.

In your opinion, who would Steve be more likely to be: a farmer or a librarian? Intuition suggests that the verbal portrait matches the stereotype of a librarian and will choose this answer. Although in reality farmers make up a much larger portion of the population (in the US) than librarians, and Steve has a much better chance of being a farmer. Kahneman calls this distortion ignoring a priori probability.

Confidence in the correctness of the forecast (Steve is a librarian) for a “fast” system depends on how well the selected result matches the input data - this is called representativeness. Moreover, it completely does not take into account the factors limiting the accuracy of the forecast. This effect in Kahneman's theory is called illusion of validity. There are other contradictions between “intuition” and statistics, but there is no point in listing them all - it is easier to direct the reader to the works of Kahneman, who, by the way, writes in an accessible and fascinating way.

Peter Heeling / skitterphoto.com (CC0 1.0)

Something about prospect theory

What else is worth noting? With the "fast" system, we rate the probability of an event highly if similar cases easily come to mind. Our assessments are “tied” to a certain point in the report, even if it is taken out of thin air. For example, in one experiment, the study groups estimated the products 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8 and 8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 differently, taking the first few steps of multiplication as a reference point.

And again a logical question: how can all this be correlated with economic theory? In Thinking Slow, Decide Fast, Kahneman presents his alternative to utility theory. – prospect theory. He based it on the idea of ​​another Nobel laureate, Harry Markowitz, which attributed utility to changes in wealth rather than to its size. According to this theory, the benefit of winning $500 if you had a million is equal to the difference between $1,000,500 and $1,000,000. Therefore, the “disutility” of losing that $500 is again equal to the difference between the benefits of the two amounts.

Kahneman says that, in addition to the difference, The reference point with which winnings or losses are compared also plays a role.

For financial outcomes, the reference point is usually status quo. But sometimes it's either expected Exodus, or the one that seems deserved, for example, a raise or bonus. Outcomes that are above the reference point are gains, below are losses. The size of the winnings is compared with a reference point: the difference between 900 and 1000 dollars is subjectively much smaller than between 100 and 200 dollars. At the same time, what is important is that the losses seem larger than the gains.

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nothing special, just one fact - Daniel has been studying psychology all his life. In particular, he is one of two researchers who, in the early 1970s, tried to destroy the fundamental paradigm of economics at the time: the myth of the arch-rational decision maker known as “Homo economicus.”

Unfortunately, Daniel's colleague, Amos Tversky, died in 1996 at the age of 59. If Tversky had lived, he would undoubtedly have shared the Nobel Prize with Kahneman, his longtime colleague and dear friend.

Human irrationality is the central point of all of Kahneman's work. Essentially, his entire research path can be divided into three stages, at each of which the “irrational man” reveals himself from a new side.

In the first stage, Kahneman and Tversky conducted a series of ingenious experiments that revealed about twenty “cognitive biases” - unconscious reasoning errors that distort our judgments about the world. The most typical is “ ”: a tendency to depend on insignificant numbers. For example, in one experiment, experienced German judges showed a higher propensity to impose a long prison sentence on a shoplifter when the dice rolled high.

In the second stage, Kahneman and Tversky proved that people making decisions under conditions of uncertainty do not behave in the manner prescribed to them by economic models; they do not “maximize utility.” They later developed an alternative concept of process that was closer to actual human behavior, called prospect theory. It was for this achievement that Kahneman received the Nobel Prize.

At the third stage of his career, after Tversky’s death, Kahneman delved into “hedonic psychology”: its nature and causes. The discoveries in this area were quite extraordinary - and not only because one of the key experiments involved a deliberately delayed colonoscopy (an unpleasant medical procedure during which an endoscopist examines and evaluates the condition of the inside of the colon using a special probe).

Book "Think Slow, Decide Fast" ( Thinking, fast and slow) covers these three stages. This is a surprisingly rich work: vibrant, deep, full of intellectual surprises and valuable for self-improvement. It is entertaining and touching in many moments, especially when Kahneman talks about his collaboration with Tversky (“The pleasure we had working together made us extremely tolerant; it is much easier to strive for excellence when you are not bored for a moment.”) . His insight into the shortcomings of the human mind is so impressive that New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and Tversky's work "will be remembered hundreds of years from now" and that "it is an important anchor in man's self-understanding."

The leitmotif of the entire book is human self-confidence. All people, and especially experts, tend to exaggerate the significance of their understanding of the world - this is one of Kaleman's key postulates. Despite all the misconceptions and illusions that he and Tversky (along with other researchers) have discovered over the past few decades, the author is in no hurry to assert the absolute irrationality of human perception and behavior.

“Most of the time we are healthy, and our actions and judgments are largely appropriate to the situation,” Kahneman writes in the introduction. However, a few pages later he notes that their findings challenged the idea, common in academic circles, that "people are generally rational." Researchers have discovered “systematic errors in the thinking of normal people”: errors that do not arise from excessive exposure to emotions, but are built into established mechanisms of cognition.

Although Kahneman describes only modest policy implications (for example, treaties should be written in clearer language), others (perhaps more opinionated researchers) have gone much further. Brooks, for example, argues that the work of Kahneman and Tversky illustrates the “limits of social policy,” particularly the folly of government action to combat unemployment and rebuild the economy.

Fast or logical

Such radical data are frowned upon, even if they are not supported by the author. And disapproval breeds skepticism: what Kaleman calls System 2. In Kahneman's framework, "System 2" is our slow, deliberate, analytical, and consciously goal-directed way of reasoning about the world. System 1, on the other hand, is our fast, automatic, intuitive, and largely unconscious mode.

It is “System 1” that detects hostility in the voice and easily completes the phrase “Black and...”. And “System 2” immediately gets to work when we need to fill out a tax form or park a car in a narrow lot. Kahneman and others found a simple way to explain how a person's System 2 turns on during a task: just look into his eyes and notice how his pupils dilate.

In turn, System 1 uses associations and metaphors to implement a quick and superficial view of reality, which System 2 relies on to achieve clear beliefs and informed choices. “System 1” offers, “System 2” disposes. It turns out that “System 2” dominates? I guess, yes. But in addition to her selectivity and rationality, she is also lazy. She gets tired quickly (there is a fashionable term for this: “ego depletion”).

Too often, instead of slowing down and analyzing things, System 2 settles for the easy but inauthentic vision that System 1 feeds it.

A skeptical reader may ask how seriously we should take all this talk about the First and Second Systems. Are they really a pair of little "agents" in our heads, each with their own distinct personality? Not really, says Kahneman, but rather they are “useful fictions”—useful because they help explain the quirks of the human mind.

It's not Linda's problem.

Consider Kahneman's "best-known and most controversial" experiment that he and Tversky conducted together: the Linda problem. Participants in the experiment spoke of a fictitious young woman named Linda, a lonely, outspoken and very bright woman who, as a student, was deeply concerned about issues of discrimination and social justice. Next, the experiment participants were asked - which option is more likely? The fact that Linda is a bank teller, or the fact that she is a bank teller and an active participant in the feminist movement. The vast majority of respondents named the second option more likely. In other words, “feminist bank teller” was more likely than just “bank teller.” This, of course, is a clear violation of the laws of probability, since every feminist teller is a bank employee; adding details can only reduce the likelihood. However, even among Stanford Business graduate students undergoing intensive training in probability theory, 85% failed the Linda Problem. One student noted that she made a basic logical mistake because “I thought you were just asking for my opinion.”

What went wrong here? A simple question (how coherent is the narrative?) is replaced by a more complex one (how likely is it?). And this, according to Kahneman, is the source of many of the biases that infect our thinking. System 1 jumps to intuitive reasoning based on “heuristics”—an easy but imperfect way of answering complex questions—and System 2 approves of it without bothering with too much work if it seems logical.

Kahneman describes dozens of similar experiments demonstrating failures in rationality - “basic institutional neglect”, “cascades of availability”, “illusion of certainty”, etc.

Are we really that hopeless? Think again about the “Linda problem.” Even the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was concerned about this. In the experiment described above, he knew the correct answer, but wrote that “the monkey in my head keeps jumping up and down, shouting: “She can’t just be a bank teller; read the description!”

Kahneman is convinced that it was Gould's System 1 that told him the wrong answer. But perhaps something less subtle is going on. Our everyday conversation takes place against a rich backdrop of unstated expectations—what linguists call “implicature.” Such implicatures can leak into psychological experiments. Given the expectations that promote communication, it might be reasonable for subjects who chose the option “Linda is a bank clerk” to imply that she was not a feminist. If so, then their answers cannot be considered truly erroneous.

"Unkillable" optimism

In more natural conditions - when we detect fraud; when we talk about things instead of symbols; when we evaluate dry numbers and not shares, people are more likely not to make similar mistakes. At least that's what most of the subsequent research suggests. Perhaps we are not so irrational after all.

Some cognitive biases, of course, look gross even in the most natural settings. For example, what Kahneman calls “flawed planning”: the tendency to overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. So in 2002, when remodeling kitchens, Americans expected the job to cost an average of $18,658, but ended up paying $38,769.

Failure to plan is “only one manifestation of the overall optimistic bias,” which “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases.” It turns out, in a sense, the bias towards optimism is obviously bad, because it creates false beliefs, such as the belief that everything is under your control, and not just a lucky coincidence. But without this “illusion of control,” would we be able to get out of bed every morning?

Optimists are more psychologically resilient, have a strong immune system, and live longer on average than their realistic peers. Additionally, as Kahneman notes, exaggerated optimism serves as a defense against the paralyzing effects of another bias: “loss aversion”: we tend to fear losses more than we value gains.

Remembering Happiness

Even if we could get rid of prejudices and illusions, it is by no means a fact that this would make our lives better. And here a fundamental question arises: what is the point of rationality? Our everyday reasoning abilities have evolved to cope effectively with complex and dynamic environments. Thus, they are likely to be flexible to this environment, even if they are switched off in several artificial experiments by psychologists.

Kahneman never entered into philosophical battles with the nature of rationality. He did, however, come up with a fascinating proposal for what her goal might be: happiness. What does it mean to be happy? When Kahneman first raised this question in the mid-1990s, most studies of happiness relied on surveys of people about how satisfied they were with their lives in general. But such retrospective estimates depend on memory, which is a highly unreliable variable. What if, instead, we sampled pleasant and painful experiences from time to time and added them up over time?

Kahneman calls this “experiential” well-being, as opposed to the “remembering” well-being that researchers rely on. And he found that these two measures of happiness diverged in unexpected directions. The Experiencing Self does not do the same thing as the Remembering Self. In particular, the Remembering Self does not care about duration—how long a pleasant or unpleasant experience lasts. Rather, it retrospectively evaluates the experience based on the maximum level of pain or pleasure.

In one of Kahneman's most terrifying experiments, two quirks of the Remembering Self were demonstrated: "prolonged neglect" and the "last impression rule." Two groups of patients had to undergo a painful colonoscopy. Patients in group A underwent the usual procedure. Group B patients also underwent this procedure, except for a few added minutes of discomfort during which the colonoscope was held still. Which group suffered more? Group B experienced all the pain Group A experienced and much more. But because the extended colonoscopy in Group B was less painful than the main procedure, patients in this group were less worried, and they had little objection to the repeat colonoscopy.

As with colonoscopy, so with life. It is not the “experiencing”, but the “remembering Self” that gives instructions. The Remembering Self exercises a “tyranny” over the Experiencing Self. “Strange as it may seem,” Kahneman writes, “I am both the “remembering self” and the “experiencing self,” making my life unfamiliar to me.”

Kahneman's radical conclusion is not so far-sighted. The Experiencing Self may not exist at all. For example, brain-scanning experiments by Rafael Malach and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute in Israel have shown that when objects are absorbed into an experience, such as when watching the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, parts of the brain associated with self-awareness are shut down ( inhibited) by the rest of the brain. Personality seems to simply disappear. Then who is enjoying the film? And why should such impersonal pleasures be the responsibility of the “remembering self”?

Obviously, there is still much to be discovered in hedonic psychology. But Kahneman's conceptual innovations laid the foundation for much of the empirical research outlined in his work: that headaches are hedonically worse in the poor; that women living alone earn, on average, the same as women with a partner; and that a family income of $75,000 in expensive regions and countries is enough to maximize life enjoyment.

That the Nobel Prize in Economics (or, officially, the Swedish National Bank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) will go to the American economist Richard Thaler: “for his contributions to behavioral economics.” Read about the use of knowledge and methods of modern cognitive science in economic research, as well as what behavioral economists study in our material.

The Nobel Prize in Economics was established in 1969, and since then it has been awarded primarily for either fundamental economic discoveries or research into the application of applied mathematics methods to economics. For example, in 1979, Theodore Schultz and Arthur Lewis received a prize for their work in the field of economic development (using the example of developing countries), and in 1994, the winners were the famous American mathematician John Nash and his colleagues, who carried out equilibrium analysis in the theory of non-cooperative games.

Thus, the activities of most laureate economists (and economic science in general) are aimed at building formal micro- and macroeconomic models necessary for effectively describing and predicting the financial behavior of people and large government and commercial structures. In its most general form, economics assumes that human behavior can be predicted. That is why economics is called “the most accurate social science.”

Economists, however, understand that people do not always behave rationally and distribute their income in accordance with their primary, most important needs. We may spend money on goods that we do not need, just because we like them, or we may not spend money on something expectedly profitable and useful just because we are afraid. However, such factors influencing consumer sentiment are difficult to take into account when analyzing financial behavior: analysts may predict an increase in demand for umbrellas during the rainy season (and, accordingly, an increase in supply to maximize profits), but will be confused if it turns out that in the sales ranking For some reason, umbrellas gave way to raincoats. This is why the behavioral factors influencing people's financial decisions have long been ignored - despite the fact that the term "behavioral economics" appeared in the 70s of the last century.

Everything changed when, in 2002, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded not to an economist, but to an American psychologist of Israeli origin, Daniel Kahneman, with the wording: “For the application of psychological techniques in economic science.” Kahneman has long been studying decision making - a cognitive process that involves choosing one behavioral strategy among several possible ones, as well as analyzing external and internal (behavioral) factors that influence this choice.

This year, the Nobel Prize traditionally went to an economist: University of Chicago professor Richard H. Thaler. His contribution to economics, however, concerns more the psychological side of things. The main thesis of his scientific works boils down to the fact that a person can be forced to buy, and his financial behavior can be predicted, given that a person is an irrational being.

One of Thaler’s most famous works, which significantly enriched behavioral economics, is devoted to the study of the so-called “endowment effect”. According to classical economic theory, owning a good or service should not affect its value. In other words, the theory assumes that a person who bought, for example, a book, will sell it, if he wants to part with it, at the same price for which he got it. Thaler (with Kahneman) showed that this is not so. In 1990, scientists conducted an experiment in which they gave people regular coffee mugs and then offered to sell them or exchange them for ballpoint pens. It turned out that a person who already owns a mug is ready to part with it for twice the “price” than what he was willing to pay for the same mug when he did not yet own it.

Having thought about the influence of what factors a person makes such a decision, scientists came to the conclusion that it is determined by his own behavior: already possessing a product, a person assigns greater value to it (and even becomes attached to it), since he has already spent energy and time and funds for its acquisition.

Another example of the “irrationality” of people’s financial behavior that Thaler describes in his works is related to the concept of “fairness” in prices. So, a bar and a supermarket may sell the same product, but at different prices. And although we are willing to pay as much for a bottle of beer as the bartender asks, we will not buy the same beer at the same price in the supermarket, because we are sure that it should cost half as much there.

Despite the fact that Thaler considers people to be irrational creatures, he has no doubt that their financial behavior can be predicted - and even benefited from it. In his book “Nudge. Architecture of choice. How to Improve Our Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” released in 2008 (released in 2017), he formulates the theory of “nudge” (from English nudge - push with the shoulder). According to this theory, certain aspects of human behavior can be predicted - and then used to effectively sell goods and services, as well as to maximize profits.

Consequently, Thaler believes, commercial organizations try in vain to convince the buyer that purchasing their goods is beneficial for him. It would be better if they convinced him that he needed their goods.

Expert opinion

Most economic theories are based on simplified characteristics of the environment. They imply that decisions are made rationally, depending on future profitability. But it is clear that in life this is almost always not the case.

It is known that a person has several dozen prejudices that he is guided by, including in economic activity. On the one hand, a person can proceed from the rational behavior of other people and, accordingly, behave differently, or, on the contrary, expect people to behave irrationally in order to behave rationally himself. This applies to all areas: investing and trading.

This is the so-called “behavioral finance”. This area has been popular for about fifteen years, it is quite expected that one of the Nobel Prizes will be devoted to this very thing - that is, to the problem of using psychological models to predict people's economic behavior.

These works are supported by good mathematics, they have been confirmed in econometric works. As an example of the influence of prejudices and irrationality, one can cite, for example, the situation with ICO, the situation around the blockchain - this is a typical example of the use of “behavioral finance”. This is a distraction from the problems, which gives those who were first the opportunity to make money, since it is obvious that a correction in the cryptocurrency market is inevitable.

The second example: the fact that in our country in the first decade of the 2000s there was a completely abnormal situation with real estate. The same situation occurred in 1927–1930 in the USA, and this led to a crisis in the entire economy. Real estate, by all measures, cannot bring a decent investment income, but for us it brought it. Several factors were at work here: the influence of mortgages, a sharp lack of investment opportunities. That is, as a result it worked, someone made money.

Analyzing people's irrational actions allows you to avoid stepping on mistakes that you want to step on, but having a theory does not mean that you personally will achieve success. Any economic patterns are realized statistically.

Ivan Rodionov
Doctor of Economics, Professor at the Higher School of Economics

Thaler could have become a Nobel laureate 15 years ago - together with Kahneman, whose co-author he often acted as. Then, however, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences considered that the prestigious prize in economics should not be awarded to two psychologists at once (despite the fact that Thaler is an economist), and together with Kahneman the prize was received by Vernon Smith, one of the founders of experimental economics. Now the academy has recognized the contribution of the second "founding father" of behavioral economics to the development of economic science.

Professor Thaler “killed” Homo economicus - the fabulous stage of human evolution, having reached which, he behaves as rationally as possible - and thereby allows corporations and governments to predict their financial behavior. Instead, Thaler showed that every consumer is, first of all, a person who is guided not by abstract benefits, but by his own (sometimes spontaneous and leading to immediate reward) interests.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards ceremony will take place in Stockholm in early December, with this year's economic sciences prize winner receiving nine million Swedish kronor (approximately $1.1 million). When asked by a journalist from The New York Times how he would spend the money, Thaler replied: “Least rationally.”

Elizaveta Ivtushok

Literature

Leonard T. C. Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness // Constitutional Political Economy. – 2008. – T. 19. – No. 4. – pp. 356-360.

Kahneman D., Knetsch J. L., Thaler R. H. Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem // Journal of political Economy. – 1990. – T. 98. – No. 6. – pp. 1325-1348.

Kahneman D., Knetsch J. L., Thaler R. Fairness as a constraint on profit seeking: Entitlements in the market //The American economic review. – 1986. – P. 728-741.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman is one of the founders of psychological economic theory and perhaps the most famous researcher of how people make decisions and what errors based on cognitive distortions they make. For his study of human behavior under conditions of uncertainty, Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (this is the only time a psychologist has received the Nobel Prize in Economics). What did the psychologist manage to discover? Over many years of research that Kahneman conducted with his colleague Amos Tversky, scientists found out and experimentally proved that human actions are guided not only and not so much by the mind of people, but by their stupidity and irrationality .

And, you see, it’s hard to argue with this. Today we bring to your attention 3 lectures by Daniel Kahneman, in which he will once again go through the irrational human nature, talk about cognitive distortions that prevent us from making adequate decisions, and explain why we should not always trust expert assessments.

Daniel Kahneman: “The mystery of the experience-memory dichotomy”

Using examples ranging from our attitudes toward vacations to our experiences with colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and pioneer of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman demonstrates how differently our experiencing selves and our remembering selves perceive happiness. But why does this happen and what are the consequences of such a splitting of our “I”? Find the answers in this lecture.

Now everyone is talking about happiness. I once asked a man to count all the books with the word “happiness” in the title published in the last 5 years, and he gave up after the 40th, but of course there were even more. The rise in interest in happiness is enormous among researchers. There are many trainings on this topic. Everyone wants to make people happier. But despite such an abundance of literature, there are certain cognitive distortions that practically do not allow us to think correctly about happiness. And my talk today will mainly focus on these cognitive pitfalls. This applies both to ordinary people thinking about their happiness and to the same extent to scientists thinking about happiness, since it turns out that we are all equally confused. The first of these pitfalls is a reluctance to acknowledge how complex this concept is. It turns out that the word “happiness” is no longer such a useful word because we apply it to too many different things. I think there is one specific meaning that we should limit ourselves to, but in general it is something that we will have to forget about and develop a more comprehensive view of what well-being is. The second trap is the confusion between experience and memory: that is, between the state of happiness in life and the feeling of happiness about your life or the feeling that life suits you. These are two completely different concepts, but both of them are usually combined into one concept of happiness. And the third is the illusion of focus, and it is a sad fact that we cannot think about any circumstance that affects our well-being without distorting its significance. This is a real cognitive trap. And there is simply no way to get it all right.

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Daniel Kahneman: "The Study of Intuition" ( Explorations of the Mind Intuition)

Why does intuition sometimes work and sometimes not? For what reason do most expert forecasts not come true and can we even trust the intuition of experts? What cognitive illusions prevent you from making an adequate expert assessment? How does this relate to the specifics of our thinking? What is the difference between “intuitive” and “thinking” types of thinking? Why may intuition not work in all areas of human activity? Daniel Kahneman talked about this and much more in his video lecture Explorations of the Mind Intuition.

*Translation starts at 4:25 minutes.

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Translation: p2ib.ru

Daniel Kahneman: "Reflections on the Science of Well-Being"

An expanded version of Daniel Kahneman's TED talk. A public lecture given by a psychologist at the Third International Conference on Cognitive Science is also devoted to the problem of two “I” - “remembering” and “present”. But here the psychologist considers this problem in the context of well-being psychology. Daniel Kahneman talks about modern research on well-being and the results that he and his colleagues have been able to obtain recently. In particular, he explains on what factors subjective well-being depends, how our “real self” affects us, what the concept of utility is, which influences decision-making, how much the assessment of life affects experienced happiness, how attention and pleasure are interconnected, what we experience from something, and how much do we exaggerate the meaning of what we think about? And, of course, the question of what significance studies of experienced happiness have for society does not go unnoticed.

Richard Thaler is known as a theorist in the field of financial and economic behavior through his work with Nobel laureate economic psychologist Daniel Kahneman. He is the author of the so-called “nudge theory” (“controlled choice”). He was one of the advisers to the 44th US President Barack Obama.

The Economics Prize is the youngest among the Nobel awards. Moreover, technically it is not really a Nobel Prize, and some members of the Nobel family oppose its existence in the first place. This award was established in memory of Alfred Nobel and in honor of its 300th anniversary by the Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank) in 1968. So its official name is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” Be that as it may, the Nobel Foundation website tracks the award ceremony. And those awarded the economic Nobel receive a corresponding diploma, a gold medal and a monetary reward from the hands of the Swedish monarch at an annual ceremony held in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel.

In total, from 1969 to 2016, the award was made 48 times, and 78 people became laureates of the economics prize. Moreover, in 18 cases the award was divided between two recipients, and in six cases the award was divided between three. The only female laureate in economics is Elinor Ostrom (2009). Among the recipients are our compatriots: in 1973, the winner was the creator of the theory of intersectoral analysis, Vasily Vasilyevich Leontyev, an American economist of Russian origin, a graduate of Leningrad University. And in 1975, the Soviet scientist Leonid Kantorovich received an award for “contribution to the theory of optimal resource allocation.”

Last year the prize went to Oliver Hart and Bengt Hallström for their contributions to contract theory. And in 2015, the prize was awarded to the famous microeconomist Angus Deaton “for his analysis of consumption, poverty and wealth.”

Most often, the award was awarded for research in the field of macroeconomics. As the American science journalist Maggie Koert-Baker once wrote, the typical Nobel Prize winner in economics is a 67-year-old man born in the United States, working at the University of Chicago at the time of the award. Indeed, the average age of Nobel economists is 67 years. At the same time, the youngest recipient was 51-year-old Kenneth J. Arrow in 1972, and the oldest was 90-year-old American economist Leonid Gurvich, born in Moscow (2007).

As usual, on the eve of the announcement of the names of the winners, the media speculated about possible favorites who have a chance to become Nobel laureates in 2017. This is how the press in this context named the Indian economist, professor of finance at the Booth School of Business (Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago) Raghuram Rajan, who until 2016 was the chairman of the Reserve Bank of India, and in 2003-2007 - the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Rajan is known as the author of “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists” and “Fault Lines,” in which he, in particular, comes up with the idea that capitalism must be defended as a system of free enterprise, not capitalists, and markets, not large businesses, must be protected. owners.

The list of possible candidates included the name of 44-year-old American-French economist Esther Duflo from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the past, by the way, she studied and taught in Moscow, worked as a research assistant to a French economist associated with the Bank of Russia, and to the American economic adviser Jeffrey Sachs. Also featured was Richard Posner of the University of Chicago, who is described as a leading thinker in the fields of justice and economics, trying to analyze legal rules using economic tools. The name of William Nordhouse from Yale University, who studies climate change from an economic point of view, was also mentioned.