Koen Smets – Medium

Koen Smets

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Koen Smets

Best of Koenfucius 2023

My 10 most read posts of the past year

Jan 4

Best of Koenfucius 2023

Jan 4

Pinned

Koen Smets

We are all economists

Mainstream and behavioural economics are two sides of the same coin

Jun 3, 2016

We are all economists

Jun 3, 2016

Koen Smets

Reality is what we feel

Much as we like to believe we can and do use rational thought about facts to interpret the world and react to it, it is our feelings that…

4d ago

A set of scales with a heart weighing more than a brain

4d ago

Koen Smets

The curse of extremism

We have a taste for the extreme — after all, who is interested in what is just middling? But together with other tendencies, it can…

Sep 27

Colourful dials (like political parties’ colours) showing all the needles in the red

Sep 27

Koen Smets

Navigating life’s hard choices-when ranking doesn’t work

Choosing between two options can be simple: compare them, rank them, and pick the best one. But sometimes ranking seems impossible. Then…

Sep 20

Two desserts: a lemon sorbet and a piece of apple pie

Sep 20

Koen Smets

The wrong way round

We seem intuitively to understand the meaning of statistical distributions, but our interpretation can be the wrong way round

Sep 13

A person wearing a raincoat the wrong way round

Sep 13

Koen Smets

Can price controls beat the market?

Economists have been insisting that price controls are bad economics forever. Are they (unconditionally) right?

Sep 6

A concert ticket for Oasis frozen in a block of ice

Sep 6

Koen Smets

Freedom for sale

Whether we do so voluntarily or not, whether we even realize it, we constantly trade our freedom. Do we buy and sell it at the right price?

Aug 30

A tightrope walker holding two weighty balls, one showing “Freedom” the other showing “Constraints”

Aug 30

Koen Smets

When winning is not the right thing

Running in second place at some distance in a cross country run, an athlete sees the front runner slowing down few paces from the finish…

Aug 23

A group of cross country runners in a race

Aug 23

Koen Smets

Strong, but weakly held

When we are convinced that we are right, it is tempting to crank up our determination, making us stray into the land of fallacies

Aug 16

A just vaccinated arm

Aug 16

Koen Smets

Koen Smets

Accidental behavioural economist in search of wisdom. Uses insights from (behavioural) economics in organization development. On Twitter as @koenfucius

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