ChatGPT is all the rage, but does it live up to our expectations? And are our expectations realistic? — I remember my first trip to Japan in the 1990s. I had worked all over Europe, and being fortunate enough to speak a few languages, most of the time I had been able to get at least some sense from notices, menus and other various written material. My British colleagues…

We can handle disruption better than we might imagine — in fact disruption can be beneficial to us — About two weeks ago, my life got seriously disrupted. I have been a frequent (some might say continuous) Twitter user for well over a decade. Not really for debating or sharing my opinion *, but to find and share information, mostly about my professional interests. For almost as long, I…

Do we always have to have an opinion on everything? It’s a tendency that is hard to resist, but it may be worth practising being comfortable with an absence of opinion — Many moons ago, my younger daughter got me a present on Father’s Day: a mug depicting Homer Simpson with the inscription, “No Opinion”. The Simpsons connection was to be expected, as I was a known Simpsons fan at the time — my modest but significant collection of T-shirts depicting members…

Externalities are a concept from economics that affects us all, and that deserves more attention — In 1989, a member of the Ramblers noticed that a barn was being built across an age-old footpath across an East-Sussex estate. England is criss-crossed by numerous rights of way, many of which are hundreds of years old, with some going back to Neolithic times. The Ramblers is an association…

What we end up concluding depends on where we start our thinking. And that is something that we may be able to control. — One of the more remarkable phenomena in cognitive behavioural science is the anchoring effect. It describes how, when are uncertain about the answer to a question, our guess may be influenced by a given reference point (the anchor). If we don’t know a particular fact precisely, this gives us some…

Exchanging gifts at Christmas is, aside from any other symbolism we want to see in it, an illustration of our profound economic instincts — and there is more! — Christmas is good for the economy — many businesses rely on the Christmas trade to stay in the black (or get out of the red). In the UK, retail sales for December 2021 amounted to nearly £55 billion (€63B, $67B), close to 12% of the annual figure, and about 17B…

The relationship between ethics and economics is closer than it may seem — Another semester comes to an end, in which I had the pleasure to engage with students on the topic of Ethical and Evidence-based Decision Making, a subject that regular readers might know is close to my heart. Naturally, we spend a good deal of the time discussing sources and types…

Quitting is underrated, but sometimes it makes sense to go on, even with what looks like a hopeless task — Tomorrow (that is if you read this article the day it was posted), I will play the piano in front of a small, but select audience. Twice a year, my teacher organizes an informal gathering of some of his mature students (even at my age, I am about at the…