03/12/2010

"If It Was Not Rational for Me, then I Would Not Be Doing It" (Updated)

[Follow-up post]

Blogging will continue to be light in the upcoming weeks due to more important stuff to do. Ever heard of RSS feeds?

In the meantime, here's a clip from someone called Ole Rogeberg explaining Becker and Murphy's theory of rational addiction:


(Via Andrew Gelman; the movie's original page is here)

In other news, "I, for one, welcome our new arsenic overlords" currently yields 173 Google hits. I would have expected more.

Update: Turns out the same Ole Rogeberg actually has written a full-blown academic paper called "Taking Absurd Theories Seriously: Economics and the Case of Rational Addiction Theory" on the matter. Not as much fun as the clip above, though.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

My dog does calculus and geometry. When I throw a stick across a river diagonally, he doesn't swim straight for it, nor does he swim perpendicular to the river, but at some angle in between which approximately minimizes his effort.

holden said...

i am in the middle of preparing for a final in applied game theory.

this video makes my week.

TGGP said...

A better calculus example would be catching a ball in mid-air, which involves acceleration problems difficult to solve in real-time with a calculator.

LemmusLemmus said...

Ant, TGGP:

Reply in a follow-up post.

my butt does calculus said...

This sounds like the economists have conflated "decision utility" with "experienced utility". Many do.