Are we in control of our decisions?

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

Behavioral Economics Introduction

Standard Economics vs. Behavioral Economics 




Visual and decision illusions






 

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

 

 Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Introduction From Injury to Behavioral Economics

  


Predictably Irrational Chapter 1 - Everything is Relative  

Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Chapter 2 Supply and Demand?  

Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Chapter 3 The Cost of Zero  

Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Chapter 4 The Cost of Social Norms 

Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Chapter 5 The Influence of Arousal 

Chapter 6 The Problem of Procrastination 

Chapter 7: The High Price of Ownership

 Chapter 8: Keeping doors open

 

Chapter 9: The effect of expectations

 Chapter 10: The power of price

Chapters 11 and 12: The context of our character

Chapter 13: What is behavioral economics?

First Decisions Matter a Lot

The Temptation of Free

Social vs. Financial Exchanges

We Don't Recognize Ourselves

Self-Control Mechanisms

 

 

High Cost of Attachment

 

Keeping Options Open

Expectations Color Experiences

You Get What You Pay For

Dishonesty: Everyone Cheats a Little Bit

The promise of Behavioral Economics

Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus

In 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.




Why you should listen too Muhammad Yunus? "Lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights." In his new book, Professor Yunus describes the role of business in promoting social reform and his vision for an innovative business model that would combine the power of free markets with a quest for a more humane, egalitarian world that could help alleviate world poverty, inequality, and other social problems.


Portrait of Muhammad Yunus (10 Minutes)












A look at the work of Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and his efforts with Grameen Bank to provide micro-credits for the less fortunate of Bangladesh.

Click here to watch:








Muhammad Yunus - A new business model (5:30 Minutes)

Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas

With all the intensity and brilliance for which he is known, Alan Kay envisions better techniques for teaching kids by using computers to illustrate experience in ways -– mathematically and scientifically -- that only computers can.

Why you should listen to him:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay not only coined this favorite tech-world adage, but has proven its truth several times. A true polymath, as well as inventor, he has combined engineering brilliance with knowledge of child development, epistemology, molecular biology and more.

In the 1960s, Kay joined the computer team at XeroxPARC, where he worked on world-changing inventions like the graphical interface, object-oriented programming, and the personal computer itself. Later, at Apple, Atari, HP, Disney, and now at his own nonprofits, he has helped refine the tools he anticipated long before they were realized.

As the industry has blossomed, however, Kay continues to grapple with the deeper purpose of computing, struggling to create the machine that won't only recapitulate patterns in the world as we know it but will teach both children and adults to think, to see what otherwise is beyond them.

"One of the computer industry's most prolific inventors."

Electronic Engineering Times

Keys to Social Innovation

The Young Foundation and Geoff Mulgan have published a number of reports and books on social innovation, public sector innovation and public strategy. They are also working actively on recession responses.

Previously he was:

• Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street (under British Prime Minister Tony Blair)
  

• Director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (formerly known as the Performance and Innovation Unit)
  

• Co-founder and Director of the London based think tank Demos (from 1993-98)
  

• Chief adviser to Gordon Brown MP in the early 1990s
  

He has written a number of books including:

• Communication and Control:networks and the new economies of communication (1991),
• Politics in an Anti-Political Age (1994),
  
• Connexity (1997) and
  
• Good and Bad Power: the Ideals and Betrayals of Government (Penguin 2006).
  

He has written numerous Demos reports and pamphlets.


His current base, the Young Foundation, mainly works on social innovation - design and launch of new social organisations, but also produces some publications, including recent ones on social innovation and the state of British society.



He has lectured and advised governments around the world on policy and strategy - including China, Australia, the United States, Japan and Russia.

He is profiled in two books - The New Alchemists (1999 by Charles Handy) and Visionaries (2001 by Jay Walljasper). He is a trustee of the Design Council and the Work Foundation.

Geoff Mulgan (born 1961) is director of the Young Foundation based in London and Visiting Professor at University College, London, the London School of Economics and University of Melbourne as well as being the chair of Involve.

He obtained his Ph.D. in telecommunications from the University of Westminster. He was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and obtained a First Class degree from Balliol College, Oxford. Mulgan was also trained as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka , but instead worked in local government and academia in the UK, and became an influential writer on social and political issues in various newspapers and magazines in the 1990s. He was made a CBE in 2005.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?"

Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives.

A leading researcher in positive psychology, he has devoted his life to studying what makes people truly happy: "When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life."

He is the architect of the notion of "flow" -- the creative moment when a person is completely involved in an activity for its own sake.

Csikszentmihalyi teaches psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University, focusing on human strengths such as optimism, motivation and responsibility. He's the director the the Quality of Life Research Center there. He has written numerous books and papers about the search for joy and fulfillment.

Buffett Family on Philanthropy

Warren Buffett's kids discuss giving. Warren Buffett's son Peter and daughter Jennifer discuss their foundation and the effect the economic woes may have on philanthropy

A Healthy Business

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