Economics Behaving Badly
George Loewenstein and I have an Op-Ed in the New York Times today. Check it out, and feel free to add your comments.
Peter Ubel
on Health, Well-Being, Bioethics and Behavioral Economics
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I am a physician and behavioral scientist. My research and writing explores the quirks in human nature that influence our lives -- the mixture of rational and irrational forces that affect our health, our happiness and the way our society functions....
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March 3rd, 2011 at 7:03 pm
[...] Economics Behaving Badly | Peter UbelGeorge Loewenstein and I have an Op-Ed in the New York Times today. Check it out, and feel free to add your comments. … This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 11:34 am and is filed under Behavioral Economics, Health Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. … Dan Ariely… [...]
April 11th, 2011 at 9:25 pm
Sorry for the huge comment but I wanted to put in my $0.02 . Firstly, awesome original post; usually, I don’t comment on a blog unless there’s something that stands out to me to do so. A little bit of history I work in wealth management in a boutique firm. Here is my story: When I first turned 21, I started trading from a few scraps of pages of the “Intelligent Investor.” Of course, like any kid, I started investing in online investopedia before that. I first tried my hand in investing in financial derivatives like futures/swaps etc. but lost a lot of money unfortunately. After that, I became more substantially more knowledgeable with my money – I read from an article that Delos Chang wrote about the psychology of investors and the Wall Street Journal daily and began investing my money into mutual index funds from the S&P 500. Of course, this was after the Internet Stock Bubble took place and all the drug scandals in Mexico (I had a lot of currency in pesos before they pegged it to the dollar). But in terms of the systemic risk, I wanted to diversify and make a modest return in the long run. I’d say that in terms of wealth management , you won’t get rich with the S&P 500 mutual index funds but you will at least hedge against some sure loss by day trading unless you’re an informational trader (which few of us are!). But I’m sure you can learn this from any finance class!