which is ever since in the u k they banned smoking in public places i 've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again
sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window now the problem is
when you can 't smoke
if you stand and stare out of the window on your own you 're an antisocial friendless idiot
you 're a fucking philosopher
cannot be overstated what we have is exactly the same thing the same activity but one of them makes you feel great and the other one with just a small change of posture
makes you feel terrible and i think one of the problems with classicaleconomics is it 's absolutelypreoccupied with reality and reality isn 't a particularly good guide to human happiness why for example
both of them after all are in exactly the same stage of life you both have too much time on your hands and not much money
but pensioners are reportedly very very happy whereas the unemployed are extraordinarilyunhappy and depressed the reason i think is that the pensioners believe they 've chosen to be pensioners whereas the young unemployed
an electric floor every now and then an electric shock is applied to the floor
which pains the dogs the only difference is one of the dogs has a small button in its half of the box and when it nuzzles the button the electric shock stops
the other dog doesn 't have the button it 's exposed to exactly the same level of pain as the dog in the first box but it has no control over the circumstances
generally the first dog can be relatively content the second dog lapses into complete depression
the circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives it 's an interesting question
we ask the question the whole debate in the western world is about the level of taxation
but i think there 's another debate to be asked which is the level of control we have over our tax money
that what costs us ten pounds in one context can be a curse
what costs us ten pounds
in a different context we may actuallywelcome you know pay twenty thousand pounds in tax toward health and you 're merely feeling a mug
pay twenty thousand pounds to endow a hospital ward and you 're called a philanthropist i 'm probably in the wrong country to talk about willingness to pay tax
because they are actually the same thing what you call them actually affects how you react to them
viscerally and morally i think psychological value is great to be absolutely honest one of my great friends a professor called nick chater who 's the professor of decision sciences in london believes that we should spend far less time looking into humanity 's hidden depths and spend much more time exploring the hidden shallows
i think that 's true actually i think impressions have an insane effect on what we think and what we do
but what we don 't have is a really good model of human psychology at least pre kahneman perhaps we didn 't have a really good model of human psychology to put alongside models of engineering of neoclassical economics so people who believed in psychological solutions didn 't have a model we didn 't have a framework
this is what warren buffett 's business partner charlie munger calls a latticework on which to hang your ideas
engineers economists classical economists all had a very very robust existing latticework on which practically every idea could be hung
we merely have a collection of random individual insights without an overall model
and what that means is that
in looking at solutions we 've probably given too much priority to what i call technicalengineering solutions newtonian solutions and not nearly enough to the psychological ones you know my example of the eurostar
six million pounds spent to reduce the journey time between paris and london by about forty minutes for zero point zero one percent of this money you could have put wifi on the trains which wouldn 't have reduced the duration of the journey but would have improved its enjoyment and its usefullness far more
for maybe ten percent of the money you could have paid all of the world 's top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free chateau
emotionally drivenpsychological ideas versus the way we treat rational numerical spreadsheet driven ideas if you 're a creative person i think quite rightly you have to share all your ideas for approval with people much more rational than you you have to go in and you have to
what they don 't say is well the numbers all seem to add up but before i present this idea i 'll go and show it to some really crazy people to see if they can come up with something better and so we artificially i think prioritize what i 'd call mechanistic ideas over psychological ideas
an example of a great psychological idea the single best improvement in passenger satisfaction on the london underground per pound spent came when they didn 't add any extra trains nor change the frequency of the trains they put dot matrix display board on the platforms
because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality its duration but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes knucklebiting going when 's this train going to damn well arrive
here 's a beautiful example of a psychologicalsolution deployed in korea
red traffic lights have a countdown delay it 's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments why because road rage impatience and general irritation are massively reduced when you can actually see
the time you have to wait in china not really understanding the principle behind this they applied the same principle to green traffic lights
this is all i 'm asking for really in human decision making is the consideration of these three things i 'm not asking for the complete primacy of one over the other i 'm merely saying that when you solve problems you should look at all three of these equally
and you should seek as far as possible to find solutions which sit in the sweet spot in the middle if you actually look at a great business you 'll nearly always see all of these three things coming into play really really successful businesses google is great great technological success but it 's also based on a very good psychological insight
people believe something that only does one thing is better at that thing than something that does that thing and something else it 's an innate thing called goal dilution ayelet fishbach has written a paper about this
everybody else at the time of google more or less was trying to be a portal yes there 's a search function but you also have weather sports scores bits of news
google understood that if you 're just a search engine people assume you 're a very very good search engine all of you know this actually from when you go in to buy a television and in the shabbier end of the row of flat screen tvs you can see are these rather despised things called combined tv and dvd players
and we have no knowledge whatsoever of the quality of those things but we look at a combined tv and dvd player and we go uck it 's probably a bit of a crap telly and a bit rubbish as a dvd player so we walk out of the shops with one of each google is as much a psychological success as it is a technological one
i propose that we can use psychology to solve problems that we didn 't even realize were problems at all this is my suggestion for getting people to finish their course of antibiotics don 't give them twenty four white pills give them eighteen white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first and then take the blue ones
it 's called chunking the likelihood that people will get to the end is much greater when there is a milestone somewhere in the middle one of the great mistakes i think of economics is it fails to understand that what something is whether it 's retirementunemployment cost
is a function not only of its amount but also its meaning
this is a toll crossing in britain quite often queues
happen at the tolls sometimes you get very very severe queues you could apply the same principle actually if you like to the security lanes in airports what would happen if you could actually pay twice as much money to cross the bridge but go through a lane that 's an express lane it 's not an unreasonable thing to do it 's an economically efficient thing to do
the only problem is if you introduce this economically efficientsolution people hate it
because they think you 're deliberately creating delays at the bridge in order to maximize your revenue and why on earth should i pay to subsidize your imcompetence on the other hand change the frame slightly and create charitable yield management so the extra money you get goes not to the bridge company it goes to charity
and the mentalwillingness to pay completely changes
actually my pain experienced in paying five pounds is not just proportionate to the amount but where i think that money is going
there was a discipline called praxeology which is a prior discipline to the study of economics praxeology is the study of human choice action and decision making
interestingly believes economics is just a subset of psychology i think he just refers to economics as the study of human praxeology under conditions of scarcity
but von mises among many other things i think
uses an analogy which is probably the best justification and explanation for the value of marketing the value of perceived value and the fact that we should actually treat it as being absolutelyequivalent to any other kind of value
we tend to all of us even those of us who work in marketing to think of value in two ways there 's the real value which is when you make something in a factory and provide a service and then there 's a kind of dubious value which you create by changing the way people look at things
von mises completely rejected this distinction and he used this following analogy he referred actually to strange economists called the french physiocrats
who believed that the only true value was what you extracted from the land so if you 're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer you created true value if however you bought some wool from the shepherd and charged a premium for converting it into a hat you weren 't actually creating value you were exploiting the shepherd
now von mises said that modern economists make exactly the same mistake with regard to advertising and marketing he says if you run a restaurant there is no healthydistinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food and the value you create by sweeping the floor
one of them creates perhaps the primary product the thing we think we 're paying for the other one creates a context within which we can enjoy and appreciate that product and the idea that one of them should actually have priority over the other is fundamentally wrong
try this quick thought experiment imagine a restaurant that serves michelin starred food but actually where the restaurant smells of sewage and there 's human feces on the floor
the best thing you can do there to create value is not actually to improve the food still further it 's to get rid of the smell and clean up the floor
and it 's vital we understand this if that seems like some strange abstruse thing in the u k the post office had a ninety eight percent success rate at delivering first class mail the next day they decided this wasn 't good enough and they wanted to get it up to ninety nine
the effort to do that almost broke the organization
if at the same time you 'd gone and asked people what percentage of first class mail arrives the next day the average answer or the modal answer would have been fifty to sixty percent
now if your perception is much worse than your reality what on earth are you doing trying to change the reality that 's like trying to improve the food in a restaurant that stinks
what you also notice is that in any case our perception is leaky we can 't tell the difference between the quality of the food
and the environment in which we consume it all of you will have seen this phenomenon if you have your car washed or valeted when you drive away your car feels as if it drives better
and the reason for this unless my car valet mysteriously is changing the oil and performing work which i 'm not paying him for and i 'm unaware of is because perception is in any case leaky
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