Behavioral Economics on Bad Behavior

So, during my almost 2 months of poor internet access, I read a lot of books. One book I read was Behavioral Economics for Dummies by Morris Altman, which was an interesting psychological look at human behavior. I’m not going to dwell on a lot of the what the book has to say because it was kind of a while ago and I’m starting to forget some elements of the book.

Thus, I want to put down some of the main points I remember.

Firstly, the author does not like Milton Friedman. That’s a good start.

Second, there is some indication that democracy and good governance (corruption need not apply) can lead to wealth creation and bigger economic pie for all. Quality of economic life improves for those living under democracy. I hope this is not wishful thinking.

Third, experiments seem to indicate that most people want to behave nicely, especially if they know who they are dealing with.

And lastly, about 25% will want to behave in a nasty manner if they can get away with it. About 10% will behave in nasty manner even if they don’t get away with it. So, about 1 out of 4 will act in deceitful or corrupt ways.

That last result coming out of studies might explain the current eruption of corruption and bad behavior around the world. There are just a lot of nasty people out there and unfortunately, it feels like they have the upper hand. Like Russian instigating its war with Ukraine on the false premise that Ukraine had a lot of nazis. Really? With a Jewish president? And then there’s Hamas and their bestial savage attack on the Israelis on October 7th. There is nothing that qualifies as a valid human protest against whatever ills Israelis have been imposing on the Palestinians. Rapes, torture and killing of babies, children, women and the elderly does not qualify as a valid protest. I don’t think the Israelis have been imposing the same kind of cruelty on the Palestinians before that attack.

I need to re-read that book or maybe read another book on behavioral economics to see what the general consensus is on this “dismal” science.

I’m going to be trying to get back to my normal schedule but I am struggling. Maybe it is the threat of hurricane season and the threat of political violence this year that is getting me down, but the unreliable internet service has really knocked me off of my discipline.

And I also need to get back to generating ideas and imagery for these posts. I could us AI for the imagery but they don’t inspire me for some reason. And it was the imagery production that was causing me problems with the internet, so I’ve been hesitant to even develop imagery for fear of losing the service again.

So, I’m going to have to be very careful with the image production.