Skip to main content

Women who stare at parking spots


Listening to the playground antics of the US government around the debt ceiling is very painful.  I still expect there will be a "last minute deal," but I also hope that the pathetic posturing that is bringing the US to the brink causes people to rethink the process.

On NPR this morning there were two interesting comments on the underlying psychology that is aiding and abetting the current process.

  1. Short term considerations overwhelmingly override long term ones.  The example was that if I ask you to give up an ice-cream cone next year, it is easy to say "yes".  If I swing by right now with the desert tray, you will have a hard time saying "no".  The debate around the debt ceiling is really about long-term concerns....but the (somewhat artificial) deadline of August 2nd is making it into a negotiation about the short term.
  2. Men are hyper-competitive without women present to moderate things.  Maybe not too surprising, but it leads to men acting in non-intuitive ways; I missed the exact reference on NPR, but there was an example of two cities in Eastern Europe which were quite similar except that one has a very high ratio of women on city counsel, and one has a high ratio of men.  The one with the women at the helm runs like a finely tuned machine, whereas the other is full of posturing, last-minute (and bad) decisions, higher debt, etc.
So, the lesson is pretty clear.
  1. Change the incentives for law makers from long-term abstract (the debt) to short-term concrete.  Either stop paying them, or even more severe, take away their preferred parking spots.  Of the two, the psychologist was sure that the parking spot would have the most impact.  Most law makers would have savings, so removing their pay is still a mid-to-long term play.  Losing your parking spot - tomorrow - is an immediate incentive.
  2. Get more women involved.  It is hard to imagine changing the ratio of law makers quickly, but it is easy to imagine moving the negotiating arena to a venue where more women are present.  Force every law maker to bring a female counerpart, for example.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Decentralization, Democracy, and Well-Being

Those of us raised in Democratic societies take it for granted that those societies provide better well-being (for common individuals) than other forms of governance. At the heart of democracy is personal freedom and autonomy, backed by the rule of law. We also take for granted the interplay of decentralized versus centralized authority. Decentralization can mean many things, but here we refer to it in terms of power, authority, and decision making. The more authority individuals have, the more decentralized the power system in which they are operating.  Almost by definition the more democratic a system, the more decentralized it is, with the caveat that some agreed upon axioms exist, such as the rule of law and its enforcement. Of course, authority can be too decentralized leading to "every man for themselves", so we put limits on decentralization through that same rule of law. With the advent of decentralizing technologies , which make possible more decentraliz...
Read more

Couragous CEO

Nokia's CEO is courageous .  It is one thing to know that a company is in trouble, and another to really do something about it.  While it is almost certain that today's announcement will be a partnership with Microsoft, I wonder if that is the wrong choice.  While Windows 7 seems fine, it has no "sex appeal".   For $0 Nokia could have jumped to Android, and customized it as much as they wanted.  Because it was derived from Android, Nokia could have basked in the glow of that product.  Microsoft -- ho hum :-) Of course, maybe I am just wrong.  Google Trends shows more searches for Windows 7 (blue)....but more news for Android (red).
Post a Comment
Read more

Neutrino

This is one of the better books for laymen that I have read in a while.  In large part, I think this is due to the fact that I knew very little about the recent developments in astronomy, and was surprised to find that Neutrino Telescopes are alive and well.  The last time I had looked, it was so hard to detect a neutrino, that even thinking of a telescope was absurd. While the book follows many of the pioneers of the area, I was most intrigued with the storyline that exposed how neutrinos come in three flavors, which can change through interaction with mass and/or time.  Thus, an electron-neutrino at birth, may be a tau-neutrino upon detection.  This is visualized well by Close as neutrinos being like harmonics of several frequencies which interact in wavelike ways as the neutrino travels through space and time.  It is interesting that this is the same visualization invoked by superstring theory. To explain the flavor-changing behavior, neutrinos (or a...
Post a Comment
Read more