Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science pdfdrive com

If we fix prices in a market system, private firms will find some other way to
compete. Consumers often look back nostalgically at the “early days” of airplane
travel, when the food was good, the seats were bigger, and people dressed up
when they traveled. This is not just nostalgia speaking; the quality of coach air
travel has fallen sharply. But the price of air travel has fallen even faster. Prior to
1978, airline fares were fixed by the government. Every flight from Denver to
Chicago cost the same, but American and United were still competing for
customers. They used quality to distinguish themselves. When the industry was
deregulated, price became the primary margin for competition, presumably
because that is what consumers care more about. Since then, everything related
to being in or near an airplane has become less pleasant, but the average fare,
adjusted for inflation, has fallen by nearly half.
In 1995, I was traveling across South Africa, and I was struck by the
remarkable service at the gas stations along the way. The attendants, dressed in
sharp uniforms, often with bow ties, would scurry out to fill the tank, check the
oil, and wipe the windshield. The bathrooms were spotless—a far cry from some
of the scary things I’ve seen driving across the USA. Was there some special
service station mentality in South Africa? No. The price of gasoline was fixed by
the government. So service stations, which were still private firms, resorted to

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bow ties and clean bathrooms to attract customers.
Every market transaction makes all parties better off. Firms are acting in their
own best interests, and so are consumers. This is a simple idea that has enormous
power. Consider an inflammatory example: The problem with Asian sweatshops
is that there are not enough of them. Adult workers take jobs in these unpleasant,
low-wage manufacturing facilities voluntarily. (I am not writing about forced
labor or child labor, both of which are different cases.) So one of two things
must be true. Either (1) workers take unpleasant jobs in sweatshops because it is
the best employment option they have; or (2) Asian sweatshop workers are
persons of weak intellect who have many more attractive job offers but choose
to work in sweatshops instead.
Most arguments against globalization implicitly assume number two. The
protesters smashing windows in Seattle were trying to make the case that
workers in the developing world would be better off if we curtailed international
trade, thereby closing down the sweatshops that churn out shoes and handbags
for those of us in the developed world. But how exactly does that make workers
in poor countries better off? It does not create any new opportunities. The only
way it could possibly improve social welfare is if fired sweatshop workers take
new, better jobs—opportunities they presumably ignored when they went to
work in a sweatshop. When was the last time a plant closing in the United States
was hailed as good news for its workers?
Sweatshops are nasty places by Western standards. And yes, one might argue
that Nike should pay its foreign workers better wages out of sheer altruism. But
they are a symptom of poverty, not a cause. Nike pays a typical worker in one of
its Vietnamese factories roughly $600 a year. That is a pathetic amount of
money. It also happens to be twice an average Vietnamese worker’s annual
income.
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Indeed, sweatshops played an important role in the development of
countries like South Korea and Taiwan, as we will explore in Chapter 12.
Given that economics is built upon the assumption that humans act consistently
in ways that make themselves better off, one might reasonably ask: Are we
really that rational? Not always, it turns out. One of the fiercest assaults on the
notion of “strict rationality” comes from a seemingly silly observation.
Economist Richard Thaler hosted a dinner party years ago at which he served a
bowl of cashews before the meal. He noticed that his guests were wolfing down
the nuts at such a pace that they would likely spoil their appetite for dinner. So

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Thaler took the bowl of nuts away, at which point his guests thanked him.
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Believe it or not, this little vignette exposes a fault in the basic tenets of
microeconomics: In theory, it should never be possible to make rational
individuals better off by denying them some option. People who don’t want to
eat too many cashews should just stop eating cashews. But they don’t. And that
finding turns out to have implications far beyond salted nuts. For example, if
humans lack the self-discipline to do things that they know will make themselves
better off in the long run (e.g., lose weight, stop smoking, or save for retirement),
then society could conceivably make them better off by helping (or coercing)
them to do things they otherwise would not or could not do—the public policy
equivalent of taking the cashew bowl away.
The field of behavioral economics has evolved as a marriage between
psychology and economics that offers sophisticated insight into how humans
really make decisions. Daniel Kahneman, a professor in both psychology and
public affairs at Princeton, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002
for his studies of decision making under uncertainty, and, in particular, “how
human decisions may systematically depart from those predicted by standard
economic theory.”
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Kahneman and others have advanced the concept of “bounded rationality,”
which suggests that most of us make decisions using intuition or rules of thumb,
kind of like looking at the sky to determine if it will rain, rather than spending
hours poring over weather forecasts. Most of the time, this works just fine.
Sometimes it doesn’t. The behavioral economists study ways in which these
rules of thumb may lead us to do things that diminish our utility in the long run.
For example, individuals don’t always have a particularly refined sense of risk
and probability. This point was brought home to me recently as I admired a large
Harley Davidson motorcycle parked on a sidewalk in New Hampshire (a state
that does not require motorcycle helmets). The owner ambled up and said, “Do
you want to buy it?” I replied that motorcycles are a little too dangerous for me,
to which he exclaimed, “You’re willing to fly on a plane, aren’t you!”
In fact, riding a motorcycle is 2,000 times more dangerous than flying for
every kilometer traveled. That’s not an entirely fair comparison since motorcycle
trips tend to be much shorter. Still, any given motorcycle journey, regardless of
length, is 14 times more likely to end in death than any trip by plane.
Conventional economics makes clear that some people will ride motorcycles
(with or without helmets) because the utility they get from going fast on a two
wheeler outweighs the risks they incur in the process. That’s perfectly rational.
But if the person making that decision doesn’t understand the true risk involved,

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then it may not be a rational tradeoff after all.
Behavorial economics has developed a catalog of these kinds of potential
errors, many of which are an obvious part of everyday life. Many of us don’t
have all the self-control that we would like. Eighty percent of American smokers
say they want to quit; most of them don’t. (Reports from inside the White House
suggested that President Obama was still trying to kick the habit even after
moving into the Oval Office.) Some very prominent economists, including one
Nobel Prize winner, have argued for decades that there is such a thing as
“rational addiction,” meaning that individuals will take into account the
likelihood of addiction and all its future costs when buying that first pack of
Camels. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who has studied smoking behavior
extensively, thinks that is nonsense. He argues that consumers don’t rationally
weigh the benefits of smoking enjoyment against future health risks and other
costs, as the standard economic model assumes. Gruber writes, “The model is
predicated on a description of the smoking decision that is at odds with
laboratory evidence, the behavior of smokers, econometric [statistical] analysis,
and common sense.”
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We may also lack the basic knowledge necessary to make sensible decisions
in some situations. Annamaria Lusardi of Dartmouth College and Olivia
Mitchell of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed a
large sample of Americans over the age of fifty to gauge their financial literacy.
Only a third could do simple interest rate calculations; most did not understand
the concept of investment diversification. (If you don’t know what that means
either, you will after reading Chapter 7.) Based on her research, Professor
Lusardi has concluded that “financial illiteracy” is widespread.
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These are not merely esoteric fun facts that pipe-smoking academics like to
kick around in the faculty lounge. Bad decisions can have bad outcomes—for all
of us. The global financial crisis arguably has its roots in irrational behavior.
One of our behavioral “rules of thumb” as humans is to see patterns in what is
really randomness; as a result, we assume that whatever is happening now will
continue to happen in the future, even when data, probability, or basic analysis
suggest the contrary. A coin that comes up heads four times in a row is “lucky” a
basketball player who has hit three shots in a row has a “hot hand.”
A team of cognitive psychologists made one of the enduring contributions to
this field by disproving the “hot hand” in basketball using NBA data and by
conducting experiments with the Cornell varsity men’s and women’s basketball
teams. (This is the rare academic paper that includes interviews with the
Philadelphia 76ers.) Ninety-one percent of basketball fans believe that a player

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has “a better chance of making a shot after having just made his last two or three
shots than he does after having just missed his last two or three shots.” In fact,
there is no evidence that a player’s chances of making a shot are greater after
making a previous shot—not with field goals for the 76ers, not with free throws
for the Boston Celtics, and not when Cornell players shot baskets as part of a
controlled experiment.
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Basketball fans are surprised by that—just as many homeowners were
surprised in 2006 when real estate prices stopped going up. Lots of people had
borrowed a lot of money on the assumption that what goes up must keep going
up; the result has been a wave of foreclosures with devastating ripple effects
throughout the global economy—which is a heck of a lot more significant than
eating too many cashews. Chapter 3 discusses what, if anything, public policy
ought to do about our irrational tendencies.
As John F. Kennedy famously remarked, “Life is not fair.” Neither is capitalism
in some important respects. Is it a good system?
I will argue that a market economy is to economics what democracy is to
government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives. Markets
are consistent with our views of individual liberty. We may disagree over
whether or not the government should compel us to wear motorcycle helmets,
but most of us agree that the state should not tell us where to live, what to do for
a living, or how to spend our money. True, there is no way to rationalize
spending money on a birthday cake for my dog when the same money could
have vaccinated several African children. But any system that forces me to
spend money on vaccines instead of doggy birthday cakes can only be held
together by oppression. The communist governments of the twentieth century
controlled their economies by controlling their citizens’ lives. They often
wrecked both in the process. During the twentieth century, communist
governments killed some 100 million of their own people in peacetime, either by
repression or by famine.
Markets are consistent with human nature and therefore wildly successful at
motivating us to reach our potential. I am writing this book because I love to
write. I am writing this book because I believe that economics will be interesting
to lay readers. And I am writing this book because I really want a summer home
in New Hampshire. We work harder when we benefit directly from our work,
and that hard work often yields significant social gains.
Last and most important, we can and should use government to modify
markets in all kinds of ways. The economic battle of the twentieth century was

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between capitalism and communism. Capitalism won. Even my leftist brother-
in-law does not believe in collective farming or government-owned steel mills
(though he did once say that he would like to see a health care system modeled
after the U.S. Post Office). On the other hand, reasonable people can disagree
sharply over when and how the government should involve itself in a market
economy or what kind of safety net we should offer to those whom capitalism
treats badly. The economic battles of the twenty-first century will be over how
unfettered our markets should be.

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