She gave a great talk about how context matters and how the details in which an item is presented shapes how you think about it. How you taste wine depends on how much it costs, what your friends have told you about a musician impacts your taste for their music, etcetera.This is all crucially important, and Beggs concluded by stating that she is bringing it all up in the hope that we might, with more awareness, be a bit more rational.
This discussion leads to an interesting philosophical point to ponder- if we can be fooled into liking things more, it's not necessarily bad if such fooling ourselves actually increases happiness. In my talk, I pointed out that this is a risky proposition because context and expectations are constantly changing, so you can't guarantee that you will be able to keep fooling yourself indefinitely.
Economists such as Dan Ariely have evidence that the placebo effect of products is stronger if the products have a higher price point. This is, of course, irrational in an economic sense, but it leads to an interesting thought exercise- for example, a lot of people say that pharmaceuticals are too expensive and that the world would be better off if drug prices were lower. I wonder what these people would say if they knew that the lower prices would actually make people the drugs less effective.
Comments
Glad you survived! Congratulations on being invited, as i’ve seen some very excellent presentations on TED. Wish you could have talked about getting this country back on sustainable economic growth, with short term measures to enhance consumer demand, create jobs, and longer term measures to reduce inequities…
I too wish Jodi and others would talk about how to get the country back in shape again!
I especially wish this of Jodi because I have already supplied her and this site with the theory and way that such an improvement can take place (having previously described the cause why it is not progressing as it should).
It is to do with the need for increased demand by lowering production costs, the most significant of which being that due to access to natural resources, namely the cost of access rights to land, both material wise (where the land is relatively cheep) and as a sensible place to perform useful work (near a population center, where the land is more costly). By speculation in land values, its price is raised whilst its opportunity for use is wasted along with the unemployed who cannot find an entrepreneur who otherwise could affort to make proper use of these production factors.
TAX LAND NOT PEOPLE; TAX TAKINGS NOT MAKINGS!