Started reading The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies by @MazzucatoM & @RosieCollingto
goodreads.com/book/show/6102… Why do so many governments outsource critical activities to consulting companies?

Why has the market for consulting services grown so much in recent decades - and globally?

What do consultants do, and what role does the consulting industry play in the economy overall?

Now reading: Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies ⁦@davies_will⁩ goodreads.com/book/show/4589… Sub title of my version of the book:
How feeling took over the world

Talk by Hunt Alcott: Are High-Interest Loans Predatory? Theory and Evidence from Payday Lending

Paper: dropbox.com/s/ibavoq0pvr8p…
Slides: dropbox.com/s/007niykbznui… Evaluating consumer protection policies

Many policies motivated by concerns that consumers don’t act in their own best interest or are “exploited” by firms

Must develop tools for:
• Measurement of alleged mistakes
• Behavioral welfare evaluation of proposed policies

Reading Michael Ignatieff - Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics goodreads.com/book/show/1780… When we call politics the art of the possible, we mean the art of knowing what is possible here and now. The possible includes the potential

Robert Bringhurst - The Elements of Typographic Style (v3.1, 2005) goodreads.com/book/show/4473… One em is a distance equal to the type size.

Half an em is called an en.

A quarter of an em is typically about the same as, or slightly more than, the set-width of the letter t.

Started to read:
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
goodreads.com/book/show/4110… failing to include the perspective of women is a huge driver of an unintended male bias that attempts (often in good faith) to pass itself off as 'gender neutral.

This is what de Beauvoir meant when she said: men confuse their own point of view with the absolute truth

Reading: Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson (1979) goodreads.com/book/show/1342… Terentius Afer, who became the greatest Latin play wright: "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto." "I am human and I let nothing human be alien to me."
This was the creed by which she lived (she= Dysons’s mother)

Reading: The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli goodreads.com/book/show/4115… Part I: What modern physics has understood about time

Part II: The world without time

Part III: "In a world without time, there must still be some thing that gives rise to the time that we are accustomed to"; what are the constituent parts of the time that is familiar to us?

Started to read Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - Nick Bostrom (2014) goodreads.com/book/show/2052… Artificial Intelligence is a quest to find shortcuts: ways to tractably approximating the Bayesian ideal by sacrificing some optimality or generality while preserving enough to get high performance

(Bayesian agent makes probabilistically optimal use of available information)

Started to read The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior, by @shlomobenartzi with @jonahlehrer

goodreads.com/book/show/2349… Typical subject using simulated version of healthcare.gov chose a plan that was $888 more expensive than it needed to be.

Bhargava et al (2017) The costs of poor
health (plan choices) &
prescriptions for reform google.com/url?sa=t&sourc…

Started to read @rorysutherland 's Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense goodreads.com/book/show/2621… Our need for logic and certainty brings costs aa well as benefits.

Hidden price oflogic: you destroy magic.

Discover Inner Alchemist. The alchemy of this book's title is the science of knowing what economists are wrong about.