Reset: An Introduction to Behavior Centered Design
A hot topic :
There are over 100 change theories in health psychology alone, and the field of behavioral economics has over 100 “nudges” for inspiring behavior change as well (just to mention the two most prominent fields dealing with this topic). This book is about a new, generic way of approaching behavior change called Behavior Centered Design (BCD).
The results indicate that obesity is associated with substantial healthcare cost increases and there are large differences in costs by degree of obesity. Specifically, severe obesity raises total direct medical costs by an average of 160 € per patient and year. With total medical costs averaging 600 € for normal-weight individuals, this means that severe obesity is associated with an increase in costs of 26 %. The effect of moderate obesity is more modest: it raises medical costs by 97 € or 16 %. Overweight has an even smaller impact, raising costs by 51 € or 8.5 %.Therefore, if obesity has an economic and health impact, what next?
Most seriously ill patients value comfort and dignity over life extension, but routine care often leads to treatment oriented toward extending life. Deviating from this life-extending norm requires that someone actively request or suggest doing so.Specifying one’s goals of care in the living will component of an advance directive provides patients with an opportunity to counter this tendency. However, the text and structure of commonly used advance directives carry some of the same implicit biases that tend to favor life extension in the absence of advance directives.Halpern et al. show that people are strongly influenced by default options in advanced directives. Without default, 66% prefer confort over life extension. With a default option, 77% prefer not to extend life, even after reconsideration and being informed over the default.
How I wish I had earlier read Mises—the senior colleague of Friedrich Hayek and the teacher of Kirzner! It would have sped up my intellectual development by two or three decades, and given me more respect for the entrepreneur-centered thinking of my friendly opponent early in my career as an economic historian, the historian David Landes. It might have allowed me as early as the 1970s to use the Kirznerian entrepreneur to make progress on the puzzle of economic growth—instead of having to wait until the 2000s, painfully extracting myself over the decades from a Samuelsonian-Friedmanite devotion to equilibrium and routine.PS. Sobre el títol del post. Humanomics es refereix al darrer estadi del viatge intel.lectual de McCloskey als 68 anys, economia per a humans de cap a peus.(així ho explica a la p.2)
In my opinion, McCloskey's paper is required reading for all who want to understand why some nations grow rich while others languish in poverty. It is a continuation of the argument presented in her Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Cannot Explain the Modern World. McCloskey summarizes her argument nicely here, and she pursues the entrepreneurial element in the story in her reflections on Kirzner and Austrian economics. I have attempted to address her thesis in my essay "A Behavioral Approach to the Political and Economic Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations."
Many elements in McCloskey's argument remind me of the nuanced argument made by Tyler Cowen in a very underappreciated essay of his -- "Entrepreneurship, Austrian Economics, and the Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry."
“The key to political order, is the establishment of credible bounds on the behavior of political officials”.Douglas North. Understanding the Process of Economic Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press.2005, p. 107
Bettering Humanomics. A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science
The discoveries I have made by responding critically, yet as amiably as I could manage, are two:
1. There seems to be emerging a new and I think more serious and sensible way of doing economic science—quantitatively serious, philosophically serious, historically serious, and ethically serious, too, as I argue in this volume. The economist Bart Wilson and a few others nowadays call it the “humanomics,” as in the title here.4
2. But, I argue in the other volume, neoinstitutionalism, from Douglass North and Daron Acemoglu and many other economists and political scientists, is not the way forward. Scientifically speaking, its factual claims, like those of the other recent neobehaviorist fashions, such as neuroeconomics and behavioral finance and happiness studies, are dubious—or, at best, questionably founded and argued. The neoinstitutionalists, like the others, do not listen, really listen, to the evidence of humans, or to their friends’ scientific questions and objections. Substantively, they treat creative adults like a flock of little children, terrible twos, to whom we need not listen. We need, they say, merely to “observe their behavior,” omitting for some reason linguistic behavior. And then we record the behavior in questionable metrics. The children-citizens will be pushed around with “incentives,” beloved of Samuelsonian economists and econowannabes. From a great height of fatherly expertise in discerning and designing Max U institutions, the neoinstitutionalist looks down with contempt on the merely human actions and interactions of free adults.
A key book by controversial Deirdre McCloskey, this is the outline:
Part I. The Proposal
Chapter 1. Humanomics and Liberty Promise Better Economic Science
Chapter 2. Adam Smith Practiced Humanomics, and So Should We
Chapter 3. Economic History Illustrates the Problems with Nonhumanomics
Chapter 4. An Economic Science Needs the Humanities
Chapter 5. It’s Merely a Matter of Common Sense and Intellectual Free Trade
Chapter 6. After All, Sweet Talk Rules a Free Economy
Chapter 7. Therefore We Should Walk on Both Feet, Like Ludwig Lachmann
Chapter 8. That Is, Economics Needs Theories of Human Minds beyond Behaviorism
Part II. The Killer App
Chapter 9. The Killer App of Humanomics Is the Evidence That the Great Enrichment Came from Ethics and Rhetoric
Chapter 10. The Dignity of Liberalism Did It
Chapter 11. Ideas, Not Incentives, Underlie It
Chapter 12. Even as to Time and Location
Chapter 13. The Word’s the Thing
Part III. The Doubts
Chapter 14. Doubts by Analytic Philosophers about the Killer App Are Not Persuasive
Chapter 15. Nor by Sociologists or Political Philosophers
Chapter 16. Nor Even by Economic Historians
I look at prevention through an economic lens and make three main points. First, those advocating preventive measures are often asked how much money a given measure saves. This question is misguided. Instead, preventive measures can be thought of as insurance, with a certain cost in the present that may or may not pay off in the future. Although most medical preventive measures improve expected health, they do not save money. Various lifestyle and early childhood interventions, however, may both save money and improve health.
Second, preventive measures, including medical and lifestyle measures, are heterogeneous in their value, both across measures and within measure, across individuals. As a result, generalizations in everyday discourse about the value of prevention can be overly broad.
Third, health insurance coverage for medical preventive measures generally should be more extensive than coverage for the treatment of a medical condition, though full coverage of preventive services is not necessarily optimal
Well, and Joseph Newhouse says:
At one time, it was common to hear arguments that clinical preventive services were not insurable because they were “not a random variable and hence not an ‘insurable risk’” (Zweifel and Breyer 1997). Zweifel and Breyer give the example that “it is hardly conceivable that a health insurer would ever cover expenditure on items such as . . . atomizers that help to prevent respiratory disorders;” a similar point could be made about a flu shot or mammography. There are, however, both economic efficiency and behavioral arguments for many preventive measures.
It may be arguments, but not so much incentives in private insurance market. For example, why vaccines have been bought by governments?. That's all. A misguided article.
