Flash Boys and Investors

Lengthy but interesting. I have thus far resisted writing anything about Michael Lewis’s book “Flash Boys”, in part because I typically don’t want to waste time on timely issues (instead focusing on topics that are of long-term interest), although it has been a real exercise in self-constraint because there have been few books published in…

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Behavioural economics and public policy

So popular is the field that behavioural economics is now often misapplied as a catch-all term to refer to almost anything that’s cool in popular social science, from the storycraft of Malcolm Gladwell, author ofThe Tipping Point (2000), to the empirical investigations of Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics (2005). Yet, as with any success story, the backlash has…

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The Fully Expressed Life

By “bliss” he meant that each person has skills and talents that collectively move us toward authentic self-expression. Bliss is our natural direction; it inspires the highest caliber of creativity and performance. Some people know the first time they put pen to page that they were born to write. Others feel most at home with law or…

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Your genes affect your betting behavior

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, National University of Singapore and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have shown that betting decisions in a simple competitive game are influenced by the specific variants of dopamine-regulating genes in a person’s brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical released by brain cells to signal other brain…

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