I recently was reminded of this article

[conuly]

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734141432/what-dropping-17-000-wallets-around-the-globe-can-teach-us-about-honesty

Every time I think about it, I wonder if all economists are amoral jerks, or just the ones involved in this study.

"People were more likely to return a wallet when it contained a higher amount of money," Cohn says. "At first we almost couldn't believe it and told him to triple the amount of money in the wallet. But yet again we found the same puzzling finding."

There's nothing puzzling about this finding! Obviously you're going to make more of an effort to return a wallet that has money in it instead of a wallet with no money in it! Obviously you're going to try harder if it's a lot of money rather than just a couple of bucks! Because most people aren't total assholes! Heck, even assholes usually have some standards of basic human decency.

I don't understand how we can trust economists to have any understanding of how money works when, if articles in the popular press are any indication, they have no understanding of how humans work. Like, fundamentally, I don't know how they were surprised by this result. Years after first reading that article, I still do not get it.

Comments

[zesty_pinto]

I might be too Twitter online, but the economists I usually see on there like to believe that more housing will lead to less homelessness. Forget that most new housing is also catered towards high-end luxury units and what low-fund units are available will only cover a tiny fraction of this. It pretty much irks me, moreso now that housing has reached a point where it's no longer economically viable to own.