Editor's Note: Thanks for the many kind notes on the return of the faiV last week. Let's see if I can get back in the swing of things. I am still interested in a) thoughts on how best to share the faiV, b) anything you see that should go into the faiV. So please share. Oh, and you have to read, then watch, to the end to get the Edition joke.
- Tim Ogden
1. The State of Behavioral Economics
I'll start out this item by noting my own uncertainty on this topic (a behavioral nudge!)—I'm genuinely unsure about what I should think about what is real and what is not in the world of behavioral economics. In the 10+ years I've now been hanging out in the world of economics research, I've eagerly consumed Predictably Irrational, Nudge and Thinking Fast and Slow. I've gotten excited about the possibility that small, cheap changes to the design of products and messages could have big impacts. But I've also watched with no small amount of schadenfreude as some of the core findings in behavioral science and economics have been found seriously wanting, whether from outright fraud, data manipulation, or poor research practices.
The You Seem Vaguely Familiar Edition
Editor's Note: You're not hallucinating, experiencing a weird time warp or flashback. But maybe I am.
- Tim Ogden
1. What the hell?
Yes, this is a new faiV, for the first time since [checks notes; checks notes again; checks calendar on current date; checks calendar on current date and year; hangs head in shame and disbelief] June, 2021. So, you (and I) could hardly be blamed for asking "What the hell happened?" The answer is complicated but mostly prosaic: my time has been focused on a seven-country financial diaries study, and three or four other field work projects that we've been running or participating in. But it's also that the world that the faiV existed in and was a part of has changed a lot. Here I don't mean the pandemic etc., at least not directly. I mean that the world of information creation and sharing has changed dramatically. As we contemplated reviving the faiV at various times in 2022 and 2023, we kept running into barriers like: what platform should we be using? What's getting through email filters now? How do we gather the information to write a faiV? Where are people posting now?
