“Decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and CFOs prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.
Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.”
This is from an excellent article by John Tierney in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine.
I think self-control problems constitute one of the most interesting areas of research in the social sciences. I will always remember my introduction to the topic, in Ted O’Donoghue’s graduate behavioral economics class — one of the first taught anywhere — in 2003. The biggest revelation in terms of how to think about self-control problems came when Ted explained that one’s present-day self did not have the same preferences for the future as one’s future self. This was the basis of his widely cited 1999 paper on procrastination with Matt Rabin titled “Doing It Now or Later.”
The bottom line appears to be that humans only have a limited supply of willpower, both at a given point in time and over time.
Some Thoughts on Food Prices and Famine
Tom Murphy had an interesting post on food prices last week in which he discussed how food prices remain very high, but how they are not the only culprit behind the current famine in the Horn of Africa. At the end of his post, Tom wrote that he hoped I would comment on the role of food prices and agriculture.
Sadly, I have very little to add. In June, the price of food was 39 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
But given that the FAO’s food price index encompasses five categories of food, this statistic masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity. Looking at the five categories that make up the food price index, we get the following price increases: