I am a member of BzzAgent, a recommendation-driven marketing agency. The deal is that BzzAgents (like me) get samples of products, which, if they like, they refer to their friends.
The first campaign I have been assigned was for Seeds of Change chocolate, to my wife’s delight. I was sent samples of Orange and Fig (odd but lovely) and Apricot and Cashew (less strange, more tasty) and some discount vouchers. It’s a great promotional idea, and great chocolate. I have passed on some vouchers to friends and family, who are suitably grateful. You can check out the Seeds of Change range here, but for some reason, they don’t mention the chocolate. Surely it can’t be a secret?
I am watching Tyler Cowen on an old video at Bloggingheads.TV – it’s great stuff!
Posted in Learning | Tagged religion, theology |
Jacqueline is “an evangelist for the serial comma”. Her article linked me to the following, from Wikipedia:
The Times once published an unintentionally humorous description of a Peter Ustinov documentary, noting that “highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.”
I think this is an area where intelligence and discretion use beats slavish convention.
I read an interesting piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times on government use of jargon. So I was amused to come back to work today and find the emergence of a new term in my burgeoning, post-holiday inbox:
phoenixed (verb): the process of having gone into bankruptcy to emerge stronger and more streamlined, e.g. General Motors, Chrysler
Posted in Living | Tagged jargon, work |
‘A Liberal Christian’ writes about Bioshock, The Incredibles and Ayn Rand:
“Bioshock” and “The Incredibles” show two visions of objectivism. “Bioshock” glorifies this vision before burning it to the ground, and quite rapidly at that. “The Incredibles,” on the other hand,” simply glorifies it. Yet regardless of what these works have to say, they remain some of my favorites of all time, and I hope they will be for you too.
More here.
While new technologies such as GPS satellite tracking could have provided a more accurate minute-by-minute update on the planes location, not all planes are equipped, and there is no requirement for them to be. Flight Wisdom
That a four year old plane doesn’t have GPS when most four year old executive saloons do strikes me as odd.
There is more than a passing resemblance between the cover of Jo Rees’ new book Platinum and the covers of Michel Houellebecq’s and Platform. Same designer? Same model?
Posted in Living | Tagged advertising, books |
One of the most illuminating insights from the study of economics is that of man as a rational maximiser of utility. Putting aside the valid quirks of organisational limitation and bounded rationality, inherent bias and behavioural economics, the idea that people do what they do because it works for them is very powerful. It’s also very democratic and empowering. People don’t do things you think of as bad or wrong because they are naive or foolish, they do it because, for them, it makes sense.
Treating people as rational means giving them credit to know what’s best for themselves, rather than adopting paternalist policies. If you want to change behaviour (itself a dubious objective requiring much caution) you have to do more than simply educate people. Education only changes behaviour when there was a lack of information before. If there was no dearth of information, education is just the annoying imposition of another viewpoint. It will have little impact except to waste money and annoy those being ‘educated’.
If you really want to change behaviour, give people credit for knowing their own minds, don’t tell them what to think, but change the incentives. This sometimes offers radically different policy solutions.
This theme has recurred a couple of times in the last week: once when examining UK government policy on teenage pregnancy (as part of my MPA studies) and once when reading an article about the book Portfolios of the Poor in The Economist. In the former case, I was struck that government policy both aims to make life better for teenage mothers – providing them with better facilities, better housing, better job and educational opportunities – while also trying to decrease the numbers of teenage mothers through education. Lisa Arai makes a good case that this doesn’t conform to a rational model, where teenage girls have children because that offers them a better life option. In the latter case, people living in poverty have been shown not to be financially naive spendthrifts, but highly sophisticated, rational consumption-smoothers. Applying rational models to these policy challenges produces very different solutions.
In what other areas would assuming rational behaviour make a huge policy difference?
Out of interest, this is the effect of a link from Marginal Revolution on your blog traffic. I’m not entirely sure why Tyler linked to me linking to Wehr in the World, linking to his own comments, but I guess it’s an example of economizing your PR. Trail, monitor, link.
The economist, academic, author and serial non-exec John Kay and the BBC Business reporter Peter Day came to speak at a work event last week. I’m a big John Kay fan, having read most of his books and columns. However, this was the first time that I’d met him. He didn’t disappoint, except for sounding less Scottish than I’d imagined he would.
John’s best line, in my opinion, was going further than asking whether businesses should engage in ‘corporate social responsibility’ to actually ask by what right they did this – recognising that their choices for charitable causes may not be the same as their customers’ or shareholders’. This has stuck with me, not least because I walk past a branch of bath-bomb outlet Lush (complete with TRAINS NOT PLANES! window poster) on my way to and from work.
Peter Day, on the other hand, I have never particularly taken to. He seemed much more qualified to ask questions than to answer them. This makes him both a good choice for a business reporter and a poor choice of panel member. However, to give him credit, he gave a good answer to a question from the floor about the role of the media in the current crisis, staunchly defending Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor who seems to be unfairly loathed for having the audacity to do his job well while being in the posession of a slightly odd voice.
