Addictive Blogger Statistics

Despite being well-acquainted with behavioural economics I am not immune to being influenced by it. Google Blogger, through which GuruHogg exists, provides live updates on the number of people reading GuruHogg - it is addictive! I promise that if it weren't for the live statistics I wouldn't be too bothered how many people read GuruHogg, but with live stats it is a completely different matter...

12th September

You can see which are the most popular posts. You can even see which country readers are from:

This changed my behaviour. I quickly moved from being ambivalent about readership to being addicted to the stats. A simple 'nudge' made all the difference. By constantly giving me updates about how many people read GuruHogg I became interested in increasing that number. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I actually suspect that thinking about what people read the most may have improved the posts I put up here. But I am trying to be less interested by the stats because it is not a driving motivation behind GuruHogg.

Anyway, I ramble. In conclusion, no one is immune from being nudged into different behaviour. Not even GuruHogg!

Religous Economists

Behavioural economics is about improving economics. But why do we want to improve economics? Why is economics important?

Tomas Sedlacek in The Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street (my current bedtime reading) provides the following answer:

"a strong faith in the beneficial effect of material progress is professed by a majority of the key figures of economic thought of our time. This why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth. Because care for the soul has been replaced by care for external things... economists have become key figures of great importance in our time... They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the promised land - paradise on Earth."

(p.49)

I am struggling to find good reasons why this might not be true...