roughly 90% in one case and about 15% in the other. on very consequential decisions people can be guided by those s people can be guided by the superficial aspects of the situation. do you think that what this tells you is that the government should be more active in trying to shape people s choices? what areas would you advocate more is done? well, you know, i think this is something that is actually happening today in the obama white house because you have a behavior economist who is in charge of regulation. and the focus there is consumer protection. it s making sure not only the things are disclosed, which everybody agrees, i mean that s the law, they have to be discloesd dosed but disclosed in a way na 0 accommodates the limitation of people. you don t think it interferes with the good functioning of a
i think there s a better than even chance there will be a naval incident between the chinese and either the vietnamese or the philippines. worse for the u.s. if it s philippines because they are a treaty ally. but it could be actually provoked by china. i m more with daniel. i see more signs of instability, seesawing between trying to control inflation but realizing they are choking off credit and going back and forth. it s quite possible if they really get into trouble and could be connected with the leadership fight that they would provoke something. they are going to try to keep heads down in 2012 precisely because of this leadership transition. i think they have every incentive not to create any waves in the south china sea or elsewhere. if they can possibly help it, i think they will try to keep things very calm with their neighbors until this leadership transition is out of the way. they may be provoked. arab spring. what countries are going to be clearly successful or cl
money considerations. a rather small amount of money on the scale of what a particle collider costs. do you worry the federal government is not funding basic science at the level it used to in the 1950s and 1960s? i worry we don t have a vision of how we re doing to continue funding it. i think for a long time america was the place where discoveries were made, at least my field. in particle physics. i visited a lab a european there saying we re better find a particle because they just weren t finding things in europe. they were all being found in america. it s clear the attention has shifted to europe, at least as far as the experiment goes. you re worried as you look forward into the future, america is losing faith in science. if you watch the republican primary debates, i think you ask them how many of them believe that evolution is, you know, a valid theory, i think there were maybe seven or eight people, one or two willing to say that.
that makes that happen? there are two things. one is something that happens in your mind, the association. for some reason that problem brings $0.10 to mind. the other thing is something that doesn t happen. you don t think. that s the key difference. if you wrote it out as an equation i found you don t you don t make a mistake. $0.10 and another dollar that comes to $1.20. they don t trick. there are interesting differences between the people that trick and people that don t. at harvard and princeton, half of the people, or over half in some cases make a mistake on that one. other universities, have to stand up for princeton, other universities it s worse. tell me this, is this a pattern that you detect in human behavior that there are some things people think fast about and some things they think slow about?
it s an association machine. when you think about this, does it make you feel the way in this economics is done, the way we think about economics is all wrong? because there is a sense in which what you re describing is the human capacity to really make false judgments all the time, to not know what is in your best rational self-interest. the idea that people are completely rational really is something very important, which is that the government has the responsibility to ensure disclosure. that people are given correct information when they interact in the market. it doesn t matter for a rational agent whether the print is small or large. it matters a lot for people with a lazy sort of system, lazy, slow thinking. they don t read the small print. none of us read the things that flash on the computer screen and