After reading with interest your plan to start exercising last Christmas (by giving to charity if you didn’t meet your goals), I’d be obliged if you could offer an opinion on a similar scheme I have concocted. Wine is the problem. I drink too much of the glorious stuff, and am unable to convince myself that doing so is unhealthy.

Your idea of giving to charity would not work with me. I’m uncharitable, I’m afraid, and would probably rather lie than give my earnings away. Here is my alternative. Each month I will deposit the total amount I would spend on wine in the family joint bank account. If I want a bottle, it must come out of this account, but whatever is left at the end of the month is to be given to my wife and children.

This appears to be an excellent solution; in my view, the guilt of taking something away from my beloved wife and children is far greater than taking from myself. Do you agree?
DW

Dear DW,

In classical economic theory, your scheme would be useless. Every pound spent on the demon drink is always a pound unavailable to your wife and children, and it should make no difference which bank account you put it in.

But Richard Thaler, a leading behavioural economist, has a theory of “mental accounting” that supports your plan. We do attach different labels to different pounds: this one is for my pension, that one is slush money. And Thaler has discovered that those labels make a difference to the way we behave.

Your scheme may well work, then. But like all commitment strategies, there is a risk that it will backfire, and you end up with the worst of all worlds. You may find yourself unable to stop drinking, feel more guilty than ever, and demonstrate unambiguously to your family that you love booze more than you love them. You evidently like to live dangerously: good luck.

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At a recent conference on experimental economics, John List, professor of economics at the university of chicago, shared a beer with other delegates and opined, “I think I used to be the most hated guy in this field.” His drinking companions jovially assured him that he still was.

So why the sharp elbows from his colleagues? Quite simply, List’s attention to the nuts and bolts of experimental method has demolished some of the most cherished results in the cool field of behavioural economics.

Consider a class of experimental games much cited by those who dispute the classical model of rational economic choice. There is the “ultimatum” game, in which player A (Anna) is given $10 and asked how much, if any, she proposes to offer to player B (Bernard). Bernard can accept the offer, but if he rejects it, neither Anna nor Bernard get anything. If Anna and Bernard were rational income-maximisers, Anna would offer one cent and Bernard would accept it as better than nothing. This never happens, so Anna and Bernard are not rational income-maximisers.

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Behavioural economics, the application of psychological insights to economic theories and problems, has been growing in influence for decades. But with the publication of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, it seems to have struck policy primetime – and as with many once-good ideas, it has mutated. I recently attended a meeting at one government department at which the conversation rarely strayed from the question of how the latest marketing tricks could be used to get citizens to behave as the nanny state preferred.

At a seminar for the UK’s government economic service on applying behavioural economics to public policy, I therefore expected to be the lone voice of caution – especially since fellow panellists included Dan Goldstein, a psychologist, and Pete Lunn, author of Basic Instincts, a popularisation of behavioural ideas. I was wrong: while everyone was impressed with the potential contribution of psychology and neuroscience to economics, they all seemed queasy about how quickly behavioural economics has appeared as a policy panacea.

Lunn began by displaying Poggendorff’s optical illusion, in which a diagonal line passes behind a vertical block, creating the impression of two separate but parallel lines. Thaler and Sunstein have a similar optical illusion at the beginning of chapter one of Nudge. Their point: the human brain has evolved to take short cuts in the way it processes information, short cuts that sometimes lead us astray. Hence, sometimes we could use a little help in nudging us towards the correct decision when we make mistakes.

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Samantha, my PA, is so very unreliable. For example, she failed to pass on your invitation to feature as a responding correspondent in your recent “Dear Undercover Economist” plug article. However, she does have a fantastic pair of, er … feet. Should I fire her?
Bob Casablanca

Dear Mr Casablanca,

Much depends on your line of business. In Mel Brooks’s masterpiece, The Producers, the crooked Broadway magnate Max Bialystock hires a blonde bombshell, Ulla, whose secretarial skills consist solely of the ability to pick up the telephone and intone, “Bialystock unt Bloom, Good tag por day.” She can, however, dance. Bialystock is happy enough, which is understandable given that the sole aim of his production is to go bankrupt.

It is unlikely that you share Bialystock’s aims, but if you work for a large organisation, you may share his contempt for his shareholders. Your PA’s incompetence largely disadvantages them, while her aesthetic appeal – which an economist might call a “non-pecuniary benefit” – is enjoyed by you alone.

Naturally you have to ensure that your PA’s failings are not so disastrous as to damage your own career, but that should be manageable, especially if you continue blaming her whenever something goes wrong.

If you own a large stake in the business, the trade-off is more painful. Samantha will be costing you money. I cannot advise you as to the right course of action, since I don’t know how much money you have, how much you want, and how “fantastic” she really is. I would simply note that you can always look for other options. You could hire a second PA to work in parallel with Samantha. Or you could seek out a PA who offers the best of everything. It cannot be impossible to find an assistant who is both effective and attractive.

Questions to economist@ft.com

My colleague Michael Peel has a new book out, “A Swamp Full of Dollars“. I’m looking forward to reading it, but it has rave reviews from Louis Theroux, Joseph Stiglitz and Michela Wrong - can’t be bad.

In the late 18th century, Johann Gottlieb Beckmann, a Saxon forester, hit upon the idea of systematically surveying Saxony’s forests. He dispatched trained surveyors into a tract of woodland to hammer nails into every tree. Each man carried nails of five different colours, enabling them to grade trees by size. When every tree was marked and the men emerged, Beckmann counted the coloured nails left over to calculate the exploitable resources.

Efforts to measure what goes on in the economy have a chequered history. The political scientist James C. Scott, who unearthed the example of Beckmann, points out that forest planners tried to conform to Beckmann’s theories, spacing with architectural precision trees of the same breed and age. The resulting forests were vulnerable to high winds and to disease.

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Suppose we plot my preference curve for a man as units of “good boy” traits (thoughtfulness, caring, emotional support) versus “bad boy” traits (adventurousness, sexual attractiveness). My boyfriend, whom I’ve been dating for a year, would come up very high on the former and low on the latter. This situation was fine for me before, but now I’m having a hard time being attracted to him and I wonder if I want to continue the relationship. Has my preference curve simply shifted more in favour of the “bad boy” traits? I know the one year is a sunk cost, but I’m reluctant to give up so easily on such a nice man.
Beatrice

Dear Beatrice,

It is a pleasure to receive a letter that packs so much consumer choice theory into so little space – although I sense a creeping confusion in your question. You speak of a preference curve expressing a trade-off between good boy and bad boy traits. (By the way, I recommend the term “indifference curve”, both because it is technically more precise, and because it makes you sound sexy and unavailable.) Yet you do not specify your budget constraint. You act as if you can have a thoughtful boyfriend or a sexy boyfriend, but not both. I wonder why you think this is true. Perhaps you should hang around with economists more.

Let us take your problem at face value, though, and assume that you cannot simply find a man who has it all. If so, the problem you describe is familiar enough: that of diminishing returns. Only little children want to eat their favourite food for every meal, or listen to the same story again and again. For most of us, variety is the spice of life. So dump your boyfriend and find a rogue. Date him for a year. It is bound to end in tears, and then you can find yourself another ugly, tedious – yet thoughtful – man. They are not in short supply.

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When the planes hit the twin towers eight years ago this week, I wasn’t a journalist at all, but a business economist living in London. It was my job to look at what was happening to the economy and figure out what it might imply and what might happen next. Alongside the shock experienced by anyone watching the television coverage, I felt bewilderment. It seemed that the sheer physical destruction and the deaths of so many highly skilled people would have to disrupt the running of the US economy – one of Osama bin Laden’s declared objectives. But with no close precedents, it was hard to say by how much.

Early estimates suggested that the economic cost alone might be grievous. The International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook, published three months after the attacks, thought that losses to the US economy could total $75bn. Others thought the economic damage would be greater. Robert E. Looney, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, estimated in 2002 that direct costs exceeded $27bn but the effect of the disruption might total $500bn. A study by the New York City Comptroller’s Office estimated that the city alone would lose a cumulative $58bn between 2001 and 2004 as a result of the attacks.

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