The language of rationality is closely tied to ideas from behavioural science, economics and nudge theory, but how does it shape the way we make public policy and should we be casting it under a critical eye? Read this post to find out more.
Planning our retirement is an endeavour we need to undertake sooner or later. A well thought-out pension plan must be able to ensure our well-being during a long period of professional inactivity. However, a striking finding is that people do not save enough for their retirement. They have difficulties to design a retirement plan tailored to their needs and end up with an insufficient pension income and an impoverished lifestyle. Behavioural economics has pointed out some of the problems that affect retirement planning.
By Tim Gohmann While the media focused on Donald Trump’s denigration of women, war heroes, Latinos and Muslims, Trump was building not just support but commitment from his core target — working-class, non-college–educated white males — to get out and vote. What was juvenile and embarrassing to the intellectual was the “silver bullet” that [...]
The BIAS project completed 15 randomized controlled trials of behavioral interventions in child care, child support, and work support programs. This article summarizes the “SIMPLER” framework of behavioral concepts and shares examples of how these concepts were used in BIAS interventions.
By Julian Jamison One of the World Bank’s flagship publications is the World Development Report, which highlights a different policy-relevant topic every year – often paving the way for novel work on that topic. The latest (2015) report, entitled “Mind, Society, and Behavior” and co-directed by Karla Hoff and Varun Gauri, focused on using [...]
On 15th September 2015, President Obama issued an executive order mandating US government agencies employ behavioural insights to enhance their work (read a White House-authored Fact Sheet on the order). On the face of it, this is an unqualified good for behavioural science. Yet Presidential Terms are short, and the current one has only a year to run. Whether such an executive order will have the impact it should will depend on commentary and promises made in the febrile atmosphere of a US election. Political support is valuable, but political polarisation can mean bureaucratic paralysis. This post takes a brief glance at bureaucratic success in the US, EU, UN and UK.
By Tom Wein Behaviour depends on context - and conflict is the most extreme context of all. There have been a series of attempts, of varying value, to understand behaviour in that scenario - by academics, governments and NGOs seeking to predict and reduce conflict, and by combatants seeking an advantage. In recent years, [...]
When it comes to behaviour, politics is never absent, argued Mike Kelly, at a UCL Centre for Behaviour Change seminar on policy and evidence.
