Freaknomics

[Name of the Writer]

[Name of Instructor]

[Subject]

[Date]

Podcast Discussion

In Praise of Incrementalism

One of the key things that is being talked about during the course of this narrative is that how important it is for a person to make sure that they have incrementalism attitude towards things. What it implies is that the effort has to be made by the people to ensure that they innovate in the manner that rather than bringing about wholesale changes in something, the idea must be to make sure that they should always keep on trying little value additions that would eventually ensure long term value is added into the premises of the project. One of the ways through which the management of the increment is supposed to be taken care off is that the people and specially the understanding has to be there on the part of the economists in a sense that how all these things are needed to be kept in mind at the broader level. With the advent of the Silicon Valley, effort has to be made by all the broader stakeholders to ensure that there has to be an effort that how the structure has to be there in terms of the way these things are supposed to be happening. The problem with this thinking is that there is a sense and insight among the economists is that how marginal utility is supposed to be applied to the different concepts at the given point of time. Due to that, at times, there is difficulty in terms of how it is going to be made sure that the value preposition is going to be allocated to the decision making premise at the given instance and how the management of the resources is needed to be done at the broader level at the particular point of time with respect to making the right decision. The other key element that has to be taken care off in this regard is that it has to be made sure that sufficient training and evaluation has to be carried out before any incremental effort is being made. With better knowledge, it can be made sure that all the corresponding elements of the data management are being taken care off in the right manner. Not only that, it would go a long way towards making sure that all the respective elements of healthcare are needed to be taken care off before such decision can be made.

The Folly of Prediction

This podcast goes into the great length discussing about the fact that how being in the sense of denial about future is something that is not the part of the human nature and how at times there is a deliberate effort on the part of the humans to make sure that they are predicting the future. The other thing that the podcast though tends to point out is that how humans are not very good when the determination of the prediction of the human future is needed to be carried out at the respective point of time. From financial experts, to economists and to political analyst, there is a tendency among humans to make sure that they tend to speculate about the future and how things are going to end. One of the key things though is that people tend to be quite bad at these predictions and are not able to formulate the right way forward with regards to this whole thing. So, there is a need to ensure that people either tend to limit their tendency to rave about the future, or there is a need to make an effort that they become better at predicting future. One of the key things that can be seen from this narrative is the fact that how futile the efforts are of the people who are trying to have a semblance of control as far as the way future is going to work out. They have a fair idea that they cannot be in the position to control with regards to what is going to be happening in the future, but the fact remains that nevertheless, they have kept on with their effort. But there must be some motivation on their part to do this thing. The motivation in my opinion is the future of unknown that the people have developed in their lives and how at times, the uncertainty about future is not considered to be good in our society. People these days would like to ensure that they have a degree of control with regards to what they say and communicate to the other people. And with that controlling nature, comes the premise that they would like to have control over their future as well and how this whole thing is going to be panning out at the given point of time. So, this fear of unknown is something that is needed to be controlled. In the Wall Street Journal survey, if you look at the extreme outcomes, either extremely bad outcomes or extremely good outcomes, you see that those people who correctly predicted either extremely good or extremely bad outcomes, they’re likely to have overall lower level of accuracy. So a prediction market gives people an incentive, a clear personal incentive, to be right and not wrong. Equally important, it gives people an incentive to shut up when they don’t know, which is often a problem with many of our other institutions. So in most of these prediction markets what we want is the few people who know the best to speak up.