Miles Kimball

A couple of months ago, I spoke to a very large room full of business economists about negative interest rate policy at the 2019 annual conference of the National Association of Business Economists. The conference was in Denver. My plenary talk was between a panel discussion involving Jim Poterba right before and a talk by the Esther George,...

This is a tweetstorm I did. Permalink

In the environment of evolutionary adaptation on the African savannah or African coast, human beings reliably survived to become our ancestors only if they could survive periods without much of any food. Thus, human beings are designed by natural selection (in the extended sense of “designed” used by Daniel Dennett’s in his book Darwin’s...

This is done by doing all the work, often at lower stakes, before. The core courses are available to audit, take somewhere else, self-study etc. before you start grad school. For me there were a lot of important things that made little sense on the first two exposures. 2/

In The Federalist Papers, #2, John Jay (writing, as Alexander Hamilton did in #1, under the pen name “Publius”) begins by appealing to the idea of America to argue for the importance of the thirteen states staying united. He circles back at the end of #2 to that theme of union, flattering his audience that their belief most of them have that...

Thanks to a sense of intuitive psychology, he said, we recognize that other people have intentions and goals and take actions to fulfill them, despite the fact that we can’t read their thoughts. “And the interesting thing about these intuitive theories is they can explain the world as it is, but they can also explain these other worlds,” Ullman said. “So even though a fictional character might look very different from us, and they might have very different goals than us … we can still...

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The following quotations about gratitude are my favorites from the 50 at this website:“No one who achieves success does so without the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.” – Alfred North Whitehead“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he...

Last year Ethan Bernstein’s research hit a deep cultural nerve. “I never would have imagined I’d be a person to get hate mail,” said the Harvard Business School associate professor in organizational behavior, whose offending paper, authored with Harvard graduate Stephen Turban ’17 threw a bucket of cold water on the hot trend of open office layouts. The study, “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration,” concluded that the new configurations actually reduced interaction,...

A large share of articles on diet and health read as if good health were people’s only objective. But almost all of us eat things we believe are bad for us because they are very tasty. I have done my best to convince you, my readers, that on any ordinary day, sugar just isn’t worth it, despite how delicious it is. What about red and processed...