Tag: Life

The Behavioral Economics of Leftover Pizza

Jared would be proud of me. Whenever I grab lunch to eat in my office, I head over to Subway for a six-inch Veggie Delite with provolone. Just 280 calories. Yum.

Depending on my mood and workload, I usually gobble down my Subway lunch between 12:15 and 1:00pm.

On Monday, though, I started eating at 11:22.

Like any good economist, I asked myself why. What inspired me to eat an hour early? Did I face some new incentive or new constraint that caused me to eat sooner?

No, I didn’t. Monday was a normal day. No new incentives, no new constraints, no other changes.

Except for one other thing: I brought lunch from home. Two slices of leftover BBQ chicken pizza. Also yum.

Small slices - this pizza will go far

If you are a well-trained neoclassical economist, your initial inclination will be to search for a subtle link between these facts. Perhaps cold pizza tastes better at 11:22 than an hour later. But that’s not true. Perhaps I ate early because I saved on travel time to Subway. No dice; Subway is only 90 seconds away.

Perhaps these facts are unrelated, a mere happenstance. No again. From long experience I can tell you that I always eat lunch earlier when I bring it from home than when I get it at Subway. It’s a law of nature. Indeed, I have sometimes eaten lunch as early as 10:30 on days I brought it to work with me. This is particularly likely if I put the lunch in my desk, rather than in the refrigerator down the hall.

The explanation for this behavior is, of course, psychological or, in the lingo of economics, behavioral. My lizard brain excels at knowing when food is near. And in getting me to eat it. Millions of years of natural selection didn’t favor creatures that wait an extra hour or two before they grab lunch. If the food is at hand, eat it now.

So every time I bring lunch to work, I set off a battle of wills. My rational, patient, busy self who likes to eat around 12:30, and my primordial brain that wants to eat when the eating is good.

That old brain has, if you will, the upper hand. It knows how to get what it wants. All it needs to do is remind me that food is near. I often feel as though lunch is calling to me from my desk drawer or, slightly more faintly, from the refrigerator. But that’s really the lizard brain doing its thing.

Ignoring that voice takes willpower. But that saps the mental energy I need to focus on my work. To shut my lizard brain up, I have only one choice – to get lunch over with. So on Monday I happily started in on my six slices of pizza at 11:22, washed them down with some iced green tea, and got back to work.

Perfectly rational behavior, I should note, given my urges, yet irrational as well measured against my “real” eating preferences. So it goes in the battle between our inner selves.

But wait. Didn’t I say I brought two slices of BBQ chicken pizza from home? How did I end up eating six?

Don’t worry, I didn’t steal a co-worker’s pizza from the refrigerator (if such thefts are a problem for you, please see this post).

Instead, I played along with another feature of my lizard brain. Eating six slices of pizza is much more filling than eating two. So I divided each of the two large pizza slices into three smaller ones. I then got to enjoy eating six slices, not just two.

I realize that sounds kind of insane. My rational, neoclassical side agrees. But it works. Perfectly rational given my urges, yet irrational as well. Such is life.

Note: Pizza photo from Chocolate on my Cranium.

Incentives and Property Rights, Dead Raccoon Edition

It seems like only yesterday that I met Rocky. Probably because it was yesterday.

Our smallest cat Caramel was staring intently upward. Following his gaze, I spied Rocky tucked between two branches high in the silver maple near our deck.

Rocky didn’t look well. Raccoons aren’t usually out and about at 3:00 on a sunny afternoon. Lounging in the sun isn’t their thing.

Esther and I thought about calling the animal control authorities–rabies is not unheard of around here–but decided to wait until morning to see if Rocky looked better. No point harassing (or worse) the poor guy if he’s just an eccentric raccoon who wanted some sun.

A higher authority came calling overnight, though, and Esther found Rocky motionless under our deck.

Wild animals are one of my domestic responsibilities, so it fell to me to go poke Rocky with a stick to check his status. Result: deceased.

So what do you do with a dead raccoon?

This is precisely the sort of question at which the web excels. Sure enough, “dead raccoon” generates more than 30,000 hits on Google. But they boil down to only three flavors of advice: (1) Do it yourself, (2) Make it someone else’s problem, or (3) Turn it into a media sensation by claiming you’ve discovered a monster.

#3 wasn’t really an option – Rocky was clearly a raccoon — so I tried the nice version of #2, calling Montgomery County Animal Control to see if they handle deceased raccoons. No dice. If the deceased is on your property, it’s your responsibility – bag him and put in the trash was the advice. If he were on a county road, however, that would be a different matter. Then the county would pick him up.

Fair enough. Property rights ought to convey responsibilities as well as ownership. I’m good with that. But I couldn’t miss the implied incentive. If I were so inclined, I could simply pick Rocky up, suitably attired in latex gloves etc. (me, not him), and deposit him by the curb. I suspect such littering is a popular strategy. People do respond to incentives after all. See, e.g., Stacey Robinsmith’s dead raccoon trilogy.

Being a respecter of property rights and embracer of responsibility, however, I went with option #1. Here are some tips if you ever find yourself in a similar circumstance:

  • Fortune favors the swift. Rigor mortis is your friend. Just trust me on this.
  • Raccoons have claws; use extra bags. Several cheery folks recommended putting Rocky in a trash bag. Well, his claws sliced right through that when I placed him inside. I ended up going with a full-on Babushka doll solution – five nested bags. That might have been a teensy bit excessive. But I suspect the garbage collectors will appreciate it.
  • Burial would, of course, be a more natural solution. But given the number of dogs, cats, and other critters that roam the neighborhood and dig better than I do, that seemed like a bad idea with Rocky’s suspicious cause of death.
RIP Rocky.

I Found What I Was Looking For …

Just back from eight days in southeast Alaska. I won’t torment you with too much of a travelogue (my wife and I have another blog for that; so far it covers the first day of the trip).

But I will note that we did find puffins, glaciers, and humpback whales, as wished in my last post. And what about grizzly bears? Well, we got those too, albeit with an asterisk. Turns out that the salmon-eating coastal bears are called brown bears, while their inland cousins are the grizzlies. Learn something new every day.

For bonus points, we also found salmon-eating black bears:

My New Gig

I am happy to announce that I will become the director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center on May 17. TPC has established a remarkable record of nonpartisan research on tax and fiscal policy issues over the past eight years, and I am honored to be joining their team.

Here’s the press release from the Urban Institute announcing the appointment:

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 13, 2010 — Donald Marron, who served as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and as acting director of the Congressional Budget Office, will become the director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center May 17.

Marron was a council member in 2008 and 2009. Earlier, he was the deputy director (2005–2007) and acting director (2006) of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Marron’s White House experience includes stints as a senior economic adviser and consultant to the Council of Economic Advisers (2007–08) and as its chief economist (2004–05). He was with Congress’s Joint Economic Committee from 2002 to 2004, first as the Senate minority’s principal economist and later as the committee’s executive director and chief economist.

Marron succeeds Rosanne Altshuler, who will be returning to Rutgers University after nearly two years with the Tax Policy Center. The eight-year-old center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, is the nation’s leading nonpartisan resource providing objective analyses, estimates, distributional tables, and facts about the federal tax system and proposals to modify it. Last year, Tax Policy Center researchers produced more than 50 reports and used their state-of-the-art tax model to generate over 500 sets of detailed tax estimates.

“Understanding and helping address the nation’s revenue problems require imaginative scholarship, crisp communication skills, and an insider’s knowledge about how good public policy can be made. Donald brings that and much more to the Tax Policy Center,” said Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute.

Since leaving his White House post, Marron has been a visiting professor of public policy at Georgetown University and an economic consultant.

Marron, who holds a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business from 1994 to 1998. He is a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center Debt Reduction Task Force and served as a member of the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board.

The Tax Policy Center’s leadership also includes two co-directors, William Gale, the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy at the Brookings Institution, and Eric Toder, an Institute fellow at the Urban Institute.

The Urban Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research and educational organization that examines the social, economic, and governance challenges facing the nation. It provides information, analyses, and perspectives to public and private decisionmakers to help them address these problems and strives to deepen citizens’ understanding of the issues and trade-offs that policymakers face.

The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and innovative policy solutions. For more than 90 years, Brookings has analyzed current and emerging issues and produced new ideas that matter—for the nation and the world.

P.S. I am also happy to report that I will continue my teaching at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute next year. Should be a fun and busy year.

The Wonders of Costa Rica

On Thursday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof had a wonderful piece about Costa Rica, home of “The Happiest People“) (ht Catie).

Kristof reports that Costa Ricans are the happiest people in the world, at least according to three broad surveys. Why? Kristof offers the following hypothesis:

What sets Costa Rica apart is its remarkable decision in 1949 to dissolve its armed forces and invest instead in education. Increased schooling created a more stable society, less prone to the conflicts that have raged elsewhere in Central America. Education also boosted the economy, enabling the country to become a major exporter of computer chips and improving English-language skills so as to attract American eco-tourists.

I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.

In Costa Rica, rising education levels also fostered impressive gender equality so that it ranks higher than the United States in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. This allows Costa Rica to use its female population more productively than is true in most of the region. Likewise, education nurtured improvements in health care, with life expectancy now about the same as in the United States — a bit longer in some data sets, a bit shorter in others.

I like this hypothesis, but being an empirical guy, I should note another possibility: maybe one of the keys to happiness is whatever allowed Costa Rica to eliminate its military in the first place?

Over the holidays, I did some field research (aka vacation) in Costa Rica and am happy to report that the area we visited (the Guanacaste province) is indeed lovely. I won’t torment you with my travelogue here–my wife and I have another blog for that–but here are a couple photos of the local fauna: