Work and the endownment effect

People — wait, not people, but academics and policy wonks — have been talking about “nudges” for a few years now, with Cass Sunstein (who I think works for Biden now) being one of the big names in that space. Here’s an interview with a woman who went to Yale, worked for Obama, worked for Google, and now has a podcast under Malcolm Gladwell’s umbrella. (Link.) If you can find a more woke path through your 20s and 30s than Yale, Obama, Google, and Gladwell, good luck. That’s the quad-fecta.

I respect this woman because, well, that’s some pedigree, and because in this article she notes that the hardest thing about humanity is changing people’s minds, due to how ingrained beliefs are. Absolutely true. I have said this in other blogs, but I live near people in Texas who, if I built a time machine and took them back to the moment of Obama’s birth, they would claim “We are in Kenya.” I would show them we are in Hawaii and they would say “No, Kenya.” Belief is everything to people. At some level, it’s all you have and much of what you can control. Narrative and belief structure is incredibly powerful. That’s why it’s so comical that we claim to live in a “data-driven” world, when we really live in a belief-driven one.

Here’s the woman in question describing a program she ran under Obama for vets:

“We had to stay within the fixed program costs, and…