Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Altruism

Two housekeeping notes: First, the Financial Tip of the Week is taking Thanksgiving week off. Second, I am currently at the AFCPE 2010 conference in Denver, so if you are in Denver for the conference and would like to meet, give me a call: 573-234-4268.

This week, I want to try something different. I want to try sharing a short video I thought was very useful in exploring a difficult economic concept: altruism. Specifically, the video highlights the authors of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and their discussion of Levitt’s colleague, John List, and his experiments concerning altruism.

I also want to introduce you to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Art, and specifically, their RSA Animate videos. Their video productions combine audio from prominent lectures with animators who take the difficult ideas and create a visual explanation as the audio is played. My explanation does not do the video justice, so the link is below with some contextual links at the bottom if you’re interested in learning more.

The Video: http://bit.ly/cYc7O4

(Note: We are using a bit.ly link to measure the number of clickthroughs; if this is popular enough, we may consider suggesting another video about economics of personal finance that we think is worthy.)

Contextual Links:

Dictator Game

Ultimatum Game

Homo economicus

List, John A. “On the Interpretation of Giving in Dictator Games,” Journal of Political Economy, (2007), 115(3): 482-494.

Andrew Zumwalt, M.S.
Director of the MoTax Education Initiative
162 Stanley Hall
University of Missouri
Columbia MO 65211
ZumwaltA@missouri.edu

 

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