Dan Ariely Tries His Behavioral Economics X-Ray Vision on Obama

MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely has gone on record (video above) weighing the pros and cons of Barack Obama, thereby guaranteeing that someone will ask a cringe-inducing "joke" question about his preference of candidates during the Q&A after his talk at Town Hall tonight.

His studies show that people clearly make irrational mistakes, thus thwarting the expectations of standard economists and turning them into crabby people with shriveled souls. Yet, because we make them over and over again, we are, as his book title has it, Predictably Irrational. Our irrational behaviors have structural origins, Ariely says, comparing the situation to our eyesight. We may know that a change in color is an optical illusion, but we can't think our way out of seeing the mistake. Same with our regularly-programmed screw-ups.

Here's the "con" on Obama, for those of you who can't watch videos whenever you feel like it:

So, what does this say about Obama? In my estimation one of the charms of Obama is that we know so little about him (we definitely know less about him than about Clinton), and I assume that this lack of knowledge, coupled with our tendency to fill in the missing information in an over-optimistic way is one of the reasons for the Obama love fest. It also means that we should expect a hard and disappointing awakening as we learn more about Obama and realize that he is not the super-human we now imagine him to be.

7:30pm // Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave // Admission $5 at the door