Se Adresseavisen,
http://www.adresseavisen.no/artikkel.awml?artikkelref=571143204
hvor det bl.a. sies
>
>Onsdag, 10. mai, 2000
>Fattigste region på økonomer
>
>Ingen landsdel har så få
>siviløkonomer som Trøndelag. Trøndelag er den eneste landsdelen som ikke har
>økonomiutdanning av høyere grad. Nå presenterer fagmiljøene ved NTNU og HIST
>en pakke med tre forskjellige mastergrads-studier for å rette opp skjevheten.
>...
>Trondheimsmiljøet har lenge kjempet for å få denne utdanningen og sjansen
>til å lykkes har neppe vært større. NTNU har allerede fått godkjenning for å
>starte et hovedfag med informasjonsteknologi og finans,
>...
>-.Dette vil øke studietilbudet i økonomi i Trondheim dramatisk. Ingen kan
>tilby tilsvarende i en og samme by, sier dekanus Jan Morten Dyrstad ved
>Fakultet for samfunnsvitenskap og teknologiledelse ved NTNU.
Hvorfor skal NTNUsatse på "finansøkonomi" når vi skal ha en
teknisk-naturvitenskapelig hovedprofil? Vi har jo allerede
sosialøkonomi og bedriftsøkonomi/-ledelse?
Jeg ser ikke hvorfor vi skal spre oss over til noe som de gjør
utmerket (hvis det er det rette uttrykket om dette) i Oslo og
Bergen.
Dessuten, noe mer spøkefullt, jeg synes det er en velsignelse at
Trondheim ikke har et stort miljø av denne typen. Se vedlagt artikkel
nedenfor.
Trond Andresen
*******************************************************************************
(fra THE ECONOMIST, 29 mai 1993)
HOW DO YOU MEAN, "FAIR"?
SOMEBODY, presumably Groucho Marx, once offered the following advice:
"The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake
those, you've got it made."
If you aren't smiling, you may be cut out for economics. Students of
the subject are trained to regard self-interest as the force that
decides economic choices. It is easy to imagine cases where cheating is
advantageous. The economist's view is: others will see that the logic
of the situation calls for cheating, so you had better cheat, too.
This idea pervades the literature. But here's a disturbing thing: it
may be having some effect. Nothing personal, but economists are an
unpleasant lot.
The evidence is in a new paper by a team of one economist and two
psychologists from Cornell University *. It reviews several
behavioural studies. In one, firstyear graduate students were asked
to take part in an experiment. They were given some money, and told to
divide it into two accounts, one "private", one "public". Money in
the private account was given to the student at the end of the ex-
periment. Money in the public account was pooled, multiplied by a
factor of more than one (the exact figure varied), and then divided
equally among all the students.
For society as a whole, as it were, the best thing is for the stu-
dents to put all their money into the public account. That creates the
biggest pie, which is then shared equally. But for each individual
student, the best thing is to put everything into the private account .
That way, you get back all your own stake, plus a full share of the
pool provided by the suckers. The study found that economics students
contributed, on average, 20% oftheir stakes to the public account.
Students of other subjects contributed 50%. The researchers then
asked the students to explain their actions: had they worried about
whether their decision had been fair? Nearly all the non-economists
said yes, they had worried. The response of the economists was
different:
More than one-third of Ihe economists either refused to answer the
question regarding what is fair, or gave very complex, uncodable
responses. It seems that the meaning of "fairness' in this context
was somewhat aÅien for this group. Those who did respond were much more
likely to say that little or no contribution was fair.
Another study involved a game played by an "allocator" and a
"receiver". The allocator was given $10 and asked to divide the cash
between himself and the receiver. The receiver could either accept the
division (in which case, both parties kept the sums proposed by the
allocator) or refuse it (in which case, both got nothing). Fairness
calls for an equal split. But what does self-interest tell the
allocator to do? Only a non-economist could ask. The answer is: keep
$9.99, and give the receiver one cent. The receiver will not refuse
because one cent is better than nothing (and self-interest does not
understand spite). Note also that the game was played just once for
each pair, so there was no reason for the receiver to refuse in the
hope of prompting a better offer next time. As before, the study
found that economics students "performed significantly more in accord
with the self-interest model" than non-economists.
Other studies have found the same. A survey asked 1,245 randomly
selected college professors how much they gave to charity each year.
About 9% of the economics professors gave nothing; the proportion
of professors in other disciplines giving nothing ranged between 1.1%
and 4.2% (despite generally lower incomes than the economists). The
median gift of economists to big charities such as the United Way and
viewer-supported public television was substantially smaller than the
median gift of non-economists.
The prisoner's dilemma a game where two players have to decide
whether to co-operate with each other or cheat has long been of great
interest to economists. The key feature is that for each player,
"defecting" secures the best outcome regardless of what the other
does. But if both players accept this logic and defect, they end up
worse off than if they had co-operated. The Cornell team conducted an
experiment involving 267 prisoner's dilemma games. Economics stu-
dents defected 60% of the time; noneconomists defected 39% of the
time. Does training in economics make you mean or is it just that
mean people are somehow attracted to economics? To find out, the
Cornell team did a further experiment, to see whether students became
more or less "honest" in a hypothetical situation, after doing some
economics. They compared three sets of students: the first took a
course in mainstream microeconomics, taught by an instructor with an
interest in industrial organisation and game theory; the second took a
similar course, but taught by a specialist on development in Maoist
China; the third took a placebo (astronomy). Across a range of
questions, the pattern was consistent: the first set contained the
largest proponion of students who became less honest; next came the
second set; honourably in the rear were the astronomers, with the
smallest proportion of students who became less honest.
Perhaps, then, there is a public interest in curbing the study of
economics. Or alternatively a conclusion that this column would
prefer to endorse economics needs to take psychology more
seriously. The fact is that people do co-operate more than the
self-interest model (useful though it is) seems to predict. As the
Cornell team points out, recent research sheds light on one reason
for this.
Imagine a world in which people move from one prisoner's dilemma to
the next (ie, the real world). If people can choose their "partners"
freely, and if honest types can spot each other in advance,
co-operators will be able to interact selectively with each other -
and will therefore do better than cheats. Experiments have shown that
people are surprisingly good at telling co-operators and cheats apart,
even on the basis of what seems to be limited information.
So there you have it: narrowly self-interested behaviour is
ultimately self-defeating. Economics practised with that in mind
could become the uplifting science. If economists can only incorporate
a bit of psychology, they've got it made.
----* Does Studying Economics Inhibit Co-operation?" By Robert Frank, Thomas Gilovich and Dennis Regan. Journal of Economic Perspecives, Spring 1993.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 20-12-01 MET