… wins the economics Nobel.
Here’s the man himself, giving a lecture in English.
(Tirole looks a bit like the young Marlon Brando as Napoleon.)
(So far, biographical information is mainly available in French, and I’m not finding anything quirky, I’m afraid.
Né à Troyes, d’un père médecin et d’une mère enseignante en lettres, Jean Tirole se dirige d’abord vers les mathématiques, intègre l’Ecole Polytechnique, et découvre l’économie sur le tard, à 21 ans.
Eventually we’ll find out something of interest to people who read novels. Something more exciting than his having discovered economics at the strikingly advanced age of 21. But not yet.)
Here’s a good discussion of his work, with plenty of links. (Scathing Online Schoolmarm forgives Tyler Cowen for not knowing where to put semi-colons; he’s too excited.)
Shaping up to be a good year for the French. They also got the literature award.
Here’s some of what Tirole says in the lecture I just linked to.
Voting is a very crazy thing because we are never going to affect the outcome of an election. It’s a zero-benefit activity… We engage in pro-social behavior without any apparent benefit to ourselves… If you are paid to give blood, you give blood less often… It’s very hard to explain such so-called crowding-out effects… These are examples in which price is not very effective as an incentive device…
Do we do these things because we’re being watched? Because we’re trying to up our self-esteem? Social esteem?
You want to feel good about yourself. So if you give, you’re going to feel better about yourself.
But this can’t explain the phenomenon very well.
Generosity is a very very complex concept…
October 13th, 2014 at 8:05PM
Hat’s off to Prof. Tirole. Although a longtime Libertarian voter, and small “l” libertarian by disposition, I gave up on that “efficient markets” stuff a long while ago. Anyone who’s worked in business knows the distortion caused by legal rigging and downright corruption of all sorts.
(FWIW-Our local commercial plasmapheresis center, a division of a multi-national, does pay its donors, and offers first-time donors incentive pay equal to about twice the usual rate. Prof. Tirole may be talking about some other phenomenon, such as Red Cross blood drives.)