Peter Orszag Was A Blogger
Peter Orszag (first the 's' then the 'z')
The newly-announced director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, blogged while he was director of the Congressional Budget Office, I found out today. So, quick, before it’s scrubbed, go read it.
Here is a link from the blog to Orszag’s slide presentation on climate change. He’s not a skeptic, but he doesn’t sugarcoat the costs of addressing it, and thus buttresses the skeptics’ case. If you’ve got about a half-hour, it’s worth your time to follow how he attacks the problem. He recognizes the cost burden will inevitably fall upon those least able to afford it, so his attempt is to see what formula would spread the burden more fairly. The conclusion I take away is, we need to be very sure that increasing CO2 emissions are a serious problem for future generations before imposing these kinds of costs on people alive today.
Here is a link to the slides from a talk he gave at Harvard called “New Ideas on Human Behavior in Economics and Medicine.” He’s very taken with the placebo effect. Wonder if he thinks the placebo effect would be useful in alleviating global warming.
And here is an interesting observation about the tendency of people to overinvest their 401 (k) savings in company stock:
Many participants in retirement plans appear to be taking on unnecessary risk by investing in individual stocks rather than a diversified portfolio. The result is that those workers assume excessive risk for which they do not receive a higher expected return. (Those workers may feel they have inside information or insights that will allow them to outperform the market with particular investment choices, but the evidence suggests that unless you’re Warren Buffett, trying to outguess the market usually doesn’t work.) Investing excessively in one stock that also happens to be your employer’s stock is even riskier — if the company runs into trouble, both your retirement assets and your job may be in danger.
In Orszag’s world, we are ridden with misperceptions. Some hurt us, and some work in our favor. The role of government is to clarify matters for some, but use psychology He’s going to be an important intellectual force in the Obama Administration.
