Hello everyone, my name is Virginia and today I will present the Robman app which is a shiny app that we developed to implement the Robman tool. This is a tool to assess risk of bias due to missing evidence in network analysis and it was published recently in BMC medicine. The framework underlying this tool evaluates the risk of bias first in each possible pairwise comparison that can be made between the interventions in the network by running both of within study and across study assessment of bias. Then it combines the judgments about the risk of bias in the pairwise comparison with the contribution that the direct comparison make to the network estimates. Also possible small study effects evaluated by network regression and any bias from unobserved comparison. And then finally a level of low risk, some concern or high risk of bias it's given to each of the network estimate. But I will move on straight to the app to show you the functionality. So the first thing the user must do is upload the data, the network data. This must be a CSV file in a long format. Precisely that means that it must be ARM based data. So a row for each arm of the study. Some of the instructions are reported here for regarding the how the data must be formatted and then the user can view the data in this tab. What's important here to note is that the data set should also have, if that's the case, if available, studies for which the outcome of interest is not reported. So as you can see here there is this study which doesn't have the values for the outcome of interest. And this is because these studies might be informative for selective outcome reporting, so for the within study assessment of bias. But let's move on to the data analysis tab, which is what we would do once the data is uploaded. So here the user must select the various parameters to run the analysis that are needed by the app to then calculate and run some of the assessment. So in this case, for example, we will select undesirable for the smaller outcome values are undesirable because our outcome of interest is responsive. And we also select our reference treatment. And then we press start analysis. This can take a few moments, depending on the network you're using, on the size of the network, we are using quite a large network. So, and I've already run this analysis before, and I'll show you this is the network I'm using to demonstrate the app. It's a network of 18 antidepressants from head to head studies. And because it's quite large, it can take a few moments to run the analysis. So this is what you will get once the analysis is it's completed. First, you will get a data summary with various characteristics also for the network, the interventions and the comparison. But you will also get output for the frequent yeast and Bayesian network analysis as well as Bayesian network meta regressions. And what I really want to show you though is the main output that you will get from the app. So first, we will go to the pairwise comparison table. Here, all the possible pairwise comparisons are automatically grouped according to whether they have data available for the outcome of interest, only for other outcomes like these two comparisons here in group B. Or they were unobserved, so they were not identified in the systematic review at all. What's also done automatically by the app is the calculation of the total sample size and the total number of studies, both for those studies reporting the outcome of interest, but also in total those identifying the systematic review. And this is reported for each comparison. Then these two columns are important because for the first assessment, we didn't study assessment of bias, because when there are comparison where there are extra studies, so studies that did not report the outcome of interest, as we can see here for comparison number six, where there are 14 in total, but 12 reported the outcome of interest, the user must decide whether there is a selective outcome reporting bias. So it must decide whether if person is to assess whether these studies did not report the outcome for reason associated with the results found for the outcome of interest, such as I don't know the p-value, the magnitude of the result, and also whether this study then, the non-inclusion of the study, can make a difference with the sized results. If so, then a suspected bias can be selected, like in this case. But there may also be cases where even if there are extra studies, like we can see comparison number nine here, there are five extra studies, but because the total sample size is already quite large and the relative sample size brought by these five extra studies, it's relative to the total size is not a lot, then we don't think that it would affect the synthesized results and that's why we selected no bias detected. So this assessment is done, as I said, for the comparison that have a difference of the sample size in this two column, as well as those comparisons in group B, so that did not report the outcome of interest, but obviously not for the unobserved comparison. While the next assessment, the across study assessment bias, commonly known as publication bias, can be done for all comparisons. And this is done mainly using qualitative consideration, such as like whether it was possible to get data from great literature, or whether there is well known publication bias in that field or for that comparison. Additionally, the user can also look at quantitative techniques if there are at least 10 studies for a specific comparison. And yeah, you can consider the final plots and the small test for small study effects, but as I said, these are only in addition to the qualitative consideration. And if in the network there are in comparison with at least 10 studies, the Robin app does not calculate any of the quantitative techniques. Finally, we assign an overall bias judgment to each of the comparison by merging these two assessments. And it can be easily done by pressing the button here. And this is essentially just looking at the algorithm. It's not actually difficult. It's just looking at whether there is suspected bias in either columns, otherwise, it's not bias detected. Once the judgments are done, then we move on to the main output that we will get from our Robin tool and app, which is the Robin table. And here, once again, the network estimates are already grouped automatically by the app, based on whether they are mixed or direct estimates, or whether they are indirect estimates, as you can see here. And here, as I said before, the judgment is combined, first of all, with the contribution that the direct comparison makes to the network estimates. And here, already calculated by the app, is the percentage of contribution that comes from a pairwise comparison of suspected bias. And it's already also divided in how this bias is directed, whether it is favoring the first treatment or the second treatment in a comparison. To do so, the app uses the contribution matrix. So it runs, I think it's called the contribution flow package in R. Contribution matrix is also available and it can be downloaded in the app. And what the user must do in the next column is evaluate whether how is this contribution then affecting the network estimate. So here are some sort of subjective judgment must be made. So for example, here we say that if there is a difference of at least 15, then that contributes a substantial contribution. So for example, here we see that there is 32%, 25%, going in one direction. So we have selected substantial contribution from bias favoring that specific treatment that goes in that direction. Same for the second estimate. But for the third and fourth, we'll see there's only 3%. So it's less than 50%. But there's actually zero and zero. So it's no substantial contribution from bias. There are also cases where, for example, there is a substantial contribution in both directions. So here 33% and 46%. So the difference between them is less than 15. And so we, for example, might decide that it's somehow balanced.  So as you can see, I'm not going to do them all for all because there's in total 153 estimates. So I'm going to move on to the next part, which is the bias assessment for indirect evidence. So because the contribution part only comes from the direct comparison, but we made a judgment also for unobserved comparisons in the previous table. This must also count in our final judgments. Because if the reason why the studies, these comparisons were observed, are related to the results found in the studies, then we will have bias. This might lead to bias. As you can see for the first part of the table, for the first group, this is grayed out. And this exactly because we have already considered the part of the contribution from the direct comparison. While this part, the bias assessment, is only for indirect evidence. So it's only considered in the unobserved comparison. And it's only done, as you can see, for the indirect part. So here it's now grayed out. And the user doesn't have to do anything. This is already copied from the previous table, from the last column of the previous table. The last part here, the last assessment, then it's evaluated whether there is any possible small study effects, as evaluated by the network mirror regression that, as I showed you before, has been run by the app. And I mean, the user can look at the output. But what the app automatically does is include the unadjusted and adjusted by each an estimate. And also, I forgot to say that the network mirror regression is run using the smallest observed variance as a covariate to give an indication whether there is a small study effect or not. What the user must do in the next column is evaluate whether there is evidence of small study effects by comparing these two estimates, as well as the credible interval. So if we see that, as in this case, there are very different than there is good overlap between the credible intervals, then there is no evidence of small study effects. Otherwise, once again, we would say small study effects favoring one direction or the other, one treatment or the other. This case, because we didn't find any evidence, so to make it easier anyway, you can also, once again, set to or to no evidence. And then if there is evidence for any, the estimate can also be changed manually. So that's quicker. So finally, we are at the end of our assessment. And we just need to give the overall risk of bias level, combining these two parts for each of the network estimates. To do so, the user can also just press the use algorithm to calculate overall risk of bias judgments here, as we are doing now. And, as you see, give automatically some concern low risk or high risk level. So the thing here is that the algorithm that applies is the algorithm that we described in our paper here. I'm not going to go through it because I have no time, but it's a more complex algorithm unlike the one in the previous table. But if the user does not agree with it, so if you want to use stricter rules or actually more relaxed rules, you can also change the judgment. So as you can see here, it will show in yellow because it's not the one calculated by the algorithm, but it's perfectly fine. So we are at the end of it. The last bit about the app is that the table, both of them, but I'll only show you tape for the second table, can be downloaded as CSV. And so that can also be included in reports and things like that. So finally, I just want to thank you for your attention. I want to remind you that of where to find the app and also the paper that doesn't describe exactly the functionality of the app, but it describes the Robman Framework and Tool. We plan to actually publish a manual paper that would be more of a manual for the app. And I also want to thank the two people that have helped me with the development of this app. So first Todoriz Papacostantino and also Alex Holloway. And if you have any questions, you can ask after the session or just write me on and send me an email. Thank you very much.


This is a wonderful group. And it represents the tip of the iceberg of Aaron, economic research on identities, norms, and narratives, which is a group that we founded, that has a very simple idea. And the idea is that we, as people, are shaped by social forces, particularly identities, norms, and narratives. And our economic decisions are shaped by social forces as well. And consequently, the way economists think about how we make decisions should reflect the role that social forces play. And social forces affect our objectives, our preferences, they affect our beliefs, and they affect our perceived constraints. So every aspect of our decision making, as we know it in economics, is affected by social forces. And this happens from day one. From when a baby appears out of the birth canal, there is a connection between the baby and its mother, and that's extended to the broader family and friends and broader society. There is no sense in which the individual is primary. The individual is shaped by social forces, and that needs to become central to economics. That's basically the idea. And within that context, it then becomes an interesting question as to whether in this new framework we can understand social dysfunctions more easily, whether there are new ways of understanding the sources of inequality, marginalization, economic marginalization in society, unemployment, corruption, crime, warfare and conflict, financial crisis, economic stagnation, environmental degradation, and so on and so forth. All these well-known phenomena in economics ought to be shed light on through the social forces that help shape our economic decisions. And the different speakers here will emphasize different aspects of this. And we'll start out with Jean-Paul Cavallo on your extreme left. He's an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, and interim director of the Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences there. He will be talking about his QGE paper on veiling, but he has done a lot of work on identity and the role it plays in education, under what circumstances you may wish to resist education because of your identity, social mobility, religious movements, the role of identity and coordination within cultures, and also the role of identity in organizations. But today, he'll tell us about veiling. Thank you very much, Dennis. Thank you to Ined and to Rob Johnson in particular. And it's an honor to share a panel with Robbie, George, and Dennis. George Akelov and Rachel Cranton are really the founders of this field of economics of identity. I owe them a great debt, as I do to Robbie and Dennis, for their contributions to the field. Today, I'm going to be speaking about religious identity. And we're going to kind of zoom in on a particular type of religious identity, and that's a veiling. But let's start 50 years ago, 1967, the summer of love, San Francisco. The Bohemian part of me would love to have been there. Idealistic college kids from around the US descended on the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. They cooked meals, fed people in the park, played music, provided even free medical care, and so forth. By all accounts, it was a great time. But why did it end? Why was this the summer of love and not the summers of love? Well, what happened was it made news, national news, in 1967. And the next year, the college kids once again arrived, but now they were joined by people with no spiritual or ideological connection to the movement. These were the free riders, therefore the free food, the free rent, and the free love of the flower children. And with this, the movement collapsed under the weight of its own success. So there are valuable lessons to learn from this. A successful social movement requires the production of both spiritual slash ideological and material goods. Free riders undermine both forms of production. So once the movement becomes successful enough, you generate enough efficiency in producing material goods that these free riders enter, they consume the material goods that are collectively produced by the group. And in doing so, they exhaust the group's resources, and they undermine the basis for cooperation within the group. And that's reciprocal altruism. But they also undermine the spiritual and ideological life of the group with their infectious lack of commitment to the mission, the movement's mission. So without a way to screen out these free riders, social movements collapse. They are self undermining, success begets failure. In this regard, we can learn a lot from observing religious groups, religious communities. Religious organizations are among the most stable and long lived organizations in human history, perhaps the most. They have an incredible way of surviving, even while at odds with the host community, perhaps especially while at odds with the host community. And one of the things that one of their real skills is screening out free riders. And in doing so, religious identity plays a critical role. By religious identity, I mean conspicuous religious markers that distinguish members from non-members, including unconventional forms of dress, speech, dietary, and sexual practices, et cetera. And these unconventional requirements stigmatize members in the society at large. Now this is a cost, but the stigma plays two constructive roles. Firstly, it plays a screening role. There's a selection role, a screening role. By making membership costly, it screens out anyone who is not committed to the movement's mission. So it selects for cooperative types and true believers, essentially. Secondly, by acting as a kind of tax on outside activity, this stigma induces members to divert money and time from outside activity to activity within the group. So this is how it stabilizes cooperation within the group by solving collective incentive problems, stigmatizing members in the outside community, and segregating members from the outside world. So this is not my theory. This is the theory, the now canonical theory in the economics of religion that was developed by Larry Ioannoni. It's a simple and it's a powerful theory. You see this with many strict religious sects, this notion of religious identity, stigmatizing, and segregating members, and thereby stabilizing cooperation within the group. What I want to talk about today is veiling among Muslim women, by which I mean various concealing forms of dress, especially head covering. Now, I think the explanation here is a little different to the standard clubs model. And to really understand it, I think we need to incorporate ideas from the economics of identity, and that's what we're here to do here. So first of all, let us place veiling in its proper context. In the Middle East, particular Egypt, this new veiling movement is, as the name suggests, a 20th century innovation. It's not the preservation, firstly, of some ancient tradition. In Cairo, there was a de-veiling movement in 1923, led by a woman named Huda Shirawi, after she arrived back from a meeting of feminists in Rome. After that, middle and upper class women in Cairo stopped veiling. And in fact, when anthropologists visit Cairo in 1970, almost no women are veiled. That's their report. By 2000, about 80% of women in Cairo wear some form of head covering. So this is a dramatic change in 30 years. And in fact, some of the new forms of veiling actually quite distinct from modes of veiling that you see in the past. So you have different modes of veiling here. On the left, you see less strict versions, like the headscarf. And to the right, you see the niqab and then the burqa, which are more strict versions. In fact, the more antiquated forms of veiling on the right had a certain motivation. They were actually aristocratic forms of veiling. Peasant women did not veil to that extent because they worked in the fields. But wealthier households did undertake that kind of veiling. And it was a signal that a man could preserve a harem of women without them having recourse to work while veiling like this. It was an aristocratic signal. Now, the new forms of veiling have different motivations. And we'll think about them closely here. So closer to home, large-scale immigration to Western Europe, the US, and British offshoots has precipitated, I think, what we can describe as a national identity crisis. And the veil, as you know, has become a kind of symbol, perhaps the symbol of cultural separation, a cultural rejection, and social separation. And this kind of gels with the religious clubs theory. But it doesn't necessarily gel, I think, with the more elaborate version that I'm going to give you today based on a closer reading of the precise practice of veiling as it occurs today. So we also see, as you know, this kind of interpretation of veiling as cultural rejection and social separation give rise to public policy. So bans on veiling in many countries, including various types of veiling, including France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and parts of Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Russia. So when I started writing this paper on veiling, I thought that there was a lot written about it, a lot of public policy. But there was very little analytical attention devoted to it. The movement was seen, I think, on all sides as symbolic and moral, a symbolic and moral issue. And so I want to take an analytical lens to this here. So in particular, using the economics of identity. So the economics of identity is an approach to social diversity, which has at its core the notion that individuals are assigned either to self or social categorization to different social categories or identities. And the social categories or identities impose upon them certain behavioral prescriptions, that is, ideals and expectations of their behavior. So we see here a person is categorized, they have an identity A or B, and that identity conditions their choice by imposing upon them certain behavioral prescriptions. And we see this when individuals violate their behavioral prescriptions. For example, in the early 20th century in the US, when married women started taking on paid work, there was a kind of violation of traditional gender roles that led to some kind of stigma. And these gender roles, of course, have changed over time. Religious identity is no exception to this, actually. So if you choose to veil, you have different prescriptions, behavioral prescriptions. You, we're treating it here as a binary thing, veil or no veil, but actually in the model, it's a model as a continuous choice variable, and really in reality it's a continuous degree of consumer. But the more you veil, the stricter the Muslim you are just deemed to be, and that imposes specific, identity specific ideals and expectations on you. You're expected to abide by religious rules more closely, and you bear a higher social stigma for violating religious rules of behavior. So if you veil, you're more likely to engage in religious behavior as when you don't veil. So this is the role of veiling, I think that we have, that is at play. And let me explain it. So taking this approach to veiling, I wanted to address three questions in this paper. One, why do women veil? Two, why has there been a rise in veiling since the 1970s? And three, what happens if you ban veiling? And there was a lot of debate over veiling, there was very little thought given to these three questions actually. So firstly, why do women veil? Well, one possible hypothesis runs along the lines of the aristocratic model of veiling that I showed you before. Veiling reduces the woman's outside option and increases male bargaining power within the household. That's one possible hypothesis that you could entertain. I think that the new veiling movement that we see is somewhat different. And in fact, it relates, and I want to talk about the bulk of the movement which relates more to the moderate forms of veiling like head covering that we saw to the left on an earlier slide. The first of all, the first thing you need to note is that in the vanguard of this new veiling movement lies women, urban, working, educated, middle-class women. Why do they veil? And so what I suggest is that veiling acts as a commitment mechanism to biding by religious norms, as we saw before. With that, by veiling you impose on yourself certain behavioral prescriptions and that has practical implications. So you can't just simply walk into a bar wearing a headscarf, it's incongruous. You attract different friends and social encounters. And all of this is a kind of commitment to religious norms of behavior. Moreover, it's not just a commitment, an individual commitment, but it's also a signal of this commitment to one's community. So why the rise in veiling? Well, whether it be women who are moving from rural Egypt to Cairo or migrants from Muslim societies to the UK, for example, women face an expansion in their economic opportunities. Educational opportunities, the labor market opportunities, just opportunities for interaction in the urban environment. Now, in religiously conservative communities, women's behavior is subject to intense social scrutiny and social judgment. Exploiting economic opportunities and interacting outside of the monitoring range of one's community can attract negative social inferences and judgments. You could lose esteem within your community. That means the deterioration of marriage market prospects. It means possibly a loss of access to community resources and so forth. But by veiling and committing to abiding by religious norms of behavior, even while you're outside of the monitoring range of your community, women can take up these economic opportunities while still preserving their esteem within the community. So in this sense, veiling is a kind of partial integration strategy. And some forms of veiling, I think, are not necessarily regressing. So this is a different narrative of veiling. This also changes our view of the consequences of banning veiling. Banning veiling in public spaces now could lead to actual segregation of these women as they take segregation within the home or the community as a costly substitute for interacting in public and veiling. More surprisingly, actually, when you embed this in a model of intergenerational transmission of preferences, what you find is that banning veiling can actually lead to a rise in religiosity in these communities. And it's not due to a blowback mechanism, but that is actually more subtle than that. It's to do with the substitutability between external and internal control mechanisms. Say you're a parent. You want to control the behavior of your child. You have different instruments at your disposal. You have external control mechanisms and internal control mechanisms. The veil is like an external control mechanism, right? If you have, for example, in society that mandates a high degree of veiling, but a homogeneous degree of veiling amongst everyone, then what happens is behavior is relatively controlled in society, and so the behavior of religious and secular women is quite similar. But that reduces the incentives of parents to expand resources on internal control mechanisms like religious education and transmitting religious preferences. So you could get in a seemingly very religious society secularization going on under the surface. I think something like this goes on in Iran.  And that increases the incentives of parents, religious parents, to transmit religious preferences to their child, and that can lead to an increase in religiosity in these communities. So if the motivation for a ban on veiling is to integrate and secularize these communities, actually you could end up achieving quite the opposite. So recent empirical work by sociologists indicates or supports at least the first part of this theory, and that is that women who veil tend to be at least religious women who exhibit higher rates of veiling are ones who are more exposed to modern influences, in particular education, urbanization, and contact with non-Muslims. So this runs counter to the alternative view of veiling, and it's more in line with the view that I suggest. Now, how does this fit in with the economics of religion and these club models that we saw before? Well, we can distinguish between two domains, rather crudely, but we can distinguish between two domains, the economic and social domain. If in the extreme, you want to set up a fully segregated community, like the Amish, what you have to do is you have to impose requirements and forms of religious identity that stigmatize members both in the economic and social domain to develop a fully segregated society. That includes banning money, modern technology, et cetera. However, if you have a community that you want to be partially integrated, then you want to attract members who are economically productive but adhere to non-mainstream behavioral norms, then you may impose a requirement for religious identity that is something like veiling. That does not attract discrimination in the economic domain, that is in education or the labor market, but that does induce some kind of social stigma in the social domain, and separation in the social domain. So that means that this partial integration strategy rests on the combination of these two factors. So if either discrimination appears in the economic domain in the educational labor market, or veiling becomes normalized and loses its stigma in the social domain, then it loses its power as a partial integration strategy. Actually what would happen would be something, the community would go to one of the extremes. If returns to economic and social participation are high enough, there would be full integration. Otherwise, there would be full segregation because you're removing this kind of partial strategy of integration. So this is the way in which the economics of identity with its focus on social categories and behavioral prescriptions intersects really with the economics of identity, intersects with the economics of religion with its focus on clubs and groups and social stigma. How many minutes do I have then? Just about, just about done. Okay, so I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Okay, our next speaker is Robert Akerlof, who is associate professor at the University of Warwick. He'll be talking about two papers, Movers and Shakers, and the other one is... Value formation. Value formation, the role of esteem. He's written a lot of other things and also provides us with a broader framework for understanding all this work. Thanks, Dennis. So I'm gonna start, in fact, with a little bit of kind of an overview. I'm gonna try and kind of put this work into a little bit of a broader context. So I think I wanna try and give a sense of what the research agenda is, not just for myself, but I think the sort of agenda we share. So I'll start, I'll talk a little bit about that, and then mention these two papers and time permitting, I'll also mention some work in progress. Okay, so on the research agenda. So I think behavioral economics has obviously had a huge impact on the field. And so I think one of the things that's done that's been extremely important is it's made us think much more carefully about what's really running through people's heads when they make decisions. It's told us we need to think much more carefully about that. The first generation of behavioral economics has largely been focused on individuals in isolation and sort of what's running through individuals' heads, viewing them in isolation. And I think, in fact, what's running through people's heads is very influenced by social interaction and by social context. And so I think that's really what's motivating this research is the idea that who we are and what we're thinking about is very shaped by social interaction. So I think the first kind of question that we're trying to answer is how are we generally shaped by social interaction, our beliefs, our preferences, and then second, of course, what are the economic consequences of that? So one of the key objects, I think, for study is beliefs. So our beliefs are very shaped by our social interactions. So one thing to look at is our positive beliefs. So these are beliefs about what is the world like? And I think we're also really interested in people's normative beliefs. So people have beliefs not just about what the world is like, but also what is good and what is bad, what is better and what is worse. So I think we're interested in both. So identity, you can think of that really as a package of beliefs. So one piece of that package are beliefs about who am I, who are others? So these are sort of beliefs about your type and others' types. So these are positive beliefs. And the second aspect of that package are their beliefs about how should someone of my type or someone of others' types behave? What's the appropriate way to behave? So you could think about gender norms here as an example.   So identity is really about beliefs. So also part of the title of this session, we've talked a little bit about it already, are narratives or stories. So I think that's very important to us as well. So you can think about the fact, you probably, everyone here has some kind of story about what you're doing here today, what you're doing at this conference, and that gives an order to your actions and your behavior. And so these stories that we tell ourselves, they encapsulate certain beliefs. So examples would be, you might have a story that encapsulates a belief that the world is zero sum and that might affect your behavior that you have that story. Or you might have a belief that people get what they deserve. So a belief in a just world and that might impact your behavior, your voting decisions. So they're these important stories. So I think these beliefs encapsulated in these stories are important to us. And the stories that are resonant to us, they depend very much on the stories that other people have in their heads.  Maybe a politician, for instance, makes a speech and tells a story and that makes it, as a sort of social enterprise, it's making it easier for everyone listening to that speech to hold that story in their heads. So how are these beliefs determined? So I'll give you sort of two frameworks for thinking about that. So one useful framework for thinking about this is you can sort of think of a demand and supply for belief. So the supply side, what I mean by supply side is what am I able to believe? What are the things that constrain me in terms of what I'm able to believe? The demand side is what do I want to believe? So one can think of the sort of standard classical model as being embedded in here, right? We have the view that information is constraining of beliefs that appears on the supply side. And that's essentially all we put in. We sort of think of that as pinning down our beliefs. But demand matters, so that's one deviation from the sort of standard model. And then social interaction can play a role both on the demand side and the supply side. So on the supply side, even independent of the informational content of social interaction, one can be influenced on a supply side by what others believe. So the Ash Line experiment gives an example of these kinds of effects. So in this experiment, maybe some of you know it, there's clearly one line is the longest of three lines and people are asked which is the longest line.  And this really upsets people and it leads a lot of people to switch their answer away from the obvious answer.  Okay, so this is one organizing framework. So you can think about demand and supply of belief. Another nice framework for thinking about how beliefs are determined is given by this picture. And this will also relate to the first of the two papers I'm gonna discuss. So you can think about people are embedded in social networks and your social interactions, they influence your beliefs and your beliefs in turn influence your choice of actions.  So actions in turn influence the shape of the social network. So you can think about a kind of equilibrium of this kind of a system. So that actually takes me to the first paper. So I'm gonna look at a version of this. So I'm gonna replace beliefs in here with values, which you can think of as a type of normative belief. Okay, so the running example for this first paper is a high school, okay? And so two kind of classic groups in high schools are nerds and burnouts. So that's the term in the education literature for this group, the burnouts, okay? And so they might look like this with green hair. Okay, and so nerds and burnouts, they have very different values, of course. And so there's this basic question, what's determinative of people's values and how are people's values shaped by social interaction? So this paper builds a model to try to understand theoretically how this works. So I'm just gonna give you a kind of sketch of the model. So values in the model are something that people choose. You choose what values to hold and that choice is motivated by economic considerations but crucially also by the desire for esteem. And there are two components of esteem and they result in conflicting desires for people. So on the one hand, people care about obtaining esteem from peers and this desire for peer esteem is something that generates conformity. So your desire for peer esteem leads you to act and choose values that are similar to those of your peers. On the other hand, people also care in the model about self esteem and that might lead you to differentiate. That's often satisfying yourself, having maximizing your self esteem is best satisfied by differentiating. For instance, if there are a lot of people who are successful academics in a school, maybe it's hard to get high self esteem. If you also value academics, maybe you can become a burnout, instead have very different values from those academic peers and generate self esteem through a different channel. Okay, so here is sort of a sense of the setup of the model. Okay, so the baseline model is two players, it's a simultaneous move game. You can extend it for what it's worth beyond two players to many players. Players make three choices. So they choose effort at two activities. So the activities I'm gonna think of is academics. So that's the nerd activity and rock music, which is meant to stand in for the burnout activity. Okay, and so achievement at activities then depends both upon people's effort and also on their abilities at activities. So that's the first choice is effort. The second choice is whether to value activities. So you can value academics or not and you can value rock music or not. And then third people choose whether to initiate interaction with the other player and I assume interaction takes place if either person initiates it. Okay, so the three main assumptions then of the model, those are the choices. The main assumptions are that the basis upon which a player confers esteem depends upon his values. So if you only cared about academics, you'd only esteem yourself and others on the basis of their academic achievement, okay? So the second key assumption is that players are esteemed for their relative achievements. It's not just about how you perform individually but how you compare to others. And the third assumption is that players value, they always value self-esteem and you also value the esteem of the other player if you're interacting. And so that's gonna be something that motivates the decision of whether to interact with the other player or not, whether they positively or negatively esteem you. Okay, so I'm gonna just sort of skip to a picture that shows what the results look like. So this shows what the equilibria are of this game as a function of the academic abilities of the two players. So alpha one and alpha two denote the academic ability of the players. And so the equilibria sort of balance this tension between the desires of the players to conform and differentiate. So in the region of the 45 degree line in this picture, what's sort of the dominant thing is this desire to conform. As their abilities become more dissimilar, so the further you get from the 45 degree line, the more this desire to differentiate is what dominates. So along the 45 degree line, I'll focus on that first. Players choose to value the same activities. They're either both scholars, so they're both nerds, or they're both rock musicians or burnouts. And there's a region of overlap where either is a possibility they could both be musicians or burnouts, they could both be nerds. And that's actually sort of intuitive because when there's sort of this desire for conformity that could generate multiple equilibria. And so that's what happens on 45 degree line. And importantly, they interact when they share the same values. So why is that? Well, when they share the same values, they have positive esteem for one another, and so they find it pleasant to interact. So one of the predictions generally of the model is that people form into sort of cliques around their values, interaction groups around their values. And that's something that's sort of been well observed in many contexts. Sociologists call this value homophily. That's the Robert Merton's term for this. So off of the 45 degree line, the person who is better at academics becomes the nerd, the person who is worse becomes a musician or a burnout, and then they don't interact because what happens there is that each thinks of themselves as superior to the other and they look down on the other person. So they each disesteem each other and then they avoid interaction. So one thing that's interesting to do then with this picture is to look at comparative static. So the dotted line is meant to be a comparative static exercise. We can think about changing the first player's academic ability. So the first thing I'll show you is what happens to player two's academic achievement as his peers' ability changes. So you could think about this as moving a student from a worse to a better school. So on the left, we've got a student who's a pretty good student in a bad school. And so they're a nerd in a bad school where other students are burnouts. That's what's happening on the far left. And then if we move them to a slightly better school, so alpha one increases, what happens is that now they're a nerd in a school of other nerds. And now there's this desire to, well you increase your academic effort because you want the esteem of your peers now. So you put in more effort. So we get an increasing achievement of player two here. But what happens if we move player two to a sufficiently good school? So now if he's in a very good school, it's hard for him to have high self esteem as a nerd. He compares himself to these other people. And so what he does and says, he switches his values. And he becomes the burnout now. And now you can see his academic achievement plummets. Okay, so you get these interesting non-monitonicities. And this accounts for a sort of puzzle in the pure effects literature. So the majority of pure effects studies have found positive pure effects, but there's a significant minority of studies that have found negative pure effects. So that's the second part, the right hand part of this picture is this negative pure effect. So this accounts for why sometimes we see it one way and sometimes the other. So another thing to note along this dotted line, so one thing that's interesting to look at is player one's self esteem along that dotted line. So you might think that self esteem is simply increasing in your ability, but in fact that's not what we find. And the reason for that is that people might sacrifice self esteem for the sake of pure esteem. So that's what's happening in the middle is that people choose to sacrifice self esteem to be part of the group. And so this picture actually, you can think about this as capturing sort of a whole high school and findings about self esteem in high schools. So James Coleman in a classic book called Adolescent Society that studies schools in Northern Illinois, he looks at the self esteem of the students and he finds out who is in the quote unquote leading crowd of the school. And so those people in the leading crowd, they have very high self esteem. So in terms of this picture, they're the people on the far right. He also finds that people who are quite distant from the leading crowd, so they're the people on the left in this picture, they also have relatively high self esteem. And he finds that those people, they say they don't really wanna be a part of the leading crowd. And so that's indicative that they have different values, which is the case for these people on the left in this picture. So they have different values from the leading crowd. And in the middle, these people, these are the people who Coleman says are hangers on to the leading crowd.  Okay, so the paper captures a number of results about schools, but it's also applicable to a lot of contexts besides schools. So one context that I talk about in the paper is inner cities. So William Julius Wilson has talked about how deindustrialization in the late 1960s and early 1970s has led to a decline in inner cities and the emergence of what he calls a kind of oppositional culture to form. And so one can think about that in terms of the model that people are changing their values forming an oppositional culture in order to protect self esteem. So one can tell that story in terms of the model. So another related phenomenon is this idea that if you're a good student in an inner city school that you're derided as acting white. And that's something one can think about in terms of the model as well.  So they're the burnouts in the model who look down on you as nerdy. So that's one application. So another interesting application. So there are a number of sociological studies that document what's called in this literature resistance within organizations where there are people within say a firm who act up in all kinds of ways that are significantly detrimental to the productivity of the firm. So one example of this is given by Robert Ramsey in a study of the merchant marines. So he talks about how crewmen on these merchant marine ships will do things like people who wash dishes rather than actually washing the dishes, they'll throw plates out of the portholes and kind of smile about throwing these plates out of the portholes. Or they'll do things like people charged with ironing the officer's shirts will take a malicious delight in burning the officer's shirts. So there's this sort of deep anger of these crew that he documents at the officers. And what's underlying this is that these people feel they're not being given the esteem that is due to them. And I think it's not just by the way that they are accorded low self-esteem but also that they think they deserve more, that there's this difference. And so that's something that exists in the model there's this notion of the esteem you accord yourself and the esteem accorded to you by others. And when there's a difference in value there's gonna be a divergence there. And that can lead to anger, so I don't model that anger in the paper but you can think about adding that to the model that that's gonna generate anger and some of this resistance behavior. So okay, so this paper is all about sort of determination of belief and particularly these normative beliefs. So the second paper I wanna briefly touch on is with Richard Holden, it's called Movers and Shakers. And it's talking about a different question but it's also an important question about social interaction. So the question here is are there economic returns to being socially connected? And what are the sources of such returns? So we normally focus on human capital and the economic returns to human capital but a question is is there a return to social connections or one might call this network capital and what are those returns? So the key idea of this paper is that there are many economic projects that require coordinating parties to be successful and getting them to participate in projects. And that someone then who is socially connected can play a very important role in that task of coordination and thereby generate rents. So I'm gonna give you an example of this. So this person is named William Zekendorf. So he was the preeminent real estate developer in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. And so he was a very social character. So he's a real fixture on the New York social scene and he even owned a nightclub called the Monte Carlo and he would sort of hold court there two or three nights a week and entertain friends and business associates. And so there were many major projects that he undertook. L'Enfant Plaza in Washington DC would be one you might know. So let me give you an example of one that I think particularly illustrates our point called Placeville Marie. So this was in Montreal. And so what's the story here? So the area that was developed was a kind of rail yard next to the central station in Montreal. And the Canadian National Railway who own this rail yard, they've been trying to develop this site for something like 30 years and Canadian developers had shied away because they felt this was too challenging to develop this site. And so what was the challenge of developing this site? Well, so there's a coordination problem here. So what was it? So you needed the participation of two groups to make this successful.  It required a lot of capital and you weren't likely to get all of this capital from one source.  So this big tower here that's pictured which is the main piece of the development cost a hundred million dollars to build which I think in the 1950s was a reasonable amount of money. So that was one coordination problem. The other coordination problem was getting tenants into this building. So the main commercial district was on St. James Street or business district was on St. James Street. And so you had to coordinate people on moving to this new area. And so initially, Zekendorf faced a freeze from people when he was trying to get them to participate in this project. So he went to many investors and many potential tenants and they all said no. But he kept persisting and because he was socially connected he was able to kind of shift beliefs. And so his first success was a sort of friend of a friend was the head of the Royal Bank of Canada. And he got him to agree to be the anchor tenant of the building. He gave them very good terms. They said they named the tower the Royal Bank Tower. And so that began to unlock this freeze. So the next big break was that MetLife agreed to give 50 million dollars. So half of what was needed to build this tower. And that got them then a second big tenant, aluminium limited. And once they had these three people lined up all kinds of people who had said no, no, no I won't have anything to do with you all of a sudden reversed and decided they come in. So this is the key thing he was able to do was to coordinate all these parties and earn a big return. And I think, so one of the things to note is there's something self fulfilling about being a mover and shaker. And this is something we model in the paper that someone who is socially connected in this way is someone you want to be connected to. Someone who is able to get these big projects done. If you're an investor, that's someone you want to know. And so there's a kind of self fulfilling aspect to this. There's an aspect of luck in being a mover and shaker. And the people who are movers and shakers they may be very good at running projects but they needn't be. In fact, you could have someone who builds a lousy building and they might even think that their clever decisions are what is the source of their return. They might think they're genius at what to do in terms of building this building. But in fact, they might succeed in spite of their ideas rather than because of them. So I'll conclude by just pointing to some future directions of work. So one thing that I'm working on at the moment, some work in progress concerns group identity. And so it takes the kind of framework that I was mentioning in the value formation paper and it applies it to thinking about other beliefs and how other beliefs form. And so here, in the values paper, your esteem derives purely from your individual achievements. But in point of fact, we take pride, for instance, in our nationality. You might take pride in being Scottish. You take pride maybe in the economics department you're in. So various groups that one's a part of matter and give us esteem. And so this paper is sort of viewing identity, who you identify with as a potential choice. And these considerations of pure esteem and self-esteem create similar tensions. So on the one hand, there's some desire to be in bigger groups because in a bigger group, there are more people who are raw raw about your group. And that gives you more pure esteem. Another effect, though, is that suppose you were in a group that everyone was in. So there's a Gilbert and Sullivan line. If everyone is someone, then no one is anybody. So one wants to have people who are not part of your group so that your group can form a story of how it's superior to other groups. And so this picture shows you can have a sort of non-monotonic relationship between group size and the utility of group members. And so this can explain things like the results of minimal group experiments that show that even in a rather simple lab setting where people are kind of homogeneous, that people will have this desire to form groups just based on random assignments. So that's one project that builds further in thinking about how beliefs form. And so another project that I'm working on with Paul Collier and Luis Rayo concerns narratives that exist within families. So there are all kinds of narratives in families. They're things like lineage narratives. How much of my identity comes from mom and how much from dad. So you can think of the idea of patriline is more of my identity comes from dad than mom, and vice versa from matriline. So another narrative, and this relates very much to what John Paul was talking about, we're calling the protector narrative. And sort of the idea of this is that under this narrative, the view is that people need protection of their sort of sexual purity, and particularly women. And one can think about how this sort of thing would lead to a whole pattern of behaviors, the sort of cloistering of women that might take a more extreme form like veiling or a less extreme form like women becoming sort of housewise and staying at home and not working. So that's sort of one kind of behavior associated with this narrative. It would also lead to things like early age of marriage for women and maybe a difference in age with sort of older men and younger women marrying because older men are better protectors and women feel they can't sort of be out of the house, out of their father's house and not be married. So the whole set of behaviors that kind of grow out of a narrative like that, one can think about how these narratives change over time and how these change in narratives are predictive of change in family behaviors and dynamics. So I'll stop there, thank you. And we now have George Akerlof who has fundamentally changed economics multiple times. The first time with the market for lemons, which we all knew, then there were many contributions that embody psychology and sociology and economics like partial gift exchange, animal spirits and so on. But extraordinarily, I think we're all agreed that his most fundamental contributions came after he won the Nobel Prize. And one of them is identity economics which he developed with Rachel Cranton. And the other one concerns fishing for fools which shows how people can be misled either emotionally or through their cognitive biases and that economies may therefore tend towards a fishing general equilibrium. And that to my mind is also a fundamental contribution that the profession has not fully understood or adopted yet. Aaron builds very much on identity economics but extends it to norms and particularly narratives and the floor is yours. Thank you Dennis, that's very nice. Okay, I'm not sure I can live up to all that. So let me try to place the last two talks by Jean-Paul and by Robbie in the context of economics more generally. Can people hear? Okay. I'll try to place them in the context of new economic thinking. Current behavioral economics is based on economics and on psychology but there's another emerging branch of economics that's based on sociology rather than on psychology. So probably most people here remember the can opener joke about economics. So just to remind you if you don't know, a physicist, a chemist and economist are stranded on a desert island and a can of soup washes ashore but they don't have a can opener. And the physicist says it will open if we drop it from the top of a tree and the chemist says if we put the can in a fire it will burst and the economist says as you all know let's just assume a can opener. Now for a very long time I did not take the can opener joke seriously but now I do. I sort of thought us economists we try to make our assumptions realistic, blah, blah, blah. So let me explain why I do now and why sociology makes a difference. All economics one textbooks they teach the derivation of demand curves and following somebody like Barbara goes to the supermarket and she has a budget to buy her apples and oranges. And then she has this utility function which described how happy she would be if she had capital A orange apples and capital O oranges and she chooses the apples and oranges to maximize her utility subject to her budget constraint. Everybody here knows this. But now the textbooks gives us this as a model for how we should do all economics.  So you look at financial data, personal financial data it shows strongly that most people in real life find it difficult to meet a budget. They save less than they want to and they're broke at the end of the month. So where's the mistake in the model? The basic mistake is that our economic models rain in on people from 30,000 feet are assumptions regarding what they care about and then correspondingly how they behave. So people may be purposeful as economists always presume. That means we're maximizing something. But then the question is how do people behave and how people behave is determined by the stories by how they think. Now Robbie and Jean-Paul were talking about how they think. So a good way to picture how people think and what determines how we behave is that every moment of our lives we're living out some story. The decisions that we make depend upon the stories that are our focus at the time we make those decisions. I think Robbie said something like that. That corresponds then to the core, to the core of both sociology and cultural anthropology. The core of those two fields is ethnographies and what do ethnographies do? Ethnographies uncover those stories that people are telling themselves. So in order to make our economics right we need to base motivation on those stories. We shouldn't just be assuming them, whatever these people are, we have to see that that's right. So central to all stories are first of all the protagonists. To get that you need to understand the protagonist and also the context in which they operate. So think about any New Yorker weekly fiction story. So how does it begin? So with rare exception this is what you're gonna see. The first paragraph will define who the central character is. That is the person's identity. And it will also describe the social context of the person. So we would say that that sets the scene. So that's what both what John Paul's and Robbie's two papers are doing. They place upfront and central who the protagonists think they are. So in John Paul's case it concerns religion.  And then both of them, both John Paul and Robbie also include how other people, how other people will also view the protagonist's respective thoughts and behavior. So this is new economic thinking that's defining the stories that people are telling about themselves and about others. And then corresponding to those stories it also determines the actions that people take and other responses to those actions. But then they will also include who will or who will not be in the respective social networks. So the stories are then propagated within those social networks. So they've then told us, they've told us how to break away from the kennel of the joke. So they've shown us how to construct economic theory that includes the stories that people are telling themselves. That is they make those stories and the reactions that people have to them. They make them endogenous. So the question arises does this make a difference? So what? So the rest of it doesn't make a difference to the economics. So the rest of my talk will then give four examples that will demonstrate the importance of stories. Each of these stories has been critical to economic and political outcomes. So I apologize to the young scholars who heard these stories earlier but I'm going to go over them again. So what's my first story? So my first story, I guess where you're, I seem to, you didn't get some stuff. So how did the Europeans get themselves into the Europe? So there's a new book coming out by Ashok Modi and it's title is Euro-Tragic. So there was a story that the Europeans desire for unity would allow them to easily overcome the problems of a fixed exchange rate across most of Europe. So Helmut Kohl had told a similar story. He told a similar story in Germany in the late 1980s, early 1990s regarding the currency union of East and West Germany at a one-to-one ratio between Eastmarks and Deutschmarks. And then Kohl, having told this story to himself, became a leading supporter of the Euro. The economic integration of East and West Germany but the economic integration of East and West Germany had been difficult enough but with the Euro, no single language with East migration has had occurred between the two Germanies, nor would they be the huge fiscal transfers from richer countries to poorer countries to East problems which had occurred during German unification. So economist's warnings that a single currency would obviate needed exchange rate adjustments were ignored. Instead, the benefits from the Euro gained traction. So Modi tells how the myth, the myth of the benefits of the Euro, escaped like a virus from official meetings. People, part of that story was simply magical thinking that the problems of a fixed exchange rate would be magically solved with the wave of a desire for unity, magic wand, okay? This story itself has played a crucial role in the economic problems of Europe today. So now I'm gonna give you another example in which a story made a huge difference, okay? So it's from a paper by Dennis Snower and myself entitled Bread and Bullets. So it begins with a joke from Communist Russia, okay? So a man walks into a grocery store with a notebook. Do you have sausage? Nope, he makes a note. Bread, nope, he makes another note. 20 years ago, they would have shot you for making notes like that, says a woman waiting in line. No bullets, either, he writes. So the joke illustrates the Soviet system at every scale. So our article demonstrates the role of the Bolshevik story under the Communist. According to that story, the Bolshevik plan for force-fed industrialization would create a new paradise on Earth. So that story legitimated. This is what it legitimated. It legitimated extremely poorly against anyone accused of resisting the plan. So think about the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s. Yet worse, it was yet worse. So ruthless men like Stalin falsely accused their opponents of resistance to the plan. And this is the type of thing that actually you saw throughout the communist world. I mean, they used this Bolshevik Leninist story and then they used this in the same way. So then these people used the sanctions legitimated by the Bolshevik story to eliminate it. Okay, so let's turn to another story. So this is supposed to be showing that stories matter. This should be part of our economics. This time, I hate to tell you, we economists did not do so well. So according to standard economic theory, in the absence of externalities, the equilibrium of a free market competitive economy will be Pareto Opel. In the 1990s, financial derivatives of many different complicated types were introduced and then they grew wildly. But economists offered few warnings. Instead, instead they were most prominently telling the story that the new securities would be benign. The new securities would help people hedge against risk. Based on this reasoning, and you can read it, there's a speed, the US Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 greatly restricted the regulation of financial derivatives. The story behind this deregulation failed to see that financial markets served two functions. They matched savers with investors and that's probably a good thing. That's good. But financial markets are also a gambling casino and thus also a way to build the unwarranted and that's banned. So the spread of these derivatives has greatly increased the fragility of financial markets. The securities can be designed to do people into taking risks they had never intended.  So the markets for derivatives have been a playing field to fish people for fools. Dennis referred to that, which resulted in the worldwide financial crash of 2008. So let me give you another story. Okay, so another story about global warming. The first inconvenient truth about global warming is the physical problem of global warming itself. That's the story that the public tells itself. But then, oh no, but then there's a second inconvenient truth. That second inconvenient truth is the story that the public is telling itself. At the extreme, that story says that it's a hoax. Yet more prevalent, at least from the surveys, is failure to perceive the urgency of acting against global warming. And so what we see is year after year after year after year slips by and the threat gets ever worse. Okay. All right, so now I'm going to give you an indication of the ubiquity of stories. So these stories that people are telling themselves are simply everywhere. So I'm going to give you an indication of the ubiquity of stories in any capitalist economy. So you see it on any commercial street in any tap. You see this in Edinburgh and almost anywhere. The shop windows are there, there to induce you to tell yourself a story that gets you to come in and buy. So in the United States, in the old days, on shopping streets in suburban areas, there used to be pet stores that placed puppies in the window. And there was an old song, which the older of us will probably remember. So Patti Pave, the singer, is coming down the street. Okay. And she sees such a puppy and she sings. Now I hope you don't mind if I sing. Okay, you don't have to have my sing. So how much is that doggy in the window? I do have the one with the waggly tail. How much is that doggy in the window? Or I do hope that doggy's for sale. So some people know that first for us. But I think almost nobody knows what comes next. So let me give you what comes next. So I must take a trip to California and leave my poor sweetheart alone. If he has a dog, he won't be lonesome and the doggy will have a good home. So I don't know if it's intentional. I think it is. But this song has a beautiful ambiguity. On the one hand, the girl's purchase may be marvelously considerate. Her relationship with her boyfriend may be perfect. And every time the doggy wags its tail, the boyfriend will be reminded of their beautiful romance. Okay, that's one thing. On the other hand, the relationship may be a disaster. The girl may be totally scatter-buried. And every time the doggy needs to be walked, the boyfriend will have to take care of it. And he will also be reminded of the failed relationship. So life in a capitalist economy is therefore not just an opportunity to get what you want. It's about the creation and spread of stories, these stories that motivate us, that influence you to come in and buy. So those stories are to get you to buy, irrespective of whether the purchase is good for you or not. So what is the general lesson? So now let me give you a general lesson. And I think this is the general lesson that was coming from Jean-Paul and was coming from Robbie. These stories are important and they are something that you can actually model. We can do what economists do with them and we ought to and not to do so is wrong. Okay, so let's see what I said. The world's problems are not just the fundamental physical problems like global warming itself. The world's problems also include the stories, the stories that people tell themselves that get us into physical problems. And they also include the stories that keep us from dealing with those problems effectively when they rise. And so as illustrations, we saw, I guess, five of them. The Euro, Communists, Financial Derivatives, Global Warming and then we saw the doggie. Okay, so let's go back to Jean-Paul and Robbie. So bit then, the presentations by Jean-Paul and Robbie have given us examples regarding how our economics can be opened up to new questions. So what and why and where do those stories come from and what are their consequences? So the major job of leaders and politicians is telling the stories that get people to make the right decisions. That's what those people should be doing. So that storytelling gets people to understand the world. Oh no, no, Robbie referred to that. But also to mutually cooperate and to overcome their differences and that's what happens if we're successful. So hopefully this is opening up an important new area for new economic things. So thanks. Before we will overrun by about five minutes but before we start taking questions from the floor, I'd like to make an attempt at pulling all of this together. We talked about this shortly before we came into this room. And we are developing slowly a narrative on the narrative of economics. There are three basic functions that narratives seem to fulfill. At least that's what I think at the moment. One is that narratives help us make sense of our physical and social world. We need to have mental models of what goes on that enables us to focus on certain things and ignore everything else. And so narratives help us do that and focus on certain causal relations within the world that help us predict events. That's one role of narratives. Second role of narratives is that they motivate us and provide a normative structure for what we do. That came out very strongly in the two papers. In fact, all three. And norms and values play a very large role in this. And thirdly, narratives structure our social space. They generate social structures, provide legitimate hierarchies within which we can find our place in society. They assign social roles to us. And thereby also assign power relationships among us. And that too figured very strongly in these stories.  We are the only animal that can cooperate in very large numbers flexibly. Ants can cooperate in larger numbers, but they lack flexibility. Chimps, great apes can cooperate flexibly, but only in small numbers because they need to know one another. We have the instrument of narratives that gives us a sense of an imagined order. And that imagined order enables strangers to cooperate because everyone who's part of this imagined order knows their place within it. And that permits us to coordinate our activities to an extraordinary degree. Now narratives of course are created and they can also implode. While they are going full swing, we find it difficult to imagine their implosion. But the fall of communism for example is an example of an implosion of a narrative that seemed virtually immortal at the time. Now the question that I've asked myself that plagues me is why is this so difficult to understand for economists and why is there so much resistance against it? And I'd just like to give you my hunch. Which is ever since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, we have adopted this instrumental approach to reality where we have a disengaged objectivity towards the world. The individual observes the world, gathers data from it. And that has released a huge amount of scientific discovery, innovation and for the first time in history over the past 350 years has enabled us to grow from year to year at least that's weights of society. And that has been done with a view to solving human problems. And now the big question that we have to ask ourselves is how did humanity decide that that was the path to follow? And in order to do that, humanity had to convince itself that it was superior to other animals. And the way it did that initially is by saying, oh, we have an eternal soul. And then when people's belief and soul started to implode, they said it was consciousness. And then after that came self-consciousness, which animals may not have. Now, you may imagine that these impassioned speakers who totally forget themselves when they talk about their new discoveries, they're not being self-conscious at all. Does that put them to the level of animals? Possibly not. But in any case, we have created a narrative that makes us superior. And that narrative has achieved a state of affairs where nowadays 90% of all large animals are domesticated. Most of them undergoing huge amount of suffering. Now, the narrative is based on the fact that each individual has enormous worth. And what we've been talking about here is that the view of an individual as someone who is, cannot be, has temporal stability and is an entity that survives intact like the eternal soul does. Individual means something that cannot be divided. An indivisible essence. That is what is being disputed here. If the triumph of humanity results from mass cooperation that depends on narratives and social forces that shape our behavior, then the individual is not necessarily a temporally stable identity. And that undermines the basic idea that has propelled us since the Enlightenment. I think that is why we're stuck and that's why there's so much resistance to this thinking. But in any case, I will stop and take your questions. Yes, please. Thanks very much. I think this question is probably not best directed. That's obvious because if you get your, the specific models you show, I think illustrates one of the folks that came down. Just as it's obvious, you're drawing good critical attention to the error of sort of Robinson Crusoe aeronics where we start with a fixed utility function and then we socialize them by just adding Friday and then we'll see. On the other hand, we don't want to swing to the other mistake of holding socially given narratives as fixed items. And so what, how long does it seem to be missing from the model? So let's just take the adolescent model. Something that's been emphasized by Bergen-Martens and I've put it in some models where back in our years is once an individual chooses a group, they need to add value to the group. They're under pressure to add value to the group, partly by differentiating. So they need a story, not a story of themselves, right? Not just model the group story, but figure out how to tell a new story that is the story of themselves that's compatible with the group story and crucially differentiated from the story of the other group. So that they can add more value to the in-group than other members of the in-group, right? Because they've got profit into them. Those internal stories. And I think that's the way to tell the story of the individual, right? So the individual that I'm advocating that arises from their efforts to differentiate the inside of the group. Very good. So I think you bring up a lot of good points. I think the key theme I'm taking from what you said is that somehow, one in fact has to think, when one's thinking about people as part of groups and having group identities, we can't lose sight of the fact that people continue to have individual identities. So people are deriving part of their esteem from the group, but they're also deriving esteem from individual achievements.  You might like to be part of a group. Are you accepted? So this paper I was sort of, you know, I only touched on briefly. There is an element of that. You might be excluded from a group and you might have to perform as an individual in order to be accepted as part of a group. So I think that's very much part of it. And that also speaks to some things Sean Paul was talking about in the clubs context. So I take your points. I think they're great. In order to have a number of questions, I will ask you to keep them very short. So if we can have a short question and answers. Yes, please. Thank you very much. So I mean, I thought it was really interesting. One of the things I want to push you on is that I thought maybe you're still presenting identities as false from what Dennis said. Identity as a more stable and coherent is really warranted, right? So Robert, you talked about identity as a package of the new, but maybe it's just a set of legged pieces that kind of gets recombined all the time in various ways, some of which we are not aware. So my questions are first of all, what's the role of the unconscious in how you think about identity and narratives? And do you think we can really abstract away from very specific situational context, decision context, in how we make decisions in general? Great. You want me to take? Anybody or all? Yeah. I think you're probably thinking about this more than... Sure. I mean, one thing I would say, I like everything you said, is that I think there are high and low frequencies to these things. So there might be something you believe for a moment in one context, and then in another context, you stop believing you might believe the exact opposite of that. There are some things that are very stable. So I think identities have both of these dimensions to it and there's a malleability to it and there can be inconsistencies in belief as context change. So I think that that's very important. Yeah. Let me just add one line to that. The standard economic model that everybody's consistent, that is an extremely singular assumption. The fact is that the more interest, this gives rise to just a whole very interesting topology where people are, you're like Patty Page going down the street and suddenly you think of this puppy. Of course you bring the puppy back home and it's a terrible news. So people are changing as they go along and that's one of the things that stories opens up. So one of the things that's been raised is the dynamic nature of these identities, right, in both questions. And you could have identities having different meanings, different what it means to be a man or a woman, for example, has changed over time. So and that conditions your behavior. For example, if being an economist means having predominantly male traits, then that is the kind of tax on participation for women and that can change over time with the representation of women. So I've got a recent, my current work is on identity based inequality and this kind of thing. So the more representation, the less the tax there is on women participating and then the higher the representation and so forth. But that does not necessarily, and you can model less, okay, using elaborating what we've kind of said here. That doesn't mean you're going to get equal participation in the end. You could get stuck in very unequal states as a result of this feedback, even for ex-anti-identical populations. And then you can look at how this, or the multiplier effects of identity in this dynamic process. So this can all be done in a dynamic way. Since we've overshot, I will take one more question and then the rest will be done in the break. If we can have you, yes, please. No, no, she was. So Robin would address part of it, but let me address, so it does this kind of model of it. When we do this model, are we doing it completely in isolation from ethnographic evidence, for example, on why women fail, survey evidence, interview evidence with women? And no, I mean, the large part of the references in the paper are from ethnographic work. But in some sense, we go beyond this, because that's about the individual motivation. And when we're interested in the social interactions, we have to understand how these individual motivations, these individual decisions, aggregate into kind of social norms. And that's the virtue of doing a model.  That's the virtue of doing the modeling. Okay, so I'll address one piece of what you said, which is could we as a group respect each other's diversity and kind of have a preference for diversity? And I think the answer is yes. So I mean, I think what we're trying to do is we're given, this is a very complex world that gets opened up here. So I think we're trying to draw out a piece of it that's relatively simple that we can sort of begin to think about. But could we have our individual differences and value our individual differences? I think in fact, one could. That's something that is possible and we do see. I think that's actually rather American kind of thing to do is we sort of form groups where we respect our individuality. So I think what you said is very right. Good, I'll have to bring this to a close. But I do encourage those who'd like to ask questions to come forward and use the break. Thank you so much for coming. It's a pleasure to be here.


Over the past few weeks, I've had the pleasure of using the LG 49WQ95C. I'll first impression from unboxing, I was really happy and someone surprised that the monitor was lighter than expected. As much as I love having the extra screen real estate, the display and image quality has been my favorite thing about this monitor. Essentially, you have two 27 inch 2560x1440 monitors packed in a one display without an extra bezel in the middle, which has made my experience incredible when it comes to productivity. The IPS display has a 5120x1440 resolution at 144 hertz with a 178 degree wide viewing angle, which allows for the colors brightness and contrast to remain consistent throughout the entirety of the screen. Before using this monitor, my biggest concern was my viewing experience, whether I be turning my head back and forth in distortion, but I can say that I haven't really experienced that at all while using this monitor. This monitor has a modest 3800R screen curvature, so you don't have to worry about the distortion of important details that you're viewing. Peak brightness also is 400 nits, so even when the sun is blasting through my home office, the image remains colorful, sharp, and bright. The first thing that comes to mind when it comes to this type of monitor is being very productive, specifically for coding and video editing. However, my gaming experience has been exceptional even when playing some of my favorite fast-paced games like Call of Duty Modern Warfare and The New God of War thanks to the 144 hertz refresh rate and the about 4ms of input lag. As a developer, I typically have multiple windows open simultaneously, and this is a first monitor where I don't feel like my screen layout is cramped, and that's thanks to the 32x9 Super Ultra Wide Display and Using Magnet, a layout manager for Mac OS. If you're looking for a versatile 49-inch display where you can do professional work, such as coding or professional video editing, along with having a great gaming experience, this monitor is a no-brainer. The screen is used just be prepared for the desk space needed for this Super Ultra Wide Monitor. Once again, thank you to LG for sponsoring today's video. I've been a fan of ultra wide monitors for years now, and by years I mean like three years. Back when I first started exploring the whole desk setup world, trying to figure out what my desk setup and work from home style was going to be, along with trying to figure out which monitors are the best based on the job that you're doing. And for me, I was a front-end software engineer working in a digital marketing department, so I spent a ton of time in Photoshop, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code, so I needed a ton of screen real estate. And at the time, I thought the dual monitor desk setup was the best-looking desk setup, and I quickly realized that dual monitor desk setup just wasn't for me. My opinion, I love the look of an ultra wide monitor. For one, there's a lot less cable management, and it just makes your desk setup look so clean. All right, these pillows look crazy in the back. I got to fix these really quick and do a little karate chop. You probably noticed in the beginning of the video when I did my unboxing and added the LG 5K. My desk was facing the window, and that just wasn't really practical for me. It was just way too bright, and it was just my eyes restraining. On top of that, the setup looks way better with a wall behind it where I install. There's like a lot less white space, and things just come together better. Plus, it's such a vibe to just look out and just see the city with an unobstructed view. My desk setup hasn't changed a ton. I'm still using the same desk mat, but there's one thing I don't change that often, and it's my desk mat. So I'm still using this leather desk mat from ErgonOffice. It has a gazillion scratches. It has the character of a vintage BMW. That might not be a good example, but this thing looks pretty vintage and worn down. I did upgrade my speakers. The funny thing is I decided to upgrade my speakers when I had the least amount of desk real estate since I have this ultra ultra wide monitor, but I went with the Kanto U4s. I tried the Kanto U6s, and those are way too big, but the U4s are perfect. I have one speaker kind of behind the monitor, and then I have another that's like along the side of the monitor. But these speakers sound so amazing, and they look so good, especially since I added the Kanto speaker stands. It just elevates the experience of the setup, and then there are just some subtle changes like in my last desk setup. When we lived in New Jersey, I was using an Ikea floating shelf, and I switched to the Grovemade floating shelf because it just is more aesthetically pleasing. Plus, Grovemade sent these over to me, and I couldn't just let them sit. The books I'm reading right now are really the only book I'm reading right now is The Defining Decade. That book is so good. If you are in your 20s, up to your early 30s, you got to read this book. And I don't read a lot of books, so that's saying a lot. Still using the Grovemade Wood MagSafe stand, it's actually in this walnut color, but everything else is maple. It's kind of cohesive in terms of the contrast, because the leather desk mat is also a walnut color. I don't know, whatever. You could break rules this 2023. Everything doesn't have to be the same wood finish. I definitely need to upgrade or change my picture frame, which almost feels counterproductive because this is supposed to be an ultimate ultra-wide desk setup. This isn't like the ultimate studio. That's like a whole another video. Give this video a thumbs up or comment studio vid if you want me to do an ultimate New York City studio tour. Filming these videos during sunset really hits. It makes me feel like I'm waiting till the last minute. The lighting, the vibe, the color looks so good. I barely even need to do any adjustments and posts. I'm still using the maple finish wood headphone stand by Grovemade. It looks so good. It doesn't matter what your overhead headphone is. It just looks so clean. I interchange it with the AirPods Max and Sony WH100-1000MX5.  Of course, the ultimate combo is what I like to call it, the MX Master 3S and MX Mechanical for Mac. The best mouse and keyboard combination in the market. I do plan on going with a white colorway for the MX Keys Mechanical since we're getting into spring summer. You definitely have to have a headphone stand. I'd say there are like two, three, four. There's like five core essentials for a desk setup. And that's obviously excluding the monitor. I know some people like to have a laptop as their monitor, but I think that's kind of silly. Gotta have some computer speakers, have to have a desk mat, obviously have to have a keyboard and mouse. And then the other thing that I definitely recommend is having a headphone stand. So wifey got me the Seasons Diffuser from Essence for Valentine's Day. That was so thoughtful. But this diffuser is one of the most modern, interesting looking diffusers I've seen. And it can fit into your desk setup aesthetic like perfectly, no matter what your setup is, in my opinion, because it's really low key. I love the ribbing around the diffuser. It smells really good. It also has a light underneath. So it can add to your aesthetic at night and just brighten up your space. But I definitely recommend copying one of these. I'm pretty sure it's on sale right now. So that concludes this ultimate ultra wide desk setup video. I'm going to enjoy this sunset and I might even film a time lapse to close out this video. Thank you again to everyone who's been on this journey with me. It's amazing to be able to work with some of my favorite brands that always dreamed of working with like LG. So thank you to LG for sponsoring today's video and sending over the LG 49 inch 5k ultra wide monitor. This thing is a beast. As always have a blessed rest of your week and I'll see y'all soon. I'm about to start posting more consistently, not at its spring time and it doesn't get dark till after seven. With that said, peace.