Abstract
Deadweight losses are the worst! These are losses where no one gains. You lose, I lose, everyone loses. The basic example of a deadweight loss is when a thief steals your photo album. The thief can’t sell the album to anyone other than you because you are the only person who finds value in the photos,
My previous three installments in this series is, in many ways, were an attempt to highlight some reasons our actions fail to align with our good intentions. Bias, at its heart, is the necessary result of having to make choices between options. Over time, our choices lead us to experiences, some of which work, maybe not perfectly, but we end up judging them well enough. With this experience in hand, we can often go on autopilot, relying on our experiences as a guide in judging new information. So when we are biased against something, it is often because of how that something jibes with our past experiences, including our past social interactions and the values, beliefs, and norms that emerge from those interactions. Our Homer brains can, and often do, handle this kind of calculation.