Word: idea
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...told hard-charging professionals in the City of London just a few months ago that they should take a 20% pay cut to work one day less per week, they would have likely mocked the idea as a French socialist plot to undermine the British economy. But when the U.K. arm of accounting firm KPMG recently asked its staff if they would be willing to reduce their workweek - and thereby save jobs - in the event that business dried up, an overwhelming 85% signed on. About 200 employees in the tax division have already shifted to a four-day week, says...
...rise of short-work programs and pay cuts in industry as a natural reaction to the crisis. In the case of accountants KPMG, he says, "if you have a highly skilled workforce that you don't want to lose, it can make a lot of sense." But the idea of governments getting involved with big subsidies for such schemes on a regular basis makes him shudder. "There will always be jobs that disappear, and in the long run it's not in our interest to keep them," Philpott says. In many places, in the current dire economic circumstances, that...
...other flawed decision makers have chronicled the irrationality of Homo sapiens. Some of our foibles are quite specific, like overvaluing things we have, overeating food in larger containers and overestimating the probability of improbable events - the quirk that made the Meet Barack Obama fundraising lottery such a smart idea. But in general, we're ignorant, shortsighted and biased toward the status quo. We're not as smart as Larry Summers. We procrastinate. Our impulsive ids overwhelm our logical superegos. We plan to lose weight, but ooh - a cupcake! We're especially irrational about money; we'll pay more...
...likely to save money rather than spend it when we get it in a big chunk. Instead, Obama made sure the tax cuts will be paid out through decreased withholding, so our regular paychecks will grow a bit and we'll be less likely to notice the windfall. The idea, an aide explains, is to manipulate us into spending the extra cash...
...couch potatoes. Obama's aides seem to favor nudges that preserve free choice over heavy-handed regulation, an approach Thaler and Sunstein, the co-authors of Nudge, call "libertarian paternalism." But it's still paternalism, and Sunstein will have the power to put it into action. The idea of public officials, even well-meaning ones, trying to engineer our private behavior to produce change can seem a bit creepy...