When It Comes To The Mental World,

The Problem With Opportunity Cost Is That Opportunity Cost Is Divided Among Many, Many Things.

Take A Brilliant, Creative Social Scientist, Without Any Respect For Conventional Wisdom And You Get Ellen Langer. She Is A Fantastic Storyteller, And Counterclockwise Is A Fascinating Story About The Unexpected Ways In Which Our Minds And Bodies Are Connected.

It Is True That From A Behavioral Economics Perspective We Are Fallible, Easily Confused, Not That Smart, And Often Irrational. We Are More Like Homer Simpson Than Superman. So From This Perspective It Is Rather Depressing. But At The Same Time There Is Also A Silver Lining. There Are Free Lunches!

...[d]ivision Of Labor, In My Mind, Is One Of The Dangers Of Work-based Technology. Modern It Infrastructure Allows Us To Break Projects Into Very Small, Discrete Parts And Assign Each Person To Do Only One Of The Many Parts. In So Doing, Companies Run The Risk Of Taking Away Employees' Sense Of The Big Picture, Purpose, And Sense Of Completion.

We Have Very Strong Intuitions About All Kinds Of Things — Our Own Ability, How The Economy Works, How We Should Pay School Teachers. But Unless We Start Testing Those Intuitions, We’re Not Going To Do Better.