Burden of Decision

Close to a year after USA has approved vehicles to drive itself, Saudi Arabia is just legislating that women should be driving vehicles, come June 2018. For some ridiculous religious reasons, the Saudi women have been in this bondage of not being allowed to either express themselves or live life to the fullest despite their level of literacy for decade. Though, the Kingdom in lifting the ban did not concede it was a bad decision. Very few people ever admit to mistake anyway.

While this was happening in Asia, down in the continent of Europe, Professor Richard Thaler was being awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on behavioral economics. A section of economics that tries to understand how humans make decisions,especially the bad ones.

Professor Thaler is one of the leading experts in the relatively new field that combines psychology with economics. For almost 50 years, he has made a career of studying people's poor choices. How could such a seemingly innocuous human endeavour attract such a high level of elitist attraction? From major governmental decisions that have impacted humanity down to trivial home decisions of what Tv channel to watch have all in different ways takes it's toll on us all.

Here is the thing: For the second consecutive year, there were no women among the 2017 Nobel Prize laureates. The head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the committees that choose Nobel Prize winners will meet this winter to discuss gender and ethnic diversity issues in the awards. Meanwhile, each of the six prizes is chosen by a different committee, three of which are currently headed by women.

Back home, The decision to appoint Aisha Ahmad as the new CBN deputy governor is generating controversy not award. And fingers are pointing, once again to Mr President for his tribalistic choice of decision. This position is by law subject to the ratification of the senate,but most people are of the opinion that a lot of our senators are not even qualified. The logic is that since they too did not get there on merit,but on other consideration, they cannot be relied upon to take a good decision. Is there a quandary here? Let's ask Prof Thaler, the latest Nobel Laureate!

Asked by phone what he planned to do with his $1.1 million prize, Thaler joked that he intended to spend it “as irrationally as possible”.