Why Politicians Keep Getting It So Wrong

A politician once claimed he could live on £53 a week in benefits. It made me wonder whether he was lying or genuinely believed it.

For years, we've argued about poverty as though it's simply a disagreement over ideology:
Left versus Right. More spending versus less spending. Growth versus redistribution.
But what if there's another explanation?

Research from psychology and neuroscience suggests that as people gain power, wealth and status, the brain becomes less accurate at modelling the experiences of those below them, and our empathy and mirroring systems become less engaged while we become more likely to surround ourselves with people like ourselves so we start mistaking our own experience for everyone else's.

We account for human bias in medicine, in aviation or the justice system.....
So why don't we account for it when designing economic policy that affects millions of people?

This video explores the behavioural science behind government decision making and whether one of the biggest problems in modern economics isn't bad intentions...but bad perspective.

Chapters
00:00 - 02:40 Intro
02:40 - 04:07 The evidence we leave out of Economic policy
04:07 - 06:06 Power Paradox Research Findings
06:06 - 07:48 The compounding problem of Homophily
07:48 - 08:42 My personal experience with homophily and social mobility
08:42 - 11:00 The life-jacket analogy
11:00 - 12:46 How other high-stakes domains handle blind spots
12:46 - 14:06 The unanswered questions in economic policy making
14:06 - 17:09 What can we do about it?
17:09 - 18:08 We need to apply the science across the board

Sources / Studies Referenced
- The Power Paradox, Dacher Keltner: https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=2187
- Power, approach, and inhibition, Dacher Keltner, Deborah H Gruenfeld, Cameron Anderson: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12747524/
- Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: how the rich are different from the poor: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22775498/
- Power changes how the brain responds to others: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23815455/
- Social and economics networks: https://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/netbook.pdf
- Elitist Britain 2019: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5d0cd9a7ed915d094666a78d/Elitist_Britain_2019.pdf
- The many faces of liberalism - Big Govt. vs Free Markets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsGRTGF8oKg

I’m Barry Ferns – a comedian whose personal journey through failure, homelessness, and rebuilding led me to explore the socio and behavioural economics of inequality.

This channel digs into how systems of power shape our identity, behaviour, and beliefs, and how we can shift the stories we tell ourselves and each other about poverty, inequality, and who’s to blame.

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