1) Pepsi is calculating the carbon footprints of popular food products like Tropicana orange juice, Quaker granola bars, and Pepsi cola. No plans yet to put those footprints on its boxes, a la Sapporo.
2) More on credit cards. Companies will change interest rates depending on where you shop. They call it behavioral financing. The minimum payment acts as an anchor, but companies don’t want to anchor you on such a low number that you pile up so much interest that you go bankrupt. They want to push your debt load right up to the penultimate straw that breaks the camel’s back. Ahem, yours.
3) A Council of Economic Advisers? How about a Council of Psychological Advisers, says one psychologist.
4) A German group adapts the fly-in-the-urinal idea to Bulimia. Reducing it, that is. Hat tip: John Hsu.
Tags: credit cards, environment, urinals
Nudge blog 
February 2, 2009 at 7:53 pm |
Taking photos of all the things that one eats is easy to do today and acts as a nudge to eat better.
February 2, 2009 at 7:57 pm |
Here is an Economic nudge:
Capital markets are unstable. In the past there was no way to make them stable. But today we have computer power that can be used to make them stable. By using the greater computer power of today we can have a much higher turn over of capital in the capital market. This higher turnover will make the market harder to game or control and the market will no longer have the unstable run ups or declines. Who can change or control the market when say 20% of the capital is trading each day. So now that we have the compute power to provide for all these transactions that will smooth out the market how to we force people to turn over at a rate of 20% a day? Easy, put a cap gains tax of 0% (zero) on all gains of 7 days or less and put a cap gains tax of 90% of all gains of more than 7 days. The likes of Yahoo, Micosoft and/or Sun Micro Systems will give us the systems that will provide automated software agents to support turning over one’s investments every 7 days (based on the specs you give the agent). A system like this will make the financial markets work as smoothly as the local fruit market.