George Loewenstein is fantastic

I'm taking George Loewenstein's Behavioral Economics seminar this semester. George is really fantastic, not just an outstanding researcher, but a great teacher -- although he seems quite modest about his teaching abilities. Talking about the tenure system of American universities that put overwhelming emphasis on publishing research papers, he said something like "If you are good at teaching, that could be a curse, because when you are best at doing something, even just marginally better than doing anything else, you tend to do it more and more, and getting rewards intrinsically." This is not nearly well-versed as his original sentence. I like these casual and witty remarks.

It's been a long time since I learned so much from a single lecture -- and this is just the beginning of an exciting adventure!

At the end of this seminar I wish I would become so familiar with George that I can finally ask: Are you really the grandson of Sigmund Freud? Although several credible sources confirmed that, I'm still a skeptic. Although it's not unusual to meet great thinkers in leading American institutions, they are all living people, and Freud sounds...really distant and awesome. Not sure how that sort of awe got imprinted in my head.

Will post a paragraph from Adam Smith's "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759), which George dug out to show how behavioral economics actually started from Smith.