This week’s Distributing the Future has the audio from a really interesting EuroOSCON session by Tor Norretranders. He discusses, among other things, the Ultimatum game, an experimental economics game that I wasn’t familiar with. Check the link for details, but basically, the results are non-intuitive if one presupposes that humans are wired for economic rationality in individual behavior. The experiment has been performed many times, in many different cultures, and behavior runs contrary to the expected economic result.

I love this kind of stuff. It rings true to me as well; there are so many more things to life than that which simply maximizes economic return. It heartens me to think that human beings are perhaps a bit more complicated than that…

The entire session by Tor Norretranders is excellent. Recommended.