Your Money or Your Life

The pandemic offers numerous applications of very basic microeconomics concepts and their extension to other aspects of economic life. It also creates an opportunity for better understanding of how the market works and its effects on the economy and society. Allocation of a scarce resource is the definition of economics. There have been countless examples of scarcity (toilet paper, vaccines). How do we decide how to allocate those goods, especially when the market fails? The pandemic is a classic illustration of tradeoffs. In particular, there are tradeoffs between shutting (or re-opening) the economy and loss of human life; a rational decision would compare the costs and the benefits. Lastly, there are countless examples of the unequal economic effects of the virus and their implications for public policy.

Analyzing Vaccination Priority Judgments for 132 Occupations Using Word Vector Models

Most human societies conduct a high degree of division of labor based on occupation. However, determining the occupational field that should be allocated a scarce resource such as vaccine is a topic of debate, especially considering the COVID-19 situation. Though it is crucial that we understand and anticipate people’s judgments on resource allocation prioritization, quantifying the concept of occupation is a difficult task. In this study, we investigated how well people’s judgments on vaccination prioritization for different occupations could be modeled by quantifying their knowledge representation of occupations as word vectors in a vector space. The results showed that the model that quantified occupations as word vectors indicated high out-of-sample prediction accuracy, enabling us to explore the psychological dimension underlying the participants’ judgments. These results indicated that using word vectors for modeling human judgments about everyday concepts allowed prediction of performance and understanding of judgment mechanisms.

Concluding Thoughts

This brief concluding chapter draws the threads of the previous chapters together. Previous work on human decision-making has tended to conclude that rationality is a scarce resource and most cognition is arational or irrational. Pushback against this view has come from proponents of ecological rationality. They concede, in effect, that our decision-making is irrational, inasmuch as it fails to respond to good information, but argue that it is rational in a broader sense: we better achieve our epistemic goals by believing arationally. This chapter argues that the evidence surveyed in the previous chapters shows that this is false: we respond rationally to the higher-order evidence we’re presented with, and there’s therefore no need to appeal to ecological rationality to defend our self-image as rational agents. Once we recognize the pervasiveness of higher-order evidence, we can vindicate something very like the Enlightenment picture of ourselves as rational animals.

Oxygen and Ventilator Logistics during California’s COVID-19 Surge-When Oxygen becomes a Scarce Resource

The state of California, in the United States of America, has a population of nearly 40 million people and is the 5th largest economy in the world. During the COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease) pandemic in 2020-2021, the state experienced a medical surge that stressed its sophisticated healthcare and public health system. During this period, ventilators, oxygen, and other equipment necessary for providing ventilatory support became a scarce resource in many healthcare settings. When demand overwhelms supply, creative solutions are required at all levels of disaster management and healthcare. This paper describes the disaster response by the state of California to mitigate the emergency demands for oxygen delivery resources.

How does the Booming Short Video Affect Attention Economy?

The 21st century is the era of new media. We-media, social media, short videos have emerged one after another. Not only have they changed the form of media, but also they have brought tremendous changes in terms of media functions, communication methods and communication relationship etc. Focused on the development of short video platforms in China in the last decade, this essay analyzes the impact of short videos on society, economy, and humanities. Also, it aims to propose a solution to the problem "how to make good use of the scarce resource of attention and truly realize the attention economy".