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Are We There Yet? (Or Does It Matter?)

02.12.2012

I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s latest book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and wondering about connections to the way we view the economy and our places in it. For example, my wife has lived in Austin since 1994 and I occasionally hear her compare today’s workplace to what it was like here in the dot-com fueled late 1990s. I think that experience made such a strong impression on people in Austin because it was so unlike anything that came before it. It defined “the new normal,” and even though we recognize it as a bubble now, it’s difficult to readjust your expectations, especially if you were a recent college graduate experiencing the “real world” for the first time. As Kahneman points out, humans are remarkably bad at navigating anomalies. We’re slaves to our reference points.

Of course, that occurred to me right after I spent several hours trying to figure out exactly when employment in Austin had reached a new post-recession peak. At least it’s a nice chart (click on it for larger version):

Kahneman 1, Kelsey 0.