Second, you’re hiring someone to give you advice, which means you might not have the strongest grasp on the issue for which you hired the consultant. If that’s the case, you might over-weight the advice the consultant gives you (say, one possible decision of several) or be unable to replicate the thought process behind the strategy later. Furthermore, if you want to seek more advice later you’ll have to pay for it.

Third, it’s possible that the consultant doesn’t understand your situation and/or gives you bad advice. They might know that they don’t know very much and conceal that information from you, or they may be unaware of the depths of their unaware-ness and thus unknowingly give you bad advice. Fortunately, I don’t think this is a very big issue. Consultants have reputations, and clients can communicate: if you give bad advice too often your clients will talk and you may find yourself out of business.

Fourth, the nature of the advice-giving game is to be vague and give shaman-like answers. If your answers and predictions are specific and wrong, you can lose credibility; just ask a fortune teller. Especially because a firm’s hiring you to give them advice in an area about which the firm doesn’t have much knowledge, they’ll believe most of the things that you say to them. This may lead a firm to believe that consultants are telling them useful things, when in fact the firm is not giving very profitable, or actionable, advice. You’re hiring the firm to give you profitable advice but it may not be in their incentive to do so, if they can get away with delivering shaman-like answers.

Fifth, there’s a selection bias at play. Despite the problems listed above, it’s likely that consultants provide firms with value in excess of the costs of hiring them. Smart firms realize this, and want to hire consultants. But because they’re smart firms, they’re probably ahead of the curve and consultants can only provide them with limited amounts of profitable advice. The firms that need consultants the most are unlikely to hire them.

What matters, from a public policy perspective, isn’t any given choice but the total amount of electricity I use. If they’re really interested in environmental quality, policy makers shouldn’t care how households get to that total. They should just raise the price of electricity, through taxes or higher rates, to discourage using it.

Instead, the law raises the price of light bulbs, but not the price of using them. In fact, its supporters loudly proclaim that the new bulbs will cost less to use. If true, the savings could encourage people to keep the lights on longer. (via)

In 2009 I wrote about a similar California proposal to ban high-energy-use TV’s.

“I really did travel with a tour company that decided to allow us to paint the school that was on their bike route. We painted it poorly, I must say, as we rushed to complete it in one day (and most of us felt too tired to put in a big effort). We probably spent $200 on paint (25% of which we dropped on the floor). The project was in rural Thailand, and $200 could have probably bought a lot of educational resources, hired a few teachers for a month, or done a list of other things which would have added more educational value than our patchy blue paint job. If they insisted on painting, if they had instead funded $3000 towards a locally identified educational need (for example, a weekly life-skills training course), plus bought $200 worth of paint, at least then our combined efforts would have been more than just the blue paint on the floor.”

Voluntourism creates an unhealthy culture:

“As Saundra has told us over and over again and as I have learned through seeing the negative effects of an unbridled tourism culture of giving things away “to the poor people”, giving things to people is never going to solve their problems. Instead, it can destroy local markets, create community jealousies, and create a culture of dependency.”

Tour companies don’t monitor projects effectively:

“A tour company in India allowed tourists to hand out goats to families on their tours. In the middle of the tour, a person from a nearby village came and told the director that the man who had been put in charge of choosing which poor families should get the goats had been charging the families for the goats for years. The tour company had been making their English speaking tour guide rich, were not helping “the poorest of the poor” that they claimed to be, and had furthered corruption and mistrust in the village.”

“There are many orphanages in Cambodia which take volunteers to teach English. Some come for a few weeks, others for a few days. When they leave, the classes have no teacher, there is no curriculum to ensure that the students aren’t learning “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” every day, and the school is not better able to solve its own problems in the future because of the volunteer’s visit. If skilled teachers had spent time teaching English teachers English, they would have improved the system at least slightly, but sadly, everyone just wants to pet the cute kids.”

Last but not least, the tours “foster moral imperialism” among volunteers:

This one is the biggest problem I think, but the least talked about. We assume, because we come from wealthier places with better education systems, that we can come into any new place without knowing much about the culture or the people, and we can fix things. We can’t! THEY, the people who live there and know the place well, can. Our job in the development world can and should be to support them in doing so. So, we can’t assume we can come do it for them and “save the babies” by visiting an orphanage for a few hours on our trip to India. And we sure shouldn’t think that our time is oh so valuable that we should fundraise money to pay for OUR flights to go paint a school poorly. My job, in running a tour operation, is to educate travelers on at least these two points: improvements take time, and the people we are visiting have just as much—if not more—to teach us as we have to teach them.

The bottom line is that “voluntourists” are more interested in showing that they care than in actually helping make a difference. This is one reason why I could never be a college admissions officer; I would reject outright any student that wrote about this sort of work in glowing terms (and I know many do).

I was pretty careful in vetting organizations at the beginning of the trip, and I know that the organization I’m working for does things the right way. I don’t have any illusions about the value of the work I’m doing. I tend to think of the main point of my trip as spending time traveling, learning about a different culture and trying to learn several specific skills.

It became clear very quickly that I don’t know much about the culture, and I definitely don’t know enough Hindi to get by. I do have some useful skills; I’ve been spending more than my fair share of time doing things for the NGO that I am good at, in particular redesigning their website to attract more money in donations (the revenue from which, when complete, will far exceed the cost of the plane flight), and writing grant proposals in English.

Traveling to a foreign country is an excellent experience and I recommend it, if you or your parents have the means. The longer you can stay the better, but even if you can only go for one week, don’t pay for one of these trips though. Aim for one of the smaller cities, then a month before you leave, buy a phrasebook and practice. Once you get there, rent a bike/car and get out into the countryside, eat the local food and try your best to make conversation.

Should taking some time to think of an answer help or hurt your image in the interviewer’s eyes? Responding quickly signals confidence, and intelligence. While I expect the interviewers at most firms to attempt to overcome this quick-response bias they might not do so. Responding quickly means you might not have thought the answer all the way through, especially to a difficult question. On the other hand if the applicant pool is large and the number of acceptances small, the best candidates will be able to respond to the question at hand accurately and quickly.

You are not expected to be honest in interviews. “I want this job because it pays very well” or “I want this job because it will give me high status” are not acceptable answers.

Every day, a U.S. Air Force cargo plane spends 5 hours flying over Haiti broadcasting a recorded message, no doubt made at the urging of Washington officials, from Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington, stating: “Listen, don’t rush on boats to leave the country. If you do this, we’ll all have even worse problems. Because, I’ll be honest with you: If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.”

One thing that will help Haitians more than anything else is allowing them to immigrate to areas that actually have functioning economies. We are only willing to go so far to save a human life.

Update: From the Aid Watch blog: “Start here: What has done the most, to date, to lift Haitians out of poverty? That answer is easy. Leaving Haiti brought more Haitians out of poverty than anything else that has ever been tried: any aid project in Haiti, or any trade preference for Haiti. See my note and video posted the day before Haiti’s catastrophe.”

Academia does not encourage taking shortcuts, indeed, teachers frown upon taking shortcuts. Teachers don’t like it when students use Cliff Notes or brag about their grades even though they did none of the reading. Does doing all of the required work for a course correlate with receiving a good grade? Yes, but if there’s a way to earn the same grade (and learn the same amount of material) while spending half as much time on it, I would probably do that. One example is fixed-time programming – you say “I’ll try to find a solution within 30 minutes” to a programming problem and if you don’t find it, you let the problem go, or try an easier approach. My CS teachers don’t talk too much about how to code more efficiently, even though our time as students is valuable.

The academic disdain for shortcuts probably springs from the fact that acquiring a credential like a masters or a Ph.D requires a fixed investment of time, which enhances the quality of the signal provided by higher education. Naturally teachers want their students to do the same, “put in the hours” so to speak. But ask people like Cal Newport and they’ll tell you to ditch the workaholic approach to school, because there’s an easier way that gets better results.

This is not to be confused with doing half-assed work or turning in a first draft of a paper. H/t to Josh Siegel.

The most puzzling behavioral phenomenon to understand when it comes to building efficiency is that Most People Won’t Do Sh*t (MPWDS). “Most people” includes people who could make money by doing sh*t, people who say they will do sh*t, even people who have promised to do sh*t. I’ve heard from people who write about energy efficiency for a living, know exactly what to do to make their homes more efficient, and still don’t do sh*t. It’s hard to disentangle the reasons why—some mix of status quo bias, hyperbolic discounting, and loss aversion to begin with—but it’s clear that public surveys and polls about this tend to be misleading. What people say they’re willing to do and what they demonstrate they’re willing to do are very different things. Attitudes don’t translate into actions.

We care much more about what others think than we do about the environment. Case in point: when homes in California were outfitted with special devices, showing a happy face if energy consumption was lower than the neighbors, or a red sad face if it was higher than the neighbors, overall energy consumption dropped 40%.