Tues, Aug 21st 2012 – The Irish Times

Human life is being monetised in a very crude way, writes JOE HUMPHREYS

IMAGINE IF a loved one of yours died and this triggered a payment to an investor who had been gambling on his or her premature death. How would you feel? This isn’t science fiction. It is the reality of the “life settlement” industry, a growing business which is testing the boundaries of financial ethics.

The practice involves acquiring life assurance policies and then trading them in the same way you would savings bonds. The only difference is profits are maximised if your bonds “mature” quickly – ie if the people in your life settlement portfolio die sooner than expected.

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http://www.irishtimes.com/debate/it-can-t-be-good-for-an-investor-to-have-a-personal-stake-in-other-people-dying-1.540869

May 30th 2012         –          Joe Humphreys        –         The Irish Times

…. When faced with a complex question involving uncertainty (and tomorrow’s poll falls slap-bang into that category) people unconsciously substitute it with an easier question and answer that one instead.

This proven psychological bias helped to earn psychologist Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize for economics. His research into “question substitution” has practical application for sales and marketing but also helps to explain why the referendum debate has been so disjointed.

It may also explain a peculiar phenomenon of this campaign: people frequently saying that the answer they would like to give on Thursday doesn’t match the question they are being offered.

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http://www.irishtimes.com/debate/to-be-or-not-to-be-in-favour-of-the-treaty-that-is-the-only-question-1.524982

Jan 3rd 2011      –        The Irish Times         –         Joe Humphreys

‘THE STRUGGLE of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” the Czech writer Milan Kundera once said. The truth of this statement is underlined by recent attempts by certain politicians, bankers and, yes, journalists too to rewrite the history of the economic collapse to deflect blame from themselves onto others.

This fictionalising of history will no doubt intensify as the general election approaches. While that’s somewhat depressing, it reminds us that we have at our disposal a rich but largely untapped asset in this country – memory.

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http://www.irishtimes.com/debate/boom-time-delusions-fed-by-collective-amnesia-1.1081730