Vygintas Gontis, currently working in Boston, was invited to give a talk to a students of Boston Lithuanian School. Though slides are based on the previous talk, but the narrative is completely new and aimed at younger viewer (though once again it was given in Lithuanian).

Prof. Cars Hommes from University of Amsterdam is mathematician by training (he obtained his Bsc and Msc degrees as mathematician). Primarily he was interested in chaotic dynamics and strange attractors. But later he got interested in economics - he received economical PhD. Now prof. Cars Hommes is one of the most well known economists who setup lab experiments - he studies general features of irrational and heterogeneous economical behavior in safe environment.

We invite you to listen to his interview given to the Institute for New Economic Thinking (you may find INET on YouTube by clicking this link).

Imagine that you and 99 other people were invited to participate in a bet. All of you have to form a line, provide a one dollar bill on which all of you write your number in the line (from 1 to 100). Host will collect all of your one dollar bills and take them to a room with 100 boxes (each box has its own number (from 1 to 100)). Host will place randomly distribute your bills among the boxes. After he has done this, everyone of you one by one will come into the room and look for your own bill, but you will be able to check only 50 boxes. If every player will find his own bill, then you all will win a game - you will regain your dollar as well as you will additionally get another 100 dollars. But if at least one player makes a mistake, you all will lose. So would you sign up for such bet?

Economic inequality is becoming a forgotten topic, but there are much more to be said about it. In this talk, recorded for ted.com website, Richard Wilkinson provides a lot of examples (based on empirical data), which show how large inequality harms human societies. In order to create a better world for all of us, we should strive for larger economic equality.

In our works we frequently refer to bounded rationality and of human beings. This boundedness causes varying inefficiencies in socio-economic systems. These inefficiencies, or bugs, are not just some strange quirk in the system. These bugs often play major role in forming socio-economic systems as they are observed.

This notion is not new in economics as it has its own branch known as behavioral economics (or behavioral finance). Dan Ariely is one of economists who are interested in human brain bugs on individual and global level. In his talk, recorded for ted.com, he develops one of the aspects behind behavioral economics - human tendency to tell small lies and bypass their own moral code.