This course will cover contemporary social science research on happiness. Topics will include major contributing and non-contributing factors, including money, relationships, technology, and physical health, global and historical perspectives on happiness, and biases and other problems of happiness measurement.

Why is your suburban hometown so boring? Why are American cities racially segregated? How can we make our cities more walkable for the future? I'll run through a crash course of the history, the present, and the future of urban design, and hopefully give you a better understanding of why our cities look the way they do.

Economists seem to have gone to absurd lengths to demonstrate causality in empirical ways. In this course, I'll talk about why we want to know this sort of thing, and I'll sample some of the most clever instrumental variables and other randomized trials for this purpose.

All sorts of weird drama has happened on Wikipedia. Edit wars over hyphens and dashes, over spellings and punctuation, very few with real-life consequences. I'll tell some of the stories here, and why they matter (or don't.)

What is a sandwich? Mankind has been asking itself this age-old question since it first crawled out of the caves many eons ago. In fact, some rumors say that language was invented for the very purpose of allowing man to conceive of the concept of the sandwich. Today, we inspect the sandwich alignment chart, the modern culmination of millennia of intellectual pursuit and push further! We will entertain thought experiments defining the boundary between sandwichness and non-sandwichness. Factions will form, friendships broken. Come join us and find where you stand on the topic of what is and what is not a sandwich.

Stop right there. If you are reading this, you are human, and that means you are not as smart as you think. We are here to point out your blind spots, with the hope of helping you make better choices. We’ll talk about intuition and biases, about historical experiments and current policy, about how to think about thinking. Learn to check yourself (before you wreck yourself!) This is a course about behavioral economics, but it is mostly a course on applications to policy and daily life.