I Am the Behavioral Economist Benjamin Ho and This Is How I Work

It’s pretty darn good the way I work. Economist Ben Ho examines things like apology, trust, and inequality from an economic perspective – this approach makes a good NPR story . He is incredibly hardworking, passionate about workflows, old text apps and portable keyboards, and he has written his own apps. And it has a morning shower fixture, which, frankly, sounds incredible. He is everything we look for at How I Work.

Location: New York, where I live, and Poughkeepsie, NY, where I work Current job : Associate Professor of Economics, Vassar College, where I study the behavioral economics of apology, inequality, and climate change Current computer: orbits between Surface Go, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, and Lenovo Yogabook. I try to carry as little as possible and never throw anything away. So I just have computers (some of them up to eight years old) at home and at work, and I choose the one that is closest. Dropbox and Google Docs make this easy. Current mobile device: Google Pixel 3XL. One word that best describes how you work: peripatetic.

First of all, tell us a little about your past and how you got where you are now.

I went to college wanting to learn everything. And I’ve been doing this for a while. I received seven degrees from MIT and Stanford, but eventually settled on behavioral economics. I dived into a couple of tech startups, a major investment bank, and as a lead energy economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, but mostly in academia, teaching in Cornell, Columbia and now Vassar.

I currently teach classes on topics ranging from behavioral economics to the ethics of climate change, and my research focuses on the economics of trust and inequality. I just finished working with Uber to do an experiment with 1.5 million customers to see how an email apology can help restore customer confidence after being late to Uber. I am currently working on a book that traces the history of trust from prehistoric tribes to modern trust issues such as climate treaties and blockchain.

I still try to learn everything, drawing inspiration from everything from science fiction and comics to my kids’ first laugh and smile (they tell us a lot about the biology of trust).

Tell us about a recent work day.

I’m not a morning person, so it’s hard to get up when the kids get up around 6:30 am (and sometimes at 5 am). I help my wife feed them and take them to school by the age of 8. If it is a school day, I start biking, train and driving in 2 hours 45 minutes to get from NYC to my office in Poughkeepsie NY, where I spend hours with students, then teach for 4 and a half. hours in a row (three classes of 75 minutes each), then another hours of work and then I repeat the same thing on the way home, I come to the children at about 20:00. My wife leaves my lunch on the table (usually delivery, thank God for Seamless) and after some time with my family I usually check the papers and answer emails before midnight.

We live in the city because my wife teaches at Columbia University Medical School, and she needs to be around work more than me. But I really appreciate the days when I might miss the road to work.

On days like this, we can spend more time getting the kids to school. Sometimes we stop at Starbucks for breakfast along the way (after the arrogant coffee phase of only going to trendy coffee shops, I’m pretty happy with Starbucks’ cold nitro beer these days). Then I usually find some coffee shop or library to work with. Several hours of continuous time is the greatest luxury, and I use that time to work on analyzing experimental data, or write a new chapter for my book, or revise a document for submission. But usually this work is interrupted by committee work or referee reports, or all the other things that distract us from our research.

What apps, gadgets or tools, besides your phone, can’t you live without?

Podcasts. I am currently using Pocket Casts . Ditching the Apple ecosystem a few years ago was difficult (since the debut of the iPhone, I’ve owned every iPhone and almost every other Apple product). But I love the flexibility of Android. I walk a lot around the city and go to work for a long time. Podcasts make this time productive. Or at least not a waste of time. And Pocket Casts is much better at managing my podcasts than Apple Podcasts. Apple has always been opaque about what was downloaded or cached and gave you so little control.

I’ve also become obsessed with the keyboard lately and have probably bought over a dozen over the past few years. My favorite is Microsoft ‘s foldable keyboard for its size and durability, which easily switches between Surface Go and phone, but fits in a large coat pocket. But my favorite is typing on specially designed mechanical keyboards. The fully programmable ortholinear plank is my favorite. Although somewhat portable, it is still heavier than we would like.

A few years ago, I ordered from WayTools what I thought would be the holy grail of keyboards – a foldable keyboard that’s smaller than your phone, but beta users find it better than typing on a full-size keyboard. Delivery was supposed to be in 1-2 months. Three years later, the company’s website still says delivery will be in 1-2 months.

Oh and vi . I still use vi every day.

How is your workplace arranged?

I just need a screen (even a very small one, like on my phone) and a keyboard. I worked on Wall Street in the days when using a mouse was a sign of weakness. I also started programming on computers that didn’t have mice, first with the line editor in GW-BASIC and then vi, so I still really believe in keyboard shortcuts.

Dropbox syncs all my files across all my devices. Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and Google Inbox (RIP) work well across devices. The same thing and Overleaf , a cloud service for writing LaTeX (for writing scientific articles), which works surprisingly well, even on the phone.

The only thing that doesn’t perform well in the cloud is my statistics package (economists usually use Stata ). Migrating to Python will give me more options for working with the cloud, but for now I can handle it. The Surface Go runs Stata quite well, otherwise I remotely log into a Linux computer cluster for more processing power.

What are your favorite research resources?

Google. Google Scholar .

What’s your best shortcut or hack?

Brushing your teeth while washing your hair with shampoo? I know this sounds ridiculous. But you have to brush your teeth for two minutes, and that’s enough to wash your hair with shampoo. Saving two minutes a day by combining them is 720 minutes a year. For twelve hours or half a day! I know this is not a work practice, but 12 hours is a lot!

The tricky part (it took years to figure this out) is that while brushing your teeth can be done with one hand, washing your hair usually requires two hands, with one hand squeezing the shampoo into the other. Or just three hands. This was the problem. The solution was to squeeze the shampoo onto the back of the hand holding the toothbrush. Apply shampoo and remove it from the back of the toothbrush hand with your free hand.

Tell us about an interesting, unusual, or challenging process you have at work.

Grade. (By the way, I hate to give grades. I think every professor does.)

As a behavioral economist, I have come to the conclusion that there are many errors in the conventional grading system B and C. The only wrong thing is that the overestimation of grades makes students expect to receive fives. I once taught as a guest in a faculty where an A was considered bad. I didn’t know this at the time, and the students came to me depressed after getting an A. All students received only A’s at this faculty.

Another problem with grades is that they are often out of 100, and then students lose points for incorrect questions. As a behavioral economist, we are well aware that the sense of loss is twice as strong as the sense of gain. This scoring system focuses on what you don’t know, rather than what you do. So I tend to use a plus check and check system (with half checks and double plus checks) to get around over-grading (because students don’t come with pre-set ideas about how many plus checks they should receive) and focus on what you learned, not what was lost.

Who are the people who help you achieve results, and how do you rely on them?

My researchers and co-authors. Research is largely a collaborative activity. Working with research fellows can be challenging. Because they are primarily for learning, getting work done is secondary. However, I find the training useful. One of the main benefits of having collaborators on research projects is that they set deadlines for you. Otherwise, an experienced professor may postpone the completion of his research indefinitely.

Since my collaborators are located all over the world, I rely on video chat and text chat apps. It annoys me that the apps people use for video chats and text chats are constantly changing (why can’t we just stop at one), but so far I mostly use Zoom and Slack .

How do you keep track of what you need to do?

Google Keep. Which works great, but very slow. Why is it so hard in 2018 to make a note-taking app that loads quickly. I wrote a note-taking app almost three decades ago on GW-BASIC when I was 10. You might think there must be something better now. (My venerable vi todo text file, supported by custom scripts, had to be deleted because it didn’t work on my phone.)

How to recharge or relax?

A super low-key Final Fantasy game on my phone. I remember playing the original Final Fantasy on the original Nintendo. I haven’t actually played much video games since college, but it’s nice to be able to pick up and play a couple of battles between other things, especially while waiting for the train.

What’s your favorite side project?

Learning Python. Python is the most popular language for the types of machine learning that would be useful to me, so I worked on it. One of my graduate degrees was in artificial intelligence, but what I learned is out of date. However, machine learning is a new “big thing” even for economists, so I am trying to get back to it.

I actually learned to program when I was about 8 years old and I still love it, but these days I feel obligated to delegate most of my programming tasks to research assistants. It is a good learning experience for them and I feel that it makes more sense for me to teach these tasks than to do them myself. However, it’s nice to have an excuse to program yourself.

What are you reading now or what do you recommend?

Just finished Qixin Wei’s Three-Body Problem. Book cover got Barack Obama’s approval! The first novel I have read translated from Chinese. Wei’s scholarly book began in the physics department of China’s Cultural Revolution, which resonates deeply with my family’s history, but ends with a profound question of how civilization will be shaped by the dizzying chaotic movements of three bodies in space.

Just launched Monstress , a comic book series by Marjorie Liu, the first woman to win the highest writing award of any comic book (2018! How still the ‘first woman’ headlines in 2018 ?!). The art (Sana Takeda) is amazing and the construction of the world is unusual.

There is a Chinese theme here, which is not very typical for me. But this seems to be a very Asian-American year in pop culture. I also rarely read anything other than research papers, so I usually recommend Neil Stevenson’s book.

Who else would you like to see to answer these questions?

The Slate Working podcast (one of my favorites) had a terrific series about comic book creators asking them the same questions. But I loved hearing about all the cover names, not just the headliners.

Maybe a podcast producer. In particular, producers of long storytelling like This American Life or Serial .

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

The mother of my brother’s ex-boyfriend is a life coach. She said at dinner years ago that the most important thing in any conversation is to first confirm the other person’s point of view. To hear what they have to say, and then answer “Yes, and” rather than “Yes, but.” I often think about this advice. This was important both in my personal life and in our increasingly polarized political discourse. It is also a key part of how I work in the classroom.

What problem are you still trying to solve?

How to accept that I have more books on my Kindle than I can ever finish in my life (and more TV shows and movies in line on Netflix than I will ever watch).