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Fri 12 Dec 2009Can we build the perfect citizen?
The role of the citizen in creating a new Ireland is an important one. FRANK DILLONwhat foundations, skills and moral attributes should the perfect citizen have?
IN HIS recently published book How Markets fail - the logic of economic calamities, respected author and New Yorker columnist John Cassidy touches on the role of the citizen in the creation of economic bubbles. Individual behavioural biases - such as overconfidence, envy, and myopia - often give rise to troubling macroeconomic phenomena such as boom-and-bust waves in housing, he says. These are the inevitable outcomes of what Cassidy refers to as "rational irrationality" or self-serving behaviour in a modern market setting.
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