What was the one place you wish you had gone?

Want to know why? The average Indian driver is taught to only pay attention to what is in front of them; anything behind them is someone else's problem. Knowing that, thinking about the efficiency of what happens to drivers behind them isn't really a concern. Standard prisoner's dilemma behaviour…

That's what I was taught by friends while I spent a couple months in India this past winter…

See TED video:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lombor...

That's what I'm working on anyway, a mechanism to enable people to reward artists for their art rather than publishers for producing copies. I call it the contingencymarket.com - commission similarly voluntary.

sometimes i have trouble with academic language, and i apologize for my lack of clarity …

micro transactions of any sort seem to be in our future, through mechanisms as yet uninvented, it seems

Microphilanthropy is not (in my eyes) the act of commoditising charity into tiny, massmarketed, micropayment experiences (i.e. micro-donations by millions of people) - it's about fostering a Long Tail in our new hyperconnected world. The micro relates more to the size of the niche - specific families, specific stories - than to the size of the donation. Micro-donation is an alternative model for charity perhaps more suited to the existing, highly institutionalised model of philanthropy (but could be very important/useful to it, so also requires discussion)

There's no reason why average donations can't stay relatively upscale in microphilanthropy - it is based around the creation/display of hyper-personal, highly niche charitable actions, thus it finds unusually devoted people (because it's highly personal, it should be of high value to people, hence the large donations), and it finds enough of them to put together a group just large enough to make the world move in that tiny niche. Before the internet, it was too hard to find those people, so charities had to stick to mass-appeal issues, staying very general. Since everyone is different, millions of niches get worked on, all in parallel. Microphilanthropy is a hyper-parallelised model of charity - its a similar boost that you get from a dual-core processor (parallel computing) versus single-core.

Ultimately the utility of these findings, and of the field itself, is in providing us with an awareness of inherent decision making biases, such that we can rationally address/redress the biases and make better decisions. Scientifically elucidated, codified and distilled wisdom. The above finding is an example of empirically-derived wisdom - but I agree with you about the dangers of correlation and causation - its like any science in that only when you go deeper (more micro) can you get really useful knowledge, and thus technology, out of it. Just like Mendel's “discovery” of inheritance in biology, it took more precise “wisdom” - e.g. DNA (i.e. molecular genetics) before it became a truly useful tool in the lab.

There's clear and present danger of abuse as it gets more advanced (more 'micro') - it could dramatically enhance propaganda, giving it precise and powerful rules/techniques for how to frame issues/prime audiences to be more receptive/accepting of a statement/policy. As behavioural science attains the advanced level (and thus increased utility) of other sciences such as physics, chemistry or medicine, with their highly informative precision tools giving their users ever clearer pictures of cause & effect in the systems they observe, we get uncomfortably close to informing - and thus empowering - brainwashing.

Behavioural science will lead to behavioural technology (in the true sense of the word - I don't mean gadgets, I mean largely immaterial 'tools' - like framing [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(economics) ]), with potential for good and bad use, like any other technology. It'll be interesting to spot the development of that technology; most other technology you can put in your hands, or at least put under a microscope, and examine. We may not yet realise just how important humanities will be in the 21st century. And this is coming from a biochemist!

…but I also think it's way too easy to get carried away with this kind of thing. For example, might not commuting time be correlated with age (young people more likely to live in towns rather than the commuter belt) or wealth (houses in prime locations), or some other underlying driver of happiness?

I'm probably doing the authors a disservice here, as they almost certainly made allowances for other variables, but my point is that as academically interesting as papers like this are for pointing out macro trends, they are a long way from being able to inform the micro decisions I make in my own life.

in america i pay for a newspaper just to read the comic strip doonesbury, and would happily send that 50 cents to the artist, the heck with the paper

increasing transparency, reducing overhead, getting paid for being who you are ….

(and i think charities are far behind for the same reason anybody is behind, a vested interest in avoiding change in order to maintain what works)