CAT 2024 Slot 1 VARC Question Paper with Solution: PDF Download

Oftentimes, when economists cross borders, they are less interested in learning from others than in invading their garden plots. Gary Becker, for instance, pioneered the idea of human capital. To do so, he famously tackled topics like crime and domesticity, applying methods honed in the study of markets to domains of nonmarket life. He projected economics outward into new realms: for example, by revealing the extent to which humans calculate marginal utilities when choosing their spouses or stealing from neighbours. At the same time, he did not let other ways of thinking enter his own economic realm: for example, he did not borrow from anthropology or history or let observations of nonmarket economics inform his homo economicus. Becker was a picture of the imperial economist in the heyday of the discipline's bravura.

Times have changed for the once almighty discipline. Economics has been taken to task, within and beyond its ramparts. Some economists have reached out, imported, borrowed, and collaborated-been less imperial, more open. Consider Thomas Piketty and his outreach to historians. The booming field of behavioural economics-the fusion of economics and social psychology-is another case. Having spawned active subfields, like judgment, decision-making and a turn to experimentation, the field aims to go beyond the caricature of Rational Man to explain how humans make decisions....

It is important to underscore how this flips the way we think about economics. For generations, economists have presumed that people have interests-"preferences," in the neoclassical argot-that get revealed in the course of peoples' choices. Interests come before actions and determine them. If you are hungry, you buy lunch; if you are cold, you get a sweater. If you only have so much money and can't afford to deal with both your growling stomach and your shivering, which need you choose to meet using your scarce savings reveals your preference.

Psychologists take one look at this simple formulation and shake their heads. Increasingly, even some mainstream economists have to admit that homo economicus doesn't always behave like the textbook maximiser; irrational behaviour can't simply be waved away as extra economic expressions of passions over interests, and thus the domain of other disciplines.... This is one place where the humanist can help the economist. If narrative economics is going to help us understand how rivals duke it out, who wins and who loses, we are going to need much more than lessons from epidemiological studies of viruses or intracranial stimuli.

Above all, we need politics and institutions. Shiller [the Nobel prize winning economist] connects perceptions of narratives to changes in behaviour and thence to social outcomes. He completes a circle that was key to behavioural economics and brings in storytelling to make sense of how perceptions get framed. This cycle (perception to behaviour to society) was once mediated or dominated by institutions: the political parties, lobby groups, and media organizations that played a vital role in legitimating, representing, and excluding interests. Yet institutions have been stripped from Shiller's account, to reveal a bare dynamic of emotions and economics, without the intermediating place of politics.

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_____(1)_____ You can't just put things anywhere you want to. The evolved architecture of the brain is haphazard and disjointed, and incorporates multiple systems, each of which has a mind of its own. _____(2)_____ Evolution doesn't design things and it doesn't build systems-it settles on systems that, historically, conveyed a survival benefit. There is no overarching, grand planner engineering the systems so that they work harmoniously together. _____(3)_____ The brain is more like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction. _____(4)_____

Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes. Elephants, whales, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles. Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment. It's not surprising that animals share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures, located in the limbic system, that are the seat of our emotions.