If Eve is wrong, then You are wrong too!

Hi! Indeed, I am too lazy to do my job recently. Article Papers lah, Global Finance grant lah, PhD Club lah, Tutorial lah, My website maintainance lah (thanks to refi to help me on this freaking problem) Badminton lah, and my sleeping competition with pak Ajo and Simon… 😛 But somehow, I am… still lazy… what a troublesome. Anyway, I just started my what-so-called as “holy life”; and I found something interesting. It is about Eve.

 Most of us must know who is Eve (my assumption is all of you Christian or Moslem or even you are Agnostic). We know about the story of Eve in Eden where she ate the “forbidden apple”. Okay, let me re-tell you the story. Once upon a time, after God finished creating everything, God told to Adam and Eve can “consume” everything in the Eden except the forbidden apple. The latter, snake came to Eve and pursue her to eat the apple. Then, Eve fell into the temptation and ate it. Some more, she shared it with Adam. In Judaism religion, this is the first human sin.

The story is not ended there. I try to analyze the story using behavioural approach. Let us build the scenario. First, Eve actually had two options. She ate it know or she will eat it later. If God promises that all the belongings in Eden will belong to Adam and Eve, it means in the end, the forbidden apple will be theirs. Now, the problem is whether they want to wait or not. In exponential utility, human will follow their time preference in-line with their utility function (thereby I presume God also make the same assumption as economist!). It means, if we follow this assumption, Eve would not eat the apple. However, recent literature shows actually humans tend to discount their time preferences. What I mean is there are many evidences show that human does not have self control in regards of time preferences. For example: “Would you prefer ten ringgit today or thirteen ringgit in the next three day?” Or “would you prefer ten ringgit in 60 days or 13 ringgit in the next 63 days?” For certain range of offering, we will choose to take the 13 ringgit today, but will happily wait three days extra in 2 months to receive the higher amount instead. This is what they called as hyperbolic discounting. Relate back to our story, I presume Eve did the hyperbolic discounting during that time. As human, Eve has what we called as time preference bias. She just did not want to wait, and took her short term option. Is it irrational? Maybe. Is it a sin? Nope! If it is not a sin, why God expelled them from Eden? Because God assumes Eve will follow the exponential utility. Okay then. If we follow all the behavioural approach study, it found most of economic activity of human is not rational. Thereby, I can say that most of us is under sin by not following the utility function. If God blames Eve because she was not following the utility function, then be aware with your decision. If you are not following the utility function, then God will put you in Hell. Hell yeah!