Faced with rational choices, the options we humans go for can be downright weird. At the supermarket checkout, a self-described thrifty, health-conscious shopper will pat herself on the back for choosing low-fat, no-added-sugar foods at bargain prices. Yet, just as her right hand is handing her money-off coupons to the checkout girl, her left hand is impulsively scooping up a high-priced gossip magazine and a handful of sugar-filled candy bribes for her fractious kids.

Such self-contradictions follow us as we try to “save money” online. We found the book we wanted, reduced. Just as we go to hit the checkout button, up comes a message saying “You qualify for this week’s special purchase. Spend another $19 and get free shipping”. We obediently agree to an additional item that we never intended to buy, to “save” $3.99. Hmmm. Define “free”.

These examples may seem trivial and random, but in fact they are neither, according to Dan Ariely, an MIT professor of behavioral economics, and author of “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions”. The all-too-human propensity for kidding ourselves betokens “irrational behaviors (that) are neither random nor senseless …but systematic”, says Ariely. “We make the same mistakes over and over”.

These ‘mistakes’ can be life-changing. Rationality says we should be minimizing debt, and saving for our retirement years. So why do we borrow to the hilt and spend virtually all the money we can lay our hands on? Last year, according to The New Yorker, Americans had $10.184 trillion in disposable income. They spent $10.132 of it. That’s 99.5%. Needless to say, a sizable proportion of the money went to credit card companies in late fees and interest payments.

As the report had it, “Americans, having reviewed their options, collectively resolved to spend virtually all the money they have”; proof that “people have trouble acting in their own self-interest”. Some theorize that this is because we are ‘loss-averse’, even when the ‘loss’ from our monthly pay-packet would be going into a savings fund. But how does that explain people who fail to enroll in company retirement plans even when no employee contribution is required?

Homo Sapiens means “Knowledgeable Man”. Yet we seem oddly incapable of perceiving the dividing lines between what we know and what we believe. Perhaps the best-measured example of this is the arresting fact that 60-70% of adult Americans believe the literal truth of Bible stories like the creation and Noah’s flood. Indeed, a 2007 Gallup survey reported 31% saying the Bible is “the actual words of God”. Yet when Gallup fielded questions about the Bible’s contents, half of respondents were unable to name its first book as Genesis; two-thirds did not know who gave the Sermon on the Mount – many thought it was Billy Graham – and 60% failed to name even half the Ten Commandments. 12% thought Noah was married to Joan of Arc. What we know and what we believe, it seems, can diverge.

Of course we have a new excuse for this. The internet has expanded the world’s supply of verbiage, and this fact allows us to dismiss things we don’t like the sound of as “too much information”. The cyber-avalanche of unsifted intelligence, inference and rant impedes real facts from reaching a wide audience. Last year the number of active blogs on the Net passed the 100 million mark. Their readers now vastly outnumber those who read serious, unbiased sources which have to filter their output through a team of fact-checkers. The result is that many of us now only read the ‘facts’ and opinions that actively appeal to us.

A case in point is the battle between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, (which the latter has resoundingly won, if eyeballs on screens is the measure; it claims 2.5 billion page-views per month). Britannica’s contributors have included Einstein, Freud, the economist Milton Friedman and more than 100 Nobel laureates. Wikipedia, by contrast, is a ‘wiki’, the type of website that allows visitors to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit content at their whim. Being voluntary, Wikipedia has no real editor. Its driving principle is “This is my truth; what’s yours?”. The aim is not necessarily truth per se, but the warm, fuzzy feeling of consensus. In consequence, Wikipedia offers more “knowledge” on Pokemon characters than on quantum mechanics.

Do we humans really want to know the truth at all? The way the majority of us vote in elections implies, for instance, that we believe saving jobs is more important than productivity and the prosperity it engenders. The folly of this was recently pointed out by a story in The Economist’s Lexington column. An economist inspects a dam-building project, and sees hundreds of workers with shovels. “Why not use a mechanical digger?” he asks, to be told that this would put people out of work. “Oh, fine, if it’s jobs you want, take away the shovels and give them spoons”. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Yet politicians figured out long ago that “job-protecting” xenophobia and protectionism mobilize more voters than genuine economic stimulus and fiscal common sense, however much better off those would make us. A candidate’s aim, after all, is to gain and keep power, not to fix things. We behave just as irrationally when choosing our leaders as we do when spending money.

All in all, it shows we humans are prone to endearingly muddled thinking. If asked by a clipboard-wielding canvasser to agree or disagree with the statement “Either something makes sense, or it doesn’t”, we seem disposed to reply “Uh… what was that middle one again?”

Views can vary in the dubbing vs. titles debate. In Latin America, for instance, large numbers of the films and TV shows aired are American in origin, but preferences for translation formats are far from uniform. Overall, dubbing seems to win by a comfortable margin. However, a surprising number of TV viewers and moviegoers in Argentina and Mexico say they prefer the original English soundtrack, and reading the sub-titles. This seems to correlate with (a) a higher proportion of the population professing to speak English, and (b) a sense of pride in taking Anglo-Saxon cultures on board undiluted. Upscale Mexicans, for instance, will be at pains to seem comfortable with Hollywood Americanisms in the original English. For their part, Argentineans notoriously regard themselves as more European than the Europeans. In Buenos Aires, the overwhelming practice in movie theatres is to show foreign films in their original version, with Spanish subtitles only provided for those ‘ignorant’ enough need them.

Curiously, in Brazil they tend to ‘dub-title’ movies, i.e. viewers get much English-language material dubbed into Spanish, with Portuguese subtitles added as well. This can get ferociously confusing. Your Pi blogmeister has sat on planes to Rio or São Paulo, and realized that the two simultaneous translations of the in-flight movie not only mis-represent the English original, but are also totally different from each other.

With dubbing, something always seems to get lost in the translation, and the quality of the movie-watching experience can suffer. Puerto Rican viewers, many of whom are bi-lingual in Spanish and English, complain that Hollywood fare dubbed into Spanish is often so badly done that the movies and series seem more like parodies of themselves. The same voice-over artists’ voices come back, thinly disguised, again and again. “It’s awful”, says one viewer in San Juan. “Serious programs come across as screamingly funny, while supposedly funny ones simply aren’t”. Sounds like “The Unwatchables”.

In a world of increasing product harmonization, is a standard-issue cab ride a more or less standardized experience around the globe? On some measures it probably is. Taxi users everywhere are united in their complaints about high prices, indirect routes, surly drivers, mysteriously defective taxi-meters, and the fact that you can never find a cab when it’s raining. (Actually that last one is sort of a back-handed compliment to this much reviled mode of transport. There are moments when we actually need a cab).

However, the complaints about high prices may not always be justified. An examination of available sources on five large cities in different corners of the Americas suggests that price is only part of a complex of variables determining how many people use taxis in a given market.

In a recent comparison, Los Angeles was charging the highest urban taxi fares in the world, at just under $15 for a 3-mile ride. New York was not far behind, and both cities showed low figures for “used a taxi yesterday”. Coincidentally, high percentages of Angelenos and New Yorkers own their own cars. By contrast, both cab fares and car-ownership are dramatically lower in places like Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and taxi usage is therefore higher. The principle seems to be that fewer private cars mean a bigger pool, both of taxis and of paying customers to ride in them. If it’s true, that means there are parallel economies of scale which hold down prices and increase uptake as a result. In many cities, taxis are a ‘commoditized’ alternative to a creaking and unreliable urban public transport system. One wonders if this ‘benign circle’ might possibly be repeated elsewhere. Could traffic congestion in New York and London be reduced by slashing 80% off taxi fares? We will probably never know.

Of course a taxi ride is not just about getting from A to B. It’s also an opportunity to exchange views with one of the most dogmatically opinionated people on the planet. New York cabbies, in Pi’s experience, know very little, but have strong opinions on just about everything. If their passenger is brave enough to voice an opinion of his own from his perspex prison-cell in the back of the car, chances are he will be sharply told to “fuggeddabadit”. London cabbies, by contrast, really do know everything. Since London traffic has now apparently slowed to an average speed of less than 5 miles an hour, even a ride of a few blocks gives your driver the chance to share with you the full extent of his knowledge about the entire universe, sometimes twice.

What of the “in-taxi experience”? Depending on where in the world you hire your cab, its interior fixtures and décor will probably differ in exotic ways. The miniature football boots dangling from the rear-view mirror will be the same, but everything else will be a tribute to the uniqueness of local culture. In Mexico, for instance, the inside of a taxi is often decked out like a religious shrine Crimson ‘altar cloths’ fringed with gold tassels cover the dashboard. St. Christopher medals and images of the Virgin of Guadalupe dangle distractingly in front of your driver’s eyes. (This is so that he can take his hands off the steering wheel and clutch onto something genuinely reliable when a traffic accident is imminent). In Saudi Arabia, Pi was told, you will find cabbies watching miniature TV sets while driving you around. One nervous English passenger asked if this wasn’t a rather dangerous practice. “Not really”, said the driver, “at least it’s not as dangerous as reading the newspaper”.

The importance of in-cab appurtenances should not be underestimated. The taxi market is apparently governed by a “price-to-kitsch ratio”. Comparative figures reveal that the cheapest cab-rides are to be had in Mumbai, Bangkok, Jakarta and in the rainbow-colored ‘jeepneys’ of Manila. Coincidentally, these are all cities where taxi-drivers vie for the honor of owning the most exotically decorated taxi on the street. How different from the sober black of London taxis, (which of course cost a lot more to ride in).

The mathematical principle at work here seems to be that the fare charged for a cab ride varies in direct inverse proportion to the garishness of the vehicle’s décor. So, when hailing a cab in foreign parts, Pi advises you to keep an eye out for fairy-lights, gold trimmed crimson altar cloths, holy medallions and little flashing neon football boots. You’ll probably save money.

What do men use to keep themselves clean-shaven? A recent survey in Europe showed that 45% of European males have electric shavers, and that nearly two-thirds of them use some kind of wet-shaving system, whether conventional razors or the disposable kind. All together those who shave seem to represent nearly 90% of adult males. (There is some duplication: a significant number of ‘wet shavers’ apparently keep an electric shaver handy as well). That leaves around 10% of adult males who don’t give any direct evidence that they shave at all.

Logic says that we can assume that those guys all wear beards. In the absence of “Do you have a beard?” as a questionnaire item in most surveys, it’s perhaps as close as we’re likely to get. (But wait. Could these people be regular shavers who happen to use someone else’s razor? Their wives’ or girlfriends’, for instance? Ewwwww!!! If yes, Pi would like to hear from the Wronged Women whose shaving equipment is being borrowed by their Unprincipled Menfolk. In keeping with this website’s fearless editorial policy, We Will Name The Guilty Men).

Interestingly enough, a man’s propensity to wear a beard seems to vary according to a North-South divide, at least in Europe. A higher proportion of British men turned up in the “don’t shave” column than Frenchmen. There are considerably more bearded men in the chilly climes of Germany than in sunny Spain, where the clean-shaven predominate by a higher margin. Pi’s Law of Thermobarbanomics (“more heat, less beards”) could be close to becoming proven scientific fact.

Electric shaver owners tend to be older (peak age is 55+), and predominantly married. They seem to be the buttoned-up sort, who like organized routines, and judge a fellow by the car he drives. Wet shavers cluster in the younger age ranges, and are slightly more likely to be divorced or separated.

How do non-shavers differ from their clean-shaven brethren? For a start, they tend to be either way older or way younger, polarized to the under-20 and over-65 age groups. Many of the younger ones are students, and still single. Temperamentally, they can be casual to the point of untidiness, forthright to the point of rudeness, and they tend to do things impulsively, on the spur of the moment. They don’t really see cars as status symbols, don’t put much effort into appearing attractive to women, and are not particularly happy with their jobs. Barbarians, perhaps… ?

Pi knows that the most absorbing of all sciences is that of human behavior and interaction. All the really interesting places on earth are where races, colors, beliefs, languages, cuisines and tastes collide, and then collude. Rio de Janeiro is one such spot. Xenophobia rarely gets a toe-hold in countries whose populations are mostly immigrants. Such places also frequently have ports attached. Puerto Rico is another cheerful ‘melting pot’, given its kaleidoscopic – and mostly benign – racial and linguistic mix. New York used to be like that, and ought to be today, but somehow isn’t. Someone once acerbically described NYC as “White people in brown shoes exchanging sidelong looks with brown people in white shoes”. The different groups there seem to slide sullenly past each other like oil and water in a Petri dish, even within ethnicities. This may in fact have something to do with socio-economic stratification, or perhaps the concentration of lots of people in a small and very expensive piece of turf. (The imbecilically-named “War on Terror” sure didn’t help, enlarging latent mutual suspicions exponentially). Anyway, by comparison with NYC Miami is big and spread out, and everyone rubs along pretty much okay. (By the way, has anyone ever noticed the unusually high concentration of “Star Trek” fans in New York City? My theory is that Trekkies respond to, but fail to perceive, that venerable TV show’s real underlying themes, ie. [i] the very American concept of obedience to authority and [ii] the ultimate impossibility of any real accommodation with aliens, however liberal your persuasions).

So what about Miami? Definitely another ‘melting pot’ market. You’ll hear Spanish in ten different dialects, (some mutually incomprehensible), plus Portuguese, French (and its Creole derivatives — all the taxi drivers are from Haiti), even Russian. Oh, and English, though it’s not always immediately recognizable as such. Miami is one of the few places where you will encounter Americans making a serious effort to speak a foreign language, whether it be Spanish or, of course, English.

Miami as a city is a jigsaw of different cultures, languages, tastes, diets and shopping habits. Older retirees from the North-Eastern US and sun-seeking newcomers from all over the States rub shoulders with conservative Cubans, dance-mad Dominicans, nostalgic Nicaraguans, and folk from every other corner of the Americas. Burger King vies for your lunch-money with Pollo Tropical (spicy chicken, yellow rice, fried bananas and salsa) and innumerable Cuban and Caribbean-style eateries, serving rice, beans, ‘yuca’, fried plantains and roast pork. Oh, try the “Vaca Frita”, why don’t you? It means “Fried Cow”.

When the writer moved to Miami, he was told how lucky he was to be living here. “What makes Miami such a terrific place”, said my witty NYC-bred informant, “is that it’s so close to the USA”. Indeed, the city has been chosen as Latin American HQ by big hi-tech and service companies, media conglomerates, ad agencies and dozens of manufacturers. (Despite this trend, some Chicago- and Minnesota-based corporations frankly shuddered at the thought of having to mix with all those flaky, unpredictable and tempestuous Latins. Realizing that you can’t easily run a Latin American business from the shores of the Great Lakes, such outfits tended to opt for an HQ in Fort Lauderdale, forty miles up the coast from Miami, on the basis that “At least that’s still the real United States”).

Anyway, the melting-pot thing really works. Miamians turn out in market research surveys to consider themselves 70% friendlier than the rest of the USA. Oh, and nearly two-thirds luckier: Miami Latinos outscore the nation by +63% on weekly purchase of lottery tickets. ¡Mucha suerte, damas y caballeros!