Daniel D wrote: > I think this [i.e., what I said] is bass-ackwards. In so far as economics is > something worth doing, it's a branch of control engineering - most of the > useful parts of economics are to do with the optimisation of production and > distribution processes, or the large-scale behaviour of complicated recursive > systems. "Explaining human behaviour" is exactly the sort of thing that > economists ought to stay out of. So my view would be that if you find > yourself looking down an MRI scanner into someone's brain to try and find out > what they're thinking, this is a good sign that you're messing about in > something that isn't economics, and you should go away and write something > about unemployment or share prices or trade instead. Behavioural and neuro- > economics are clever and inventive answers to questions that shouldn't have > been asked. <
Explaining human behavior is quite important to economics. Why, for example, don't a lot of people involved in the stock market follow the "rational" path, to buy low and sell high? Behavioral finance -- which gets beyond _homo economicus_ -- gives us some idea. (Why do people often follow Keynes' story of financial markets as involving "betting on a beauty contest," i.e., caring about what others think, which sometimes gets them buying at high prices?) If you look at the current state of behavioral economics, as far as I can see, it's too much a matter of a bunch of empirical generalizations. Thaler & Sunstein's book NUDGE presents one effort to get away from that, emphasizing the possible conflict between two cognitive systems, i.e., the automatic (intuitive) system and the reflective (analytical) system. They somehow ignore the moral side of humanity. If you bring that in, it gets very complex, allowing for a "voter's paradox" inside one's skull. Well, maybe understanding neurology would help add some order to all of this. Standard economics does more than simply posit _homo economicus_ and then see what the implications are in different settings. It presents vision of humanity as if it were the only one, with all the moral conclusions that follow. Having an alternative model would help combat that. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
