I've been reading in and about behavioral economics in a desultory fashion -- mainly because I didn't have any direction on how to approach it.
A couple of preliminary thoughts. One is that there isn't all that much new. Basically it concludes that the two fundamental assumptions of neo-classical economics -- that an individual's consumption behavior is independent and that consumption preferences are reversible in time -- are not correct. But these have long since been dismissed by respectable and less-respectable economists alike. Of course these assumption persist in textbooks and are taught in the universities but nevertheless economists knew, already, that they were nonsense. The second thing I noticed is that objections to behavioral economics, or at least objections to acting on insights from behavioral economics, come from a libertarian perspective. These objections -- objections to using insights gained -- are to manipulating consumer choice to reach "better" consumer choices. For example, one area is in consumer saving. In order to have consumers put more into 401k's, policies can be adopted to cause that. But who is to say that the consumer will be better off saving more? The work being done, or what I have read of it, seems of high quality, quite clever, and reaching out to brain scans and so forth to get results. I haven't seen Behavioral economists asserting that their work overthrows the whole of neo-classical economics, though of course it does. Am I missing major parts of this new area of economics? Gene Coyle _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
