BTW, it's Bowles. it's really hard to tell whether the (narrow, "bourgeois") individualism is a matter of which economists do experiments or is inherent in the field. In general, academia encourages individualistic attitudes (there are almost no group rewards), while this tendency is reinforced by the the NC tradition and "Austrian" schools that dominate economics as a field, and it's almost always academics who do experiments, so we end up with pretty individualistic attitudes expressed by experimentalists. Nonetheless, I see no reason to automatically reject the results of these experiments. Each should be judged on its own terms.
On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 4:13 AM, Michael Nuwer <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/28/2011 12:01 AM, Jim Devine wrote: >> Unfortunately, they still have a basically >> individualistic perspective. They thus ignore the way in which our >> biographies in society (including our practice) limit and shape our >> "preferences," attitudes, and ideologies. > > Do you think this individualistic perspective is inherent in behavioral > economics or is it the way some trained economists use behavioral economics? > > My own view is that it is the latter. I think the work by Sam Bowels > over the last ten years or so shows that behavioral economics is not not > necessarily individualistic. I don't disagree that guys like Thaler & > Loewenstein are basically orthodox economists. But I'm not sure that is > true of Bowels and Ernst Fehr. > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- 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
