

Is Behavioral Economics the Past or the Future? - mindcrime
http://orderstatistic.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/is-behavioral-economics-the-past-or-the-future/

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gmac
I teach a Behavioural Economics (BE) module of an Economics Bachelors degree.
BE is not awfully radical: it tends to build on and refine standard theory. If
BE is 'the past' I suspect it's only because its key parts have been absorbed
into the mainstream — leaving us without a sub-discipline, but with a general
Economics that's rather more Behavioural than before.

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gimpei78
Economist here. Not quite sure what he's talking about as there are a ton of
Behavioral Economists around and growing. Since he is a Macroeconomist I
imagine he is expressing "surprise" that there aren't really any
Macroeconomists that are Behavioral Economists. This isn't so surprising when
you realize that the insights from Behavioral Economics undermine the basic
approach to Macro since the seventies. The reason there aren't any behavioral
Macroeconomists is that the old guard won't let them in, because it would
involve throwing all their ideas where they belong, the trash. This sort of
delusional thinking is what you would expect from someone who believes you can
take one highly unrealistic model of an individual, multiply it by a million
and call that the "microfoundations" of an economy.

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logicalman
Here here. If anything, behavioral economics is becoming more legitimized with
the advent of neuroeconomics.

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shalmanese
The problem with BE in the Kuhnian sense is that it's still pre-paradigmatic.
BE is great at lobbing bombs at rationalist economics and pointing out all the
flaws but it's yet to offer a compelling, coherent framework for which
positive results can be derived.

Kuhn states in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions that paradigm shifts do
not occur simply when people are aware of how broken the old system, so no
amount of poking holes will cause the BE revolution. Instead, BE needs to
offer an alternative paradigm which useful work can be done.

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kriro
I think a rigorously executed BE has merits. There needs to be a mindset shift
that repeating experiments is not "lame" but rather important though (also
true for psychology) and the experiments need to be set up better by and
large.

The "pop-BE" books are also nicely written and fun to read (Ariely etc.) which
helps the discipline from a Fleckian science theory point of view in my
opinion.

Reading through some of the famous papers and most of the pop books also gave
me some inspiration for A/B-tests to run and made me more aware of interesting
ethical issues. The "default" label option mentioned in the post is a good
example of that. Before reading up on BE I somewhat naively assumed that
websites aren't optimized for things like that :)

However for the most part I agree that the most interesting ideas will be
absorbed into the mainstream. For some reason the mainstream in economics is
rather misunderstood by non economists. I had a pretty twisted view of what it
was before I started sampling some up to date papers and getting a better idea
(I'm not an economist)

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kartman
I think this recent thread is very relevant for any posting about Economics
research:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8543865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8543865).
TLDR: Overall, the credibility of the economics research literature is likely
to be modest or even low.

i would think we will save huge amounts of money and world pain, by not
funding this pseudo science similar to homoeopathy.

btw, Kahneman who did the foundational research in what economists hijacked as
behavioral economics is not even remotely an economist.

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kartman
edit: "not even remotely an economist" I mean as a compliment, I read his
Prospect Theory papers and hold him in high regard. He is a great scientist
and psychologist, who did not ever study what is called economic theory- so
not an economist.

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aet
He won the Nobel Prize in Economics

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kartman
Again just to clarify, if you read Kahneman's own words he says he is not an
economist but a psychologist.

The Nobel "Memorial" prize by the bank of Sweden was awarded to him. Its what
he calls himself that I am talking about, not what some Bank in Sweden is
calling him.

Btw, says something about Economics as a field that it chose to name its top
most award in way it will be confused with the true prizes set up by Nobel
himself. Not the case, for example, with Math or others.

