Russ Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…Which part of behavioral economics has turned out to be the most interesting? It’s funny. I’m not a big fan of behavioral economics as a piece of economics, formal academic discipline. I’m a big fan of it as a way to think about life. It seems a bit strange to make that division perhaps. I feel like a lot of the behavioral economists play gotcha: “Ah, people aren’t rational.” No kidding. [laughs] There’s this view that somehow our models — whether that’s our, mine, and yours; or ours, mine, and somebody else’s; or mainstream economics; or so-called price theory microeconomics — they rely on perfect competition, rational consumers. And since those things don’t hold, we can ignore all the conclusions. I will say that one of the things that I loved when I came to George Mason in 2003 was how happy people were to take a piece of behavioral economics and say, “Well, in this area, people don’t maybe work as rationally as in other areas, and therefore I could assume this, that, and the other. ” As opposed to wearing it as a religion in a form of clothing that you always had on. I also feel like much of the behavioral economics field has been damaged by the replication crisis in psychology. Now, I would think that way because I’m not as big a fan of behavioral economics as some people are. When I claim that, people will oftentimes say, “Well, but this finding still holds up, doesn’t it?” I’ll say, “Yeah, sometimes in a laboratory, in certain situations, with a large enough sample, maybe.” I think for me, it’s more of a perspective than a discipline. In many ways, I think its promise has been disappointing, right? To gore neoclassical economics by proving that people aren’t totally rational seems like a very unexciting finding, but it is greeted with great glee in some circles. As a Hayekian, how can we do science better?…

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