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1 results

  • Chapter 16 - Reading beyond Behavioral Economics

  • from Part III - Interdisciplinary Exchanges
  • Edited by Paul Crosthwaite, University of Edinburgh, Peter Knight, University of Manchester, Nicky Marsh, University of Southampton
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
    Published online:
    28 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022, pp 262-276

  • Summary

    The hubris of economists is astonishing. While they regularly look to other disciplines for topics of study, they all too rarely engage seriously with those fields. Building on the arguments in our book Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (2017), we contend that while economics is more important than ever, its glaring deficiencies are unnecessary. Most strikingly, even behavioral economists usually neglect culture, have a simplistic and unrealistic depiction of human behavior, and assume away genuine irrationalities. We offer an alternative: an economics that not only learns from literature, philosophy, and the other humanities, but also from history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science. Embracing those fields could lead economists to develop more realistic models of human behavior, recognize that they should not be so confident about their predictions, and produce more effective and just policies.