It is an American (and American-based Israeli) centric book. Rather, it is a personal intellectual history, supplemented by stories, anecdotes and occasional reposts to past combatants. And I would question whether this is a book that outlines the making of behavioural economics. Thaler, arguably the world’s leading behavioural economist and one of its early pioneers, perhaps feels as though his career has been a 40-year odyssey of misbehaving in relation to the mainstream economics community, but given that he has devoted himself to the study of how people actually make, rather than ought to make, decisions, one could make a case for deleting ‘Mis’ from the front of the title. I begin this review of Richard Thaler’s new book with a gripe, or rather a double gripe, about its title. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics. Reviewer Adam Oliver finds that Richard Thaler’s new book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics, covers the core concepts of behavioural economics, but finds that this book is more a ‘personal intellectual history, supplemented by stories, anecdotes and occasional reposts to past combatants’ that misses two important issues ‘relating to suggestions for the future development of behavioural economics’.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |