Discussion Tuesday
From here this claim:
Economics, psychology, and neuroscience are converging today into a unified discipline of Neuroeconomics with the ultimate aim of providing a single, general theory of human decision making.
Once again, remember that these are points for discussion – I am not saying I agree or disagree with them.
What this new endeavour will tell us is what we already know. Confronted with any policy initiative – spending, taxing, regulating, advising, nudging – different people will react differently, and therefore the policy will be partly successful in delivering its intended results but will also have unintended consequences. It might enable us to get better at predicting what is likely to be the response of a specified individual about whom we already know everything, but this is of little use for public policy making
Agreed. I’ll be honest I actually starting laughing when I first read that quote – I think the author got a touch ahead of themselves 🙂
Although I’ll add that it could have policy relevance – in fact I would argue a lot of people are trying to use new ideas of the mind to determine policy, often in a partial way. I am touching more on this idea tomorrow ….