Jayson L. Lusk, “Are You Smart Enough to Know What to Eat? A Critique of Behavioural Economics as Justification for Regulation.” European Review of Agricultural Economics 3: 355-373, 2014.
• People make some 200 food-related decisions per day!
• Food policy activists presume that people should be eating differently than they do.
• Lusk argues that behavioral economics-inspired policies are best when they are applied to rules that are aimed at externalities, not internalities.
• Behavioral economics is sort of an intellectual fad, boosted by the interest of journals in novelty. At the same time that behavioral economics articles started appearing claiming that humans are not rational, other journals were publishing articles claiming that non-human animals are rational.
• Some behavioral economists jump quite quickly from small-scale experiments on undergraduates to major claims about appropriate policy. Laboratory conditions are not the real world, and lab experiments reveal how people operate in the lab.
• People need practice to make good decisions, so the government should not remove opportunities for people to choose. People self-regulate, self-commit, and even employ stickk.com.
• Behavioral economics incentivizes the abdication of personal responsibility and normalizes abnormality. Markets, alternatively, anticipate our changing preferences.
• If we abandon traditional “welfare” analysis based on consumer surplus, all we have to go on are the prejudices of researchers.
• Is there really any evidence that those people who are subject to all of these behavioral biases actually do worse in life than others not similarly afflicted?
No comments:
Post a Comment