The Obama government has a team dedicated to it, and Thaler also advised David Cameron's bods on how to get people to pay their taxes (cheers, Rich).īut Thaler is the opposite of a stuffy old don. His new book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics, is partly a history of the field, which began in the Seventies (though Thaler argues both Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes were hip to it long before, even if no one really paid attention to those bits) and has taken serious hold in the last decade. He had a hunch that people don't quite behave how economists would like: that we don't always recognise what's in our best interests, and we don't always do what, to a Spock-like economist, makes obvious sense. Richard H Thaler, now a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the co-author of 2008's Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, was one of the first people to pipe up. (Anyone who wishes to defend them might wish to cast their minds back to the financial events of 2007–'08.) And that issue? Well, we're it. It's the once-renegade part of the field that posits that all those beautiful theories about how markets behave, how wealth is dispersed and how consumers choose, have just one teeny-tiny issue that means they're not as perfect as they could be.
Behavioural economics is the trendy branch of economics, in as much as that's not an oxymoronic thing to say.
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