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Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

> governmental paternalism is called upon to steer people with the help of “nudges.” These biases have since attained the status of truisms. In contrast, I show that such a view of human nature is tainted by a “bias bias,”

Is it me, or does this sentence (from the abstract) seem very non-academic? It uses the first person, and seems rather political.

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It is clearly political, but economics is inherently political - it justifies how society is organised. I would put it that someone having firm ideas of how an economy should be run doesn't in any way disqualify them from making a point and if an economist doesn't have firm opinions on how to organise an economy ... well, that would be fine, but surprising.

The abstract is putting forward a very important point in light of the environment that has developed where governments are expected to 'fix' the economy when a 'crisis' occurs. Both of those words are highly, highly political and also central to the practical branch of modern economics.

The core of this abstract is that there is evidence people have 'fine-tuned intuitions about chance, frequency, and framing' compared to what is currently believed by economists. If that is true, then that should have a bearing on the quantity and quality of regulation being recommended by economists.

In my experience using first person in abstract or even in the manuscript is field- as well as individual- dependent. Prof. John Cochrane (when he was at U of Chicago) advised not to use royal pronoun "we" when it's a single author paper. In business management you can see a mix of use of "we" even when the paper is written by a single author. Some journals like Journal of Marketing require all the abstracts in third person (e.g., the authors find xyz instead of we find xyz) but don't have any rules about using I/we in the manuscript.

You have to be damn naive to think that economics is not political.

I (alone) can pierce this veil of ignorance, the halmark of contrarianism.

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