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Comment by unmole | Hacker News Reader

Behavioral economics, the bastard child of psychology, is built on an edifice of fashionable nonsense. The field is rife with grand generalizations based on dubious conclusions from small under-powered behavioral experiments. Just look at what a disaster the much hyped priming studies turned out to be. I would not count on behavioral economics to advance a more accurate understanding of the human condition.

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I know very little about economics but I am compelled to point out the irony in your comment.

How I understood your comment: "This whole field, consisting up of many people trying to do understand things, is just a bunch of nonsense generalizations."

Touché.

> Behavioral economics, the bastard child of psychology, is built on an edifice of fashionable nonsense.

This is a relatively fair take. That being said, at least it's damaged and dethroned the equally misguided frictionless spheres of homo economicus.

Yes, this was my point: that prior, economists had silly ideas about humans which make no sense.

Frictionless spheres are fine in Physics 101 and Homo economicus is fine in Economics 101. Like all models, economic models too are wrong but some of them are useful. The bulk of economics after 101 is about how the models break.

The idea that humans are not perfectly rational self-interested actors has been part of mainstream economics at least since Keynes.

Sure; Keynes coined the term "animal spirits." Yet the criticism (that economics is too modelling-based) is widely levied, e.g. see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/its-ti..., https://aeon.co/essays/economics-is-once-again-becoming-a-wo....

Is it the whole story? Probably not. Like I said, I'm not an economist.

But given the extreme challenges in empirically testing macroeconomic models, it should be no surprise that economists might--as somewhat irrational humans--over-rely on theoretical models.

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