Economist Writing Every Day

I haven’t written a formal response, yet, to the “behavioral economics is dead” claim going around Twitter. I’m too busy doing my referee reports on behavioral papers to write in depth about why behavioral is not dead. Incidentally, I’m not loving the most recent paper I was sent, so maybe that’s a point in the column of Team Death. I’ll write a few posts intersecting with the arguments being had.

First, I’ll point out two places in a CWT discussion of health and cities where the phrase “behavioral” was used. This is obviously a current conversation. David Cutler probably wouldn’t say that behavioral economics is his field, but here’s how he describes puzzles in decision making over health issues. (bold emphasis mine)

Everything that we know in healthcare is that people have difficulty choosing on the basis of price and quality. It goes back a little bit to some of the behavioral issues that we were talking about, but I think it’s slightly different. If you go to the doctor, and the doctor says you should take medication X, and you go to the pharmacy, and the pharmacy says that’ll be $30, a fair number of people will walk away and say, “I don’t have $30.”

What we would hope they would do is go to their doctor and say, “Doctor, is there any way that there could be a cheaper medicine that might work because $30 is hard for me this month?” In practice, people are extremely uncomfortable doing that. They really don’t like to go to their doctor and say, “Doctor, how do I trade off the money here versus the medicine?”

David Cutler

The previous issues Cutler mentioned had to do with time preference and delayed gratification. The turmoil over dieting alone is evidence that people don’t always make the best decisions.

Here’s the second of two appearances of the word “behavioral”, in response to Tyler’s question about how to make cities healthier.

I certainly join the crowd of economists who have argued that congestion pricing is the best way to deal with urban traffic jams. There’s no reason not to charge people for the social cost of their actions on that. And giving away street space for free is just crazy, especially since we now have technologies that can handle this.

And if we introduce autonomous vehicles without congestion pricing, you have just lowered the cost of sitting in traffic, which means the first-order behavioral response is that more people will sit in traffic, and our congestion will get even worse unless we introduce this from the beginning. So I think pricing is really good.

Ed Glaeser

In the second use of the word, it sounds like an individually-rational decision to sit in your autonomous vehicle and read blogs until your arrive at your destination. Maybe we can use mechanism design to reduce traffic congestion and improve life for all.

Whether or not you think behavioral economics is dead, economists are going to keep using the word “behavioral” for a long time.

I did a quick Ngram to get a sense of how common the word is, although this does not restrict the search to books about economics. Ngrams are easier to interpret if there is a comparison word. I choose the word “clustering” because it’s also a relatively new technical term. Both words were quite rare before 1930.

If you missed the small discussion about behavioral econ, Mike Munger did a link round-up here. Tomorrow’s post will be Vernon Smith’s view of behavioral economics.