Not only is there the danger of explaining the recent economic crisis  
in terms of 'short-sighted greed'; much of the work by behavioural  
economists essentially ensures that fundamental tenets of economic  
rationality remain central to models of decision-making (as I and  
others have argued in the context of pensions). This has real policy  
implications, as individualised models of service delivery are  
legitimated in financialised welfare states such as the UK and US on  
the assumption that insights into the bounded nature of human  
rationality can be used to 'nudge' consumers into making the right  
choices (the new UK public occupational pension system, NEST is based  
on a defined contribution model and is an example of this). In this  
way collective solutions are effectively sidelined in policy discourse.

During my viva, I was asked if my research on cognition and context in  
economic decision-making was not simply the structure-agency problem  
re-framed. I have been thinking about this question in the years  
since, and in many ways the answer is "yes". However, that is not to  
say that behavioural economics does not offer important insights into  
the way agency is exercised, and the new structural conditions  
(including ideological and discursive) that shape, and are shaped by,  
the models they purport to reflect. It is thus important to engage  
critically with the rise of behaviouralism and of course, as always,  
to ask who benefits and who loses: what are the power dynamics at play  
in the promotion of the new behaviouralism. To paraphrase Marx in the  
Eighteenth Brumaire, 'people make their own choices, but they do not  
make them as they please; they do not make them under self-selected  
circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and  
transmitted from the past'.

Kendra.

On 20 Apr 2010, at 19:48, AJ Scott wrote:

> The following article appeared in "The Guardian" on April 5th. Like  
> many other critical commentaries on economics and economists today,  
> it makes several well-taken points about the unrealistic and over- 
> formalized abstractions of the economics discipline and its  
> increasing inability to say anything sensible about the state of the  
> world. However, a rather worrying point (for me) about this and most  
> other similar commentaries that I have seen is that the critics tend  
> to see the way to salvation primarily by means of incorporating more  
> subtle behavioral/psychological insights into economics. This, of  
> course, is fine as far as it goes. The neoclassical assumptions of  
> perfect information, perfect rationality, optimal decision-making,  
> and so on, certainly do need to be relaxed and more realistic-cum- 
> flexible approaches adopted. Even so, any conceptual improvement  
> along these lines still leaves us with an essentially behavioral,  
> individualistic, and in the end micro-economic "science." This  
> leaves the way open, for example, to explaining the recent economic  
> crisis in terms of "short-sighted greed." In contrast to this kind  
> of unsatisfactory short-cut, I believe that we need a much more  
> thorough-going structural analysis that pays attention to the  
> underlying systemic features of capitalism as an expressive set of  
> socio-economic dynamics. I suppose I need to add the cautionary note  
> that this can indeed be done without falling into determinism in the  
> strict sense of invoking a causal link from social relations to  
> mind. It's a long time since geographers last openly debated what we  
> used to call the "structure-agency" problem. It seems to me that the  
> current crisis raises this issue again (in spades), and that we as a  
> discipline need to recover some of the ground that we have lost in  
> this regard as a result of various "post-structuralist" turns. Any  
> reactions out there? Allen Scott
>
> *
> *
>
> *
> *
>
> *Rescuing economics from its own crisis*
> *Economists must admit they don't have all the answers and learn  
> from firefighters, psychologists – and history
> *
>
> *By Larry E**lliott*
>
> For economics, it's like Glastonbury only with better food and no  
> mud. King's College, Cambridge will host the biggest happening for  
> the dismal science's counterculture in decades when it hosts the  
> inaugural conference of the George Soros funded Institute for New  
> Economic Thinking this weekend.
>
> It's a big gig, spread over four days and with plenty of headline  
> acts. Joe Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Sir James  
> Mirrlees are the four Nobel prize winners performing, along with  
> Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International  
> Monetary Fund, Lord Adair Turner of the Financial Services Authority  
> and Bill White, who as the former chief economist at the Bank for  
> International Settlements presciently identified the flaws in the  
> Great Moderation (the apparent decline in economic volatility in the  
> years before the credit crunch).
>
> The choice of venue is symbolic and deliberate. The great and the  
> good believe that what has happened over the past three years is  
> both an economic crisis and a crisis in economics. They want to see  
> new thinking of the sort provided by Keynes the last time there was  
> such a systemic shock to the global economy. King's was Keynes's  
> college.
>
> The crisis has yet to throw up a new Keynes and is unlikely to do  
> so, according to my friend and fellow commentator, David Smith of  
> the Sunday Times, who has just published a thought-provoking book on  
> the crisis and its likely consequences*.
>
> In reality, though, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. It's  
> more important to strip away the layers of complexity that gave big- 
> picture economics a spurious and dangerous exactitude in advance of  
> the crisis. The big lesson in economics from Keynes is that we know  
> less than we think we do, and that there is a vast difference  
> between the output of economic models and the actual behaviour of  
> individuals.
>
> "Our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield 10 years hence of a  
> railway, a copper mine, a textile factory, the goodwill of a patent  
> medicine, an Atlantic liner, a building in the City of London  
> amounts to little and sometimes to nothing," Keynes wrote. He was  
> unimpressed by the argument that decisions were "the outcome of a  
> weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative  
> probabilities".
>
> This, though, is where mainstream economics has ended up. It is  
> possible to construct beautifully precise models if you start from  
> the assumption that rational economic agents with perfect  
> information are operating in free markets that always return to  
> equilibrium. But since none of these assumptions holds true in the  
> real world, this is a classic case of "rubbish in, rubbish out".
>
> Even more worryingly, there has been no room in this view of the  
> world for the heterodox. The prestigious economics journals have  
> been cleansed of all but the purveyors of highly technical algebra.  
> Economic history has been removed from the syllabus, because those  
> who yearn for economics to be a hard science believe the past can  
> teach them nothing. Truly, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
>
> The financial crisis has provided Stiglitz, Akerloff and the others  
> with an opportunity to strike out in a new direction. As Smith puts  
> it in his book: "Economists, like bankers, discovered they were more  
> fallible than they thought and for some that was a humbling  
> experience. Occasionally, that is no bad thing."
>
> There are plenty of suggestions for where the profession should be  
> heading once it has backed out of its blind alley. Speaking at a  
> Greater London Authority conference last month, economist Paul  
> Ormerod said a lesson from physics is that there is kudos to be had  
> from empirical discoveries. In other words, you don't have to  
> construct an elaborate model of the economy to be considered good;  
> you could draw important conclusions from the available data.
>
> An empirical assessment of 250 years of industrial capitalism showed  
> that violent movements in asset prices and credit markets of the  
> sort seen in 2007 and 2008 were relatively frequent; those who used  
> models to assess risk said the chances of a crash were infinitesimal.
>
> Nick Parsons, head of strategy at National Australia Bank, says he  
> learns a lot by talking to his bank's clients and by simply  
> observing what people are up to. Sir Alan Budd, chief economic  
> adviser to the Treasury during the recession of the early 1990s,  
> once said that he had been surprised at how poor the official  
> figures were for consumer spending given that the shopping malls  
> appeared to be full of people. Only when he looked more closely and  
> saw that most were empty-handed did he realise the truth: people  
> were reluctant to part with their money but still liked to window- 
> shop.
>
> The Bank of England also sees the merits of the economics of walking  
> around. It has a model of the economy (which is being updated and  
> simplified) but interest rate decisions are also influenced by the  
> reports from a string of regional agents who act as the eyes and  
> ears of the monetary policy committee and provide top-class  
> information about what is happening on the ground.
>
> At the same GLA conference, Neil Stewart, a psychologist at Warwick  
> University, said that people make economic decisions using general- 
> purpose psychological tools. He used the example of the minimum  
> payments required by credit card companies. The idea behind these is  
> to protect the minority who otherwise would make no repayment, but  
> Stewart said there was evidence that they made other consumers less  
> likely to pay off their bills in full. The perception of consumers  
> was that the minimum payment reduced the chance of them getting  
> seriously into debt, and increasing the minimum payment from 2% to  
> 5% resulted in fewer and fewer people paying off their bills in full.
>
> As the Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, noted in a recent  
> lecture, economists can learn about how to cope with instability  
> from other disciplines, such as ecology or epidemiology. The  
> approach of engineers to limiting the damage caused by avalanches or  
> forest fires could be imitated to make economies more resilient to  
> shocks. Questioning the idea of a rational "homo economicus", he  
> added that there was evidence that perceptions of risk were affected  
> by recent experience; actions were influenced by what other  
> individuals were doing; and that people had excessive faith in their  
> own judgments.
>
> Like those gathering in Cambridge on Thursday, King is wary of the  
> notion that economics can be boiled down to hard and fast rules.  
> "Beliefs adapt over time in response to changes in the environment;  
> and this in turn affects how economic systems behave," he said.  
> "Because the surrounding environment can affect economic decision- 
> making, there are probably few genuinely 'deep' (and, therefore,  
> stable) parameters or relationships in economics. In contrast, in  
> many settings in the physical sciences there are stable 'rules of  
> the game' (for instance, the laws of gravity are as good an  
> approximation one day as the next)."
>
> Is it worrying that the governor of the Bank of England freely  
> admits that economists don't have all the answers? Not a bit of it.  
> There are things we know and things we don't. Understanding that  
> there is a difference is the path to wisdom.
>
> -- 
> Allen J. Scott,
> Distinguished Professor,
> UCLA,
> Los Angeles, CA., 90095.
>
> Tel.: 310 825-7344
> Fax: 310 206-5976

Dr. Kendra Strauss
Research Associate in Urban Political Economy
Department of Geographical & Earth Sciences
University of Glasgow
East Quadrangle, University Avenue
Glasgow  G12 8QQ UK
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