Prospect mag­a­zine hosts a debate on whether or not behav­ioural eco­nom­ics is as impor­tant as many of its advo­cates laud. As the BPS Research Digest says,

In this […] debate, Pete Lunn (author of Basic Instincts) argues that behav­ioural eco­nom­ics will “deliver a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new way of under­stand­ing the world.” In response Tim Har­ford (author of The Logic of Life) plays down the impact of behav­ioural eco­nom­ics, argu­ing that the field’s lab stud­ies rarely trans­late well into the messi­ness of the real world.

Mov­ing from psy­chol­ogy to neu­ro­science, a recent Econ­o­mist arti­cle takes a crit­i­cal look at neu­roe­co­nom­ics.

The fiercest attack on neu­roe­co­nom­ics, and indeed behav­ioural eco­nom­ics, has come from two econ­o­mists at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity, Faruk Gul and Wolf­gang Pesendor­fer. In an arti­cle in 2005, “The Case for Mind­less Eco­nom­ics” (pdf), they argued that neu­ro­science could not trans­form eco­nom­ics because what goes on inside the brain is irrel­e­vant to the dis­ci­pline. What mat­ters are the deci­sions peo­ple take—in the jar­gon, their “revealed preferences”—not the process by which they reach them. For the pur­poses of under­stand­ing how soci­ety copes with the con­se­quences of those deci­sions, the assump­tion of ratio­nal utility-maximisation works just fine.

via Mind Hacks