ABSTRACT

A common narrative among some behavioural economists and policy makers is that experimental psychology highlights that individuals are more like Homer Simpson than the Mr Spock imagined by neoclassical economics, and that this justifies policies aiming to ‘correct’ individual behaviours. This narrative is central to nudging policies and suggests that a better understanding of individual cognition will lead to better policy prescriptions. I argue that this Homer economicus narrative is methodologically flawed, and that its emphasis on cognition advances a distorted view of public policies consisting in fixing malfunctioning individuals, while ignoring the characteristics of the socio-economic environment that influence individuals’ behaviours.

摘要

一些行为经济学家和政策制定者的普遍说法是，实验心理学强调，个人更像荷马·辛普森，而不是新古典经济学想象的斯波克先生，这证明了旨在“纠正”个人行为的政策是合理的。这种叙述对于推动政策至关重要，并表明更好地理解个人认知将带来更好的政策处方。我认为，这种荷马经济叙事在方法论上是有缺陷的，它对认知的强调提出了一种对公共政策的扭曲观点，即修复失灵的个人，而忽视了影响个人行为的社会经济环境的特征。