Richard Thaler’s work demonstrates why economics is hard
It is difficult to model the behaviour of creatures as irrepressibly social as humans
By R.A. | WASHINGTON
RICHARD THALER has won the Nobel prize in economic sciences this year for his contributions to behavioural economics. It's a well-deserved prize and a clarifying one, as far as economics is concerned. For a very long time, economists hoped to treat individuals a bit like particles in physics, whose activity can be described by a few well-understood rules, which allow researchers to model and understand complex interactions between particles. The rules, they reckoned, were things like perfect information, forward-looking reasoning and rationality. Of course economists understood that individuals didn't always behave according to those rules, but the idea was that, in aggregate, the rules would allow for a pretty good approximation of reality.
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