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On the identity and methods of behavioural economics

The FT has a very good article from Tim Harford today, surveying behavioural economics and asking some important questions about it. People within a field can be so immersed in their unconscious assumptions and practices that it takes an outsider to point out some of the questions they are not asking. Tim says: The past decade has been a triumph for behavioural economics...[which] is one of the hottest ideas in public policy....Yet, as with any success story, the backlash has begun. Critics argue that the field is overhyped, trivial, unreliable, a smokescreen for bad policy, an intellectual dead-end – or possibly all of the above. Is behavioural economics doomed to reflect the limitations of its intellectual parents, psychology and economics? Or can it build on their strengths and offer a powerful set of tools for policy makers and academics alike? Quite. That, of course, is a journalistic question - not one intended to be answered within the article, but designed to provoke t