I have some skepticism about this “Future Directions for Applying Behavioral Economics to Policy” project

Kevin Lewis points to this announcement:

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is undertaking a study to review the evidence regarding the application of insights from behavioral economics to key public policy objectives (e.g., related to public health, multiple areas of chronic illness . . . economic well-being, responses to global climate change). The committee will examine applications from the past 5 to 10 years . . . and also less successful applications that may offer valuable lessons. The committee will also examine main controversies that have arisen as field has progressed . . .

The study will be carried out by a committee of approximately 12 volunteer experts in the fields of: Economics, Behavioral Economics, Psychology, Medicine, Cognitive Science (e.g. judgment and decision making) and Methodology.

The National Academies are committed to enhancing diversity and inclusion in order to strengthen the quality of our work. Diverse perspectives contribute to finding innovative approaches and solutions to challenging issues. . . .

Lewis asks, “How about just ‘rigorous empiricism’ instead of arbitrarily limiting to ‘behavioral economics’?”

But I’m wondering about the last bit of the announcement. I agree on the value of diverse perspectives, but they list 6 fields:

2 are economics
2 are psychology
1 is medicine
1 is “methodology” (which is not actually a field).

Economics, psychology, and medicine are fine—but do you really need to include each of economics and psychology twice? And, if we’re looking at public policy objectives, does it makes sense to get someone from medicine rather than public health? And what about public policy and political science? And what’s with “methodology”? Is that a way to say statistics without saying statistics? In any case, I don’t think the above list is a good start if their goal is diverse perspectives.

More generally, I’m concerned about such a project coming out of the National Academy of Sciences. I’m sure this organization does lots of wonderful things, but just by its nature it represents entrenched powerful conservative forces in science, which would seem to make it not the best organization to take a critical perspective on the existing scientific establishment, which in turn will get in the way of the goal of studying “controversies that have arisen as field has progressed.” I fear there will be just too much pressure for happy talk along the lines of, “Sure, science has some problems but a few tweaks will solve them, and we can move ever upward in a glorious spiral of NPR appearances, Ted talks, and corporate and government funding.” Don’t get me wrong, I love media appearances and corporate and government funding as much as the next researcher; I just don’t anticipate much value in a blue-ribbon panel promoting complacency.

On the plus side, they promise to examine “less successful applications that may offer valuable lessons.” I can give them many examples there! I’d also like them to examine the unfortunate tendency of promoters of behavioral economics to drop past failures into the memory hole rather than admit they got conned. It’s hard to learn from your failures when you never talk about them.

At the end of the above National Academies page, it says:

We invite you to submit nominations for committee members and/or reviewers for this study by October 25, 2021.

Here are some nominations for the committee:

Nick Brown
John Bullock
Anna Dreber
Sander Greenland
Andy Hall
Megan Higgs
Sabine Hossenfelder
Blake McShane
Beth Tipton
Simine Vazire

I could think of many more but this is a start. I even included an economist and a psychologist—see how open-minded I am!

And here are some suggested reviewers:

Malcolm Gladwell
Mark Hauser
Anil Potti
Diederik Stapel
Matthew Walker
Brian Wansink

A couple of those guys might be busy, but most of them should have pretty open calendars and so could devote lots of time to a careful read of the report.

P.S. Further thoughts from Peter Dorman in comments.

12 thoughts on “I have some skepticism about this “Future Directions for Applying Behavioral Economics to Policy” project

  1. I’ll make a prediction right now – nudges will figure prominently in their future efforts. We can debate whether or not it should, but I think it will regardless. From a traditional economic view, however, easy nudges that produce big results are low hanging fruit – which should have been picked up in public policies without needing any big research projects. But they will get funded nonetheless. Nudging people to change their behavior may be relatively easy and inexpensive to accomplish, but research to “prove” the nudge worthwhile will turn out to be much more expensive.

  2. House of Lords Science and Technology Sub-Committee’s report on Nudging…

    “The report – the culmination of a year-long investigation into the way the Government tries to influence people’s behavior using behavior change interventions – finds that “nudges” used in isolation will often not be effective in changing the behavior of the population. Instead, a whole range of measures – including some regulatory measures – will be needed to change behavior in a way that will make a real difference to society’s biggest problems.”

    https://old.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/science-and-technology-committee/news/behaviour-change-published/

      • I like this from the report:
        “Committee Chair, Baroness Neuberger, said,

        “There are all manner of things that the Government want us to do – lose weight, give up smoking, use the car less, give blood – but how can they get us to do them? It won’t be easy and this inquiry has shown that it certainly won’t be achieved through using ‘nudges’, or any other sort of intervention, in isolation.”
        The first time I read it, I honestly thought it said “Baroness Nudgeberger.”

  3. As a person who has a foot in both worlds, medicine and public health, my perspective is that the propensity to rely on medical experts in questions of public health is an important barrier to real progress in public health.

    • Clyde:

      I don’t know enough about the two fields to judge, but it was striking that public health was one of the top priorities of the project, yet they didn’t mention public health as one of their fields. For that matter, it’s not clear why they should include medicine at all, rather than nursing and social work, two fields that I think are closer than medicine to the listed policy topic of “multiple areas of chronic illness.” I mean, sure, I get it, the National Academies has a section on medicine but not on nursing or social work, but they should be trying to do the best possible job on this report, not just satisfy their internal constituencies, right?

  4. I sure don’t trust anyone from any of those fields to evaluate “responses to global climate change” — sounds like a good way to commend Freakonomics-esque climate denialism (particularly if the economists take that section). Shouldn’t experts in the fields these insights are being applied to be the ones to judge their effectiveness?

  5. Economics it’s at it’s worst when it does two things. The first is obvious — pretending it’s Physics. It’s not, but the impact of this mistake isn’t as harmful as the second case.

    The second is when it apes a *terribly* policed discipline (psychology). It might get you TED Talk and podcast appearances, but it will also get you embarrassing retractions (or embarrassing refusals to retract work built on flimsy theories).

    As a “recovering economist”, I find this all pretty dismaying.

  6. Like many who comment here, I’ve had some experience with NAS/NRC. There are aspects of their methodology I like, especially a deliberate attempt to include a wide range of views, although it can also be rather controlled in terms of issues addressed and, of course, the framing of the research questions. These reports should always be read critically. (But what shouldn’t?)

    Anyway, I agree that the proposed composition of the panel in this case appears questionable. If the issue is how well BE-inspired interventions have worked in various policy areas and what we can learn about what does or doesn’t work, the expertise needed is mostly in those areas and not on the side of the researchers who designed the interventions. Behavioral economists and their ilk have a useful role to play, maybe, in digesting the feedback they get from policy people, but the feedback itself is what matters most. The panel should be stacked with public health, environment and social policy types.

    By the way, despite the publicity generated by a few BE-ists, nudging is far from the only recommendation you can get from cross-pollinating economics and psychology. Way back when, it occurred to me that cognitive dissonance avoidance played an important role in worker response to occupational safety and health risks, and that regulatory policies could be crafted in a way that would make workers more willing to acknowledge and act on these risks. (There’s a paper by Akerlof and Bill Dickens on this too, but we arrived at this independently.) The advice has nothing to do with nudging.

    To put it differently, there’s a highly prominent elite within the BE world for whom the paradigm is “predictable departures from rationality” and the solution is micro reframing interventions to encourage a restoration of rationality. Most of the firepower on this blog has been directed at that crowd. But that is just one current in a much wider field. True, this is the influential wing of BE, for various reasons many of us have discussed (institutional position, TED talks, a message that appeals to the vanity of its audience), so most actual policy impacts reflect the ideas of the nudgeocracy. That’s probably going to be the focus of this review panel.

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