Richard Thaler 'Discovered' the Known, Only to Add Pretense

We call it the Nobel prize in economics, but the Nobel that Richard Thaler won last week is technically a prize in economic sciences, and that bit of self-puffery (Oh, we're scientists now, are we?) is fitting. Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, the latest craze to sweep a trade not previously known for its runaway enthusiasms. The craze is scarcely the advance in human knowledge that its practitioners want it to be, but it is a tremendous leap forward in the pretensions to knowledge that an economist can't do without.Thaler is a professor at the University of Chicago and the author of countless technical articles and books, as befits a Nobel laureate. He is also a charming writer for general audiences, funny and whimsical, gifts that have helped fuel the craze. Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Lehrer, and other pop science writers feast on his work and then, like a momma budgie regurgitating for her chicks, present the reading public with a smooth, easily digestible bolus of behaviorism. Thanks to Thaler and his colleagues, many technical-sounding phrases have become popular with the upper classes in America and Europe: the endowment effect, risk aversion, confirmation bias, and so on.