[jhap]

I thought this was kind of a lame article. The point of behavioral economics is to systematically understand the heuristics people are using. That is hard to do! Trying to describe all the heuristics together is difficult and untestable -- i.e., not that good for the experimental research which most behavioral economists practice. Still it is well-known in the field that this is an open question worth theorizing about and I think many people do[1][2], although there is not a consensus on the "best" theory as far as I know.

The author like then lauds some impressive/hard to conduct/large-scale interventions which are formidable but don't really teach us about economic theory, and in fact neither were published in economics journals. Maybe the field should move in that direction, I am agnostic on the point, but the author's argument wasn't coherent in my opinion.

[1] https://rajchetty.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/behavioral_...

[2] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Selective%20Atte...