Economizing Mind, 1870–2015: When Economics and Psychology Met . . . or Didn't

Economizing Mind, 1870–2015: When Economics and Psychology Met . . . or Didn't. 2016. Edited by Marina Bianchi and Neil De Marchi. Supplement to volume 48 of HOPE. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

"Introduction," by Marina Bianchi and Neil De Marchi (pp. 1–15). Despite persisting differences in aims and methods, economics and psychology have been aware of, drawn on, complained about, shunned, and, yes, welcomed each other.

"Letts Calculate: Moral Accounting in the Victorian Period," by Harro Maas (pp. 16–43). Accounting tools such as Benjamin Franklin's moral algebra made Victorians behave as accountants, with accounting practices intruding into the private sphere of Victorian life.

"War of the Ghosts: Marshall, Veblen, and Bartlett," by Simon J. Cook and Tiziana Foresti (pp. 44–70). Establishing the path that leads from Marshall to Bartlett in Cambridge lays the groundwork for a comparison of the theoretical systems of Marshall and Veblen.

"Economics and Psychology: Why the Great Divide?," by Craufurd D. Goodwin (pp. 71–169). Any schism between economics and psychology is indebted in large part to methodological differences, ideological differences, and cultural constraints, along with the accidents of history.

"Behaviorism and Control in the History of Economics and Psychology," by José Edwards (pp. 170–97). Consumer demand theory has always been far removed from behaviorism, because econoimsts conceive of behavior as being essentially purposive (i.e. teleological) rather than controlled (i.e., causally explainable).

"Implementation and Rationality: The Nexus of Psychology and Economics at the RAND Logistics Systems Laboratory, 1956–1966," by Judy L. Klein (pp. 198–225). In order to translate the broad findings of normative microeconomics into detailed, implementable procedures for operations in a system, the system has to be in large part grown by building networks of information flows and feedback loops.

"Psychology Fails to Trump the Multiyear, Structural Development Plan: Albert Hirschman's Largely Frustrated Efforts to Place the 'Ability to Make and Carry Out Development Decisions' at the Center of the Development Economics of the Late 1950s and the 1960s," by Neil De Marchi (pp. 226–38). Development economists such as Hollis Chenery simply could not grasp the open-ended and historical analyses promoted by Hirschman.

"Measuring the Economizing Mind in the 1940s and 1950s: The Mosteller-Nogee and Davidson-Suppes-Siegel Experiments to Measure the Utility of Money," by Ivan Moscati (pp. 239–69). In the "meeting" between expected utility theory and the experimental tradition in psychology, psychologists not only provided the technology to perform the experiments but also identified certain aspects of the psychology of decision that could spoil the experiments and suggested how to deal with those aspects.

"The Sidney Siegel Tradition: The Divergence of Behavioral and Experimental Economic at the End of the 1980s," by Andrej Svorenčík (pp. 270–94). A 1988 Caltech meeting between Vernon Smith and Amos Tversky was the historical beginning of a conflict at the methodologial and theoretical level.

"The Economics of Motivations: Tibor Scitovsky and Daniel Berlyne," by Marina Bianchi (pp. 295–315). Scitovsky's effort to study the determinants of individual choice and how they relate to individual and social well-being remains a unique economic endeavor, owing to what he had to say about the motivational background of choices and to his discoveries in experimental psychology.

"Theoretical Behaviorism, Economic Theory, and Choice," by John Staddon (pp. 316–31). Rather than rely on some form of utility theory as the ultimate explanation for economic behavior, future research might better examine the historical and cultural (i.e., causal) factors that explain why a particular question format drives people to frame a problem in a certain way.