I recently was reminded of this article

[conuly]

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734141432/what-dropping-17-000-wallets-around-the-globe-can-teach-us-about-honesty

Every time I think about it, I wonder if all economists are amoral jerks, or just the ones involved in this study.

"People were more likely to return a wallet when it contained a higher amount of money," Cohn says. "At first we almost couldn't believe it and told him to triple the amount of money in the wallet. But yet again we found the same puzzling finding."

There's nothing puzzling about this finding! Obviously you're going to make more of an effort to return a wallet that has money in it instead of a wallet with no money in it! Obviously you're going to try harder if it's a lot of money rather than just a couple of bucks! Because most people aren't total assholes! Heck, even assholes usually have some standards of basic human decency.

I don't understand how we can trust economists to have any understanding of how money works when, if articles in the popular press are any indication, they have no understanding of how humans work. Like, fundamentally, I don't know how they were surprised by this result. Years after first reading that article, I still do not get it.

Comments

[agoodwinsmith]

Agree.

[conuly]

Never misplace your wallet around an economist.

[sallymn]

People are better than some experts think... then again, a life in economics probably makes them cynical.

[melannen]

I don't know if all economists are necessarily amoral jerks, but at the very least in order to be a working economist (outside a very few amazing people who are constantly screaming into the void!) you have to be either an amoral asshole or fundamentally unobservant, authoritarian, and bad at critical thinking, because modern economic theory is entirely built on false postulates that are blatantly obviously false to a college freshman who's willing to question them even the tiniest bit and that econ professors can't defend at all if called out on. So anyone who starts taking econ classes and doesn't change majors after a couple semesters is either someone who didn't notice that or noticed that but decided a lucrative career was more important.

[rebeccmeister]

I suspect the aspect of surprise is at least partly tied to how the field set itself up. It took economists a ridiculously long time to grasp the fact that human beings do NOT behave rationally. That, in turn, has meant that the development of behavioral economics is surprisingly recent (e.g. understanding of economic principles built off of this type of study using real-world behavior instead of a series of highly inaccurate assumptions).

I don't know how the field of economics got its start, but from what I know for other disciplines, often the origins are strange and fascinating (see, e.g., psychology).

[siliconshaman]

I'm reminded of quote from (I think) George Bernard Shaw: An Economist is someone who knows the cost of everything, and the value of nothing.

[movingfinger]

One thinks of the story of the pickpocket who, on his first serious try, got a wallet with what was obviously someone's monthly cash in it, stared at it and realized that this was just another poor slob like himself, and returned it. He said he decided pickpocketing wasn't for him, he wrote...

[pauamma]

Is your impression based on the actual academic article published in Science, or what NPR made of it? More often than not, there's a substantial difference between what academic articles actually say (or don't say) and how they're reported in mainstream media.

[conuly]

Oh, no, it's definitely the reporting by NPR - but unless they straight up invented that quote, I'm still baffled.

[pauamma]

My guess is the NPR writer and or editor blew it up out of proportion with little or no context. The Science article says

Although there is robust experimental literature on the conditions that give rise to honest behavior (6–11), little is known about how material incentives affect civic honesty, particularly in field settings. Understanding the relationship between civic honesty and material incentives is not only practically relevant but also theoretically important.

and (crucially) Theories of honesty make different predictions about the role of material incentives. (emphasis mine) and the rest of the next paragraph of the abstract.

[melannen]

I will say that the fact they turned them in to employees is pretty significant to the results, compared to, say, dropping them on the street. I work in a job where we do get things like that turned in pretty regularly, and while honesty is certainly part of the equation, we do have actual employee policy around lost money turned into us, with repercussions if we're caught out not following it. (And we're expected to put more effort into finding the owner the more valuable something is - if someone turns in a wallet with no credit cards and less than $20 it just goes into the lost and found for a couple months and then the charity donation bin after; if it's $100 we're supposed to make a serious effort to find the person and keep the money accounted for.) Like, that's not just me being an altruistic human, when I'm behind the desk I'm not a human I'm an employee and it's explicitly part of my job duties as front-desk customer service.

(it's also often regular customers who lose stuff and the nicer you are to your regular customers, the more likely they bring you donuts later and then talk you up to your boss. A lot of the "altruism vs self-interest" questions economists ask have a really unimaginative definition of self-interest. )

(also in a lot of places you can actually be charged with theft for keeping a lost wallet if there's a reasonable expectation you could have returned it.)

[zesty_pinto]

I've said this way too many times. Folks like Matt Yglesias who keep insisting more housing will lead to less homelessness is ridiculousness to the scale of Keynes and might as well be borderline Reaganomics, even folks without econ degrees can see the glaring flaws!

[conuly]

I'm finding your comment really difficult to parse, for some reason. Can you rephrase it or, idk, tweak the punctuation or something? I'm still not sure if you're saying that housing = less homelessness or more.

[zesty_pinto]

I might be too Twitter online, but the economists I usually see on there like to believe that more housing will lead to less homelessness. Forget that most new housing is also catered towards high-end luxury units and what low-fund units are available will only cover a tiny fraction of this. It pretty much irks me, moreso now that housing has reached a point where it's no longer economically viable to own.

[sabotabby]

They should spend less time modelling how to extract wealth from poor people and more time talking to humans.

[the_future_modernes]

they insist that logic is equal to selfishness. And a lot of them are hell bent on building systems to prove themselves right

[silveradept]

Economists often model the belief that we are all selfish and self-interested, and that's not actually the case much of the time. I think there are enough people who do fit that and who have enough economic power to make it look like the rest of us are so inclined.

[gale_storm]

LOVE this RED phase in which she’s found herself lately!! As if MY OPINION

[conuly]

??

[gale_storm]

Don’t know at all, now, I check as it in November!! Sorry to say all that and it will hopefully get me to check in again and again and again, on a good schedule. At least I can well hope to do!!

[dorchadas]

This reminds me of the phenomenon of Elite Panic, where people in power assume that the populace is a barely-contained mob and a single thing will set them to looting and murdering and burning even though the actual evidence shows that disasters usually make communities come together to overcome the problem.

[conuly]

To be fair, I sometimes think all the emphasis on community building overlooks the public good that might come from looting and/or eating the rich.