Tempestade Cerebral

Em anterior post critiquei, levemente, o facto da maioria dos economistas reduzir o comportamento humano a fórmulas matemáticas. Agora, via Hidden Persuader, um artigo da Newsweek sobre o estudo do processo de decisão (meus destaques):

"Flat on my back, my eyes shrouded with LED goggles and my ears encased in headphones, I was trundled into the maw of an fMRI machine in a basement lab at the California Institute of Technology.
(...)
My brain was helping science explain why, despite centuries of progress in economic theory since Adam Smith, actual human beings so often refuse to behave as equations say they should.

For all its intellectual power and its empirical success as a creator of wealth, free-market economics rests on a fallacy, which economists have politely agreed among themselves to overlook. This is the belief that people apply rational calculations to economic decisions, ruling their lives by economic models. Of course, economists know that the world doesn't actually work this way"

O jornalista está, certamente, a referir-se aos economistas "mainstream". Durante décadas, a escola austríaca tem defendido diferente metodologia:

"[The Austrian School] is not a field within economics, but an alternative way of looking at the entire science. Whereas other schools rely primarily on idealized mathematical models of the economy, and suggest ways the government can make the world conform, Austrian theory is more realistic and thus more socially scientific."

Senhores "economistas", não somos números mas, sim, indivíduos!