Defending Thaler from the guerrilla resistance
So, Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize , which is pretty awesome. If you've read Thaler's memoir , you'll know that it was a long, hard, contentious fight for him to get his ideas accepted by the mainstream. And even though Thaler is now a Nobelist and has been the AEA president - i.e., he has completely convinced the commanding heights of the econ establishment that behavioral econ is a crucial addition to the canon - resistance still pops up with surprising frequency in certain corners of the econ world. It's a sort of ongoing guerrilla resistance. An example is this blog post by Kevin Bryan of A Fine Theorem. Kevin is one of the best research-explainers in the econ blogosphere, and his Nobel explainer posts have always been uniformly excellent. This time, however, instead of explaining Thaler's research, Kevin decided to challenge it, in a rather dismissive manner. In fact, his criticisms are pretty classic anti-behavioral stuff - mostly the same arguments Thale...