I think an interesting topic to bring up to Professor Laibson would be one that has been asked in previous economics classes. For a long time, the foundation of economic theory has been rooted in traditional neoclassical microeconomics. As Laibson mentioned, this foundation makes many assumptions about economic agents that don't hold up in the real world: rationality, lack of a present bias, etc. I understand that the field of behavioral economics was founded in order to work around these assumptions from a psychological perspective, explaining the lack of rationality in agents, but will the rapid growth of behavioral economics render the traditional neoclassical models useless? Do we still need to focus on learning how to work with and expand neoclassical models if they don't apply in the real world? How would moving from a neoclassical focus to a behavioral focus in microeconomics affect other fields of economics — that is, what would be the spillover effects?
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I love the idea of questioning the value of classical economics ideas that don’t work!