I thought Professor Laibson’s discussion of present bias was especially interesting. Rather than reducing people’s behaviors to pure laziness, “present bias” as a term reframes people’s behavior as a symptom of human psychological biases rather than a deliberate unwillingness to accomplish a task, a framing which is much better at accounting for factors such as executive dysfunction, burnout, and other sorts of mental or physical overload. This manner of framing feels sorely missed in discussions of worker productivity in the modern day. An idealized model with laziness as a framing for humans acting “irrationally” may subtly imply that “laziness” is a deviation from the norm and subsequently is something that can be remedied given the right conditions (see discussions of solving/boosting worker productivity in pursuit of infinite growth). However, "present bias" allows us to consider a model where this sort of behavior is simply another factor that must be worked around rather than a problem to be solved, which I believe is a simple demonstration of one of the reasons why behavioral economics is needed as a field.
One question I’d ask is how other concepts such as herd mentality factor into behavioral economics, especially in a highly-connected age where trends come and go much more suddenly?