At the end of the interview, Professor Laibson concludes, with Professor Goodman’s guidance, that Aristotle would have been in favor of the rational choice theory in economics. As a behavioral economist, Laibson has spent his career working to correct the mistakes of rational choice theory, involving the complicated nature of human decisions in their economic choices in order to make more accurate economic predictions. What I find interesting about this conversation about simple rules that encompass many things and create perfect predictive systems (as Aristotle and the rational choice theorists hoped the world worked) is that it seems to apply to all scientific fields. In physics, as Professor Goodman explains, the complexities surrounding Newton’s theory of gravity are relatively small but they still exist and need to be accounted for. Laibson seems to believe that in economics these complexities will never fully be accounted for and economists will continue to work for a long time at getting more and more accurate predictions that are still fairly uncertain. I find this conclusion somewhat comforting because he does not seem to feel the need to have a perfectly predictive system in economics. His goals are not as lofty as Aristotle’s but they are more concerned with finding the truth in an honest way.
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