Thinking, Fast and Wrong

Sit in a boardroom, a Whitehall ministry, or a tech company product review for more than 15 minutes and somebody will explain to you that human beings are irrational. People are primitive monkeys running on a defective “System 1” brain, you’ll be told. We panic over small losses, we can’t weigh probabilities, we get subconsciously “primed” by stray words on a page, and we need enlightened experts to arrange our “choice architecture” and “nudge” us into eating our vegetables and saving for retirement.For 20 years, this catechism from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Richard Thaler’s Nudge, and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational has been the state religion of the Western managerial class. Permanent secretaries, management consultants, and corporate executives still quote those books as if they were quoting Isaac Newton.Nobody seems to have told them that over the past decade, the entire intellectual edifice of behavioural economics has been dismantled.Its famous laboratory…