Excepts," It may come as a surprise that the origin of the study of economics was substantially psychology, perception, and mental ordering. As I've discussed, Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, wrote not just The Wealth of Nations but also a book on human psychology, namely The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith's life's work was to mix economic reasoning with Stoic moral philosophy (Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, plus their French Renaissance successor Montaigne) and applied psychology, most of which he generated from his own reasoning. The Stoics were themselves obsessed of the proper internal order of the mind and in particular how to manage pain, how to deal with what you can never have, and how to lower your expectations so that life seems like a pleasure rather than a burden. Whereas the Stoics sought to understand the psychology of the Roman Empire, exile, and the slave whip, and Smith studied the pin factory, I am looking at Facebook, Google, and the iPod."
As an economics student, I personally find this comment very interesting. Economics have been framed in such a rational perspective that it starts to veer from real human daily lives. I am hoping that behavioral economics (economics + psychology) can be developed in a greater speed so that it can be injected into marketing arena. The real fun begins when science is infused with arts and vice versa.
The Age Of The Infovore by Tyler Cowen
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