A 2013 article from the Financial Times.
Economics is not fighting the last war. In the past three decades, experimental methods have shown that people are more fair-minded and moral, and less calculating than the so called Economic Man of the textbooks. The fact that we are nicer and not quite as clever as economists once assumed has direct implications for policies to address problems of financial instability, climate change, and economic disparity. The new research greatly expands the set of politically viable and economically effective policies to ensure a sustainable planet and to level the economic playing field.......For our students, though – especially those in the core courses of the curriculum – this is all a well-kept secret. We impose a curriculum that is increasingly remote from what economists now know, and more distant still from the pressing problems that drew our students to economics in the first place.
Economics is not fighting the last war. In the past three decades, experimental methods have shown that people are more fair-minded and moral, and less calculating than the so called Economic Man of the textbooks. The fact that we are nicer and not quite as clever as economists once assumed has direct implications for policies to address problems of financial instability, climate change, and economic disparity. The new research greatly expands the set of politically viable and economically effective policies to ensure a sustainable planet and to level the economic playing field.......For our students, though – especially those in the core courses of the curriculum – this is all a well-kept secret. We impose a curriculum that is increasingly remote from what economists now know, and more distant still from the pressing problems that drew our students to economics in the first place.