Richard Thaler's "Misbehaving" Volume 2 // Part 4
This will, as far as I know, be my final blog post for Richard Thaler's book Misbehaving which sought to explain behavioral economics in a modern-day setting. With this final post, I will be tackling a moral idea that truly impacted me, eugenics. Eugenics and their financial factors will be scrutinized within the scope of behavioral economics. This theory of economics is a combination of business and psychology that seeks to understand and explain why people buy. With this as my lens, I will be explaining why eugenics connects to the business industry and how behavioral economics plays a role. First off is incentives. While this may seem out of the blue, I believe it is one aspect of eugenics that truly hits the low end of the ethical spectrum. Before we get to that though, the economics of incentives. Behavioral economics tells us that incentives offer a way to "nudge" or otherwise influence consumer rationale. Nudge is actually the name of Richard Thaler's book pr
