Brain Game: Why social policy needs more than the behavioural economics bandwagon
Mark Francas TNS
Behavioural economics insights can help break through the final barriers to behaviour change – but policymakers who believe they have found a "magic bullet" solution may risk disappointment.
For policymakers, trying to change human behaviour the old-fashioned way is expensive, risky, and fraught with failure.
Launching wide-reaching education programmes, and canvassing support for new laws or fiscal policy; altering financial incentives in favour of new behaviour and trying to convince populations of the rational reasons for acting that way: all are costly, potentially controversial...