The behavioral and neoliberal foundations of randomizations

• Published date: 01 May 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2328
• Author: Bruno Tinel,Jean‐Michel Servet
• Date: 01 May 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

The behavioral and neoliberal foundations of randomizations

Jean-Michel Servet

1

| Bruno Tinel

2

1

Institut de Hautes Études Internationales et

du Développement/Graduate Institute of

International and Development Studies,

Geneva, Switzerland and Triangle, Lyon,

France

2

University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and

Centre d’Économie de la Sorbonne (CES, UMR

8174), Sorbonne School of Economics, Paris,

France

Correspondence

Bruno Tinel, Maison des Sciences

Economiques, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-

Sorbonne, 106-112 Boulevard de l'Hôpital,

Cedex 13, Paris 75642, France.

Email: btinel@univ-paris1.fr

Abstract

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by behavioral economists pretend to be pragmatic

and only interested in what works to solve practical problems, but in reality, they have

notorious normative and ideological aspects. Behavioral RCTs ignore contexts and

composition effects and reflect the biases of those who perform assessments. Behav-

ioral randomizers presume without demonstrating that market exchanges are the most

effective form of regulation for societies in all situations of social life. The positive or

negative incentives (“nudges”) offered by behavioral economics aim to normalize the

behavior of consumers, users, employees, or small/independent producers. They are

part of a set of power devices by which individual behaviors are shaped and forced,

without their knowledge, to conform to dominant class interests.

KEYWORDS

behavioural economics, behaviour normalization, bias, finance, ideology, methodology,

neoliberalism, power device, randomized controlled trials (RCT), shaping behaviour

1|INTRODUCTION

A symposium on the assessment of public policies was held at the

French National Assembly in June 2018 as a prefiguration of the

national assessment office that will help elected representatives make

their decisions. During the preliminary word, Esther Duflo has been

presented by an MP as “the world reference regarding evaluation.”In

her introductory lecture, Duflo said her randomized evaluations

(or randomized controlled trials [RCTs]) conducted at J-Pal are

“inspired by behavioral economics.”As a support for this statement,

she contended that poor people (who are prime targets of these

assessments) display behavioral biases that she considers as a-

temporal and universal among such a kind of population. In her Ely

lecture given at the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Asso-

ciation in January 2017, she said a good economist should act and

think like “a good plumber.”This text teaches us little about the art of

proper plumbing. However, this rhetorical process, which is less a

metaphor than a way of establishing benign complicity of the reader,

or the listener, while overplaying a kind of empiricist modesty, serves

among other things to anchor the analysis into behaviorism: “To sum-

marize, economists have the disciplinary training to make good

plumbers: economics trains us in behavioral science, incentives issues,

and firm behavior”(Duflo, 2017, p. 20). The aim here is, therefore, to

remedy the supposed behavioral biases displayed by the poor by elab-

orating the “good”incentives (“a smart ‘nudging’policy,”ibid., p. 6) not

on the basis of major theoretical or abstract principles, but in a puta-

tive pragmatic way based on an empirical and concrete knowledge

provided by behavioral economics.

In an article published in theJournal of African Economics, Harrison

had criticized the current randomized experiments as lacking the rigor

of laboratory behavioral economic tests (Harrison, 2011). However, he

did not question the notion of behavioral bias shared with J-Pal ran-

domizers, among others. Thus, Harrison does not dispute the fact that

randomizers,albeit not exemplary, can be part of behavioraleconomics.

RCT economists are not all behavioral economists, and not all

behaviorists practice randomized evaluation, especially Richard Thaler.

This article focuses on the intersection between both groups. While

they pretend to be largely pragmatic and only interested in what really

works to solve practical problems, it is crucial to point out their nor-

mative content and show that their approach is, in fact, based on

clear-cut neoliberal ideological and political grounds (Servet, 2018).

Most of the critical arguments highlighted in this article are not new.

They have already been emphasized many times about mainstream

economics and methodological individualism. The contribution of this

JEL classification codes: A13, B41, C93, and G41.

DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2328

Strategic Change. 2020;29:293–299. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jsc © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 293