Neuroeconomics | Do economists need brains? | Economist.com

Neuroeconomics Do economists need brains? Economist.com: “FOR all the undoubted wit of their neuroscience-inspired concept album, ‘Heavy Mental’—songs include ‘Mind-Body Problem’ and ‘All in a Nut’—The Amygdaloids are unlikely to loom large in the annals of rock and roll. Yet when the history of economics is finally written, Joseph LeDoux, the New York band’s singer-guitarist, may deserve at least a footnote. In 1996 Mr LeDoux, who by day is a professor of neuroscience at New York University, published a book, ‘The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life,’ that helped to inspire what is today one of the liveliest and most controversial areas of economic research: neuroeconomics.

“… This is ‘equivalent to neuroeconomics’ brain scan,” notes David Colander, an economist at Middlebury College in Vermont, in an article last year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, ‘Edgeworth’s Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility.’ “