Behavioral economics produced no crisis warnings because its practitioners avoided macroeconomics

Evidence

Posner makes the interesting point that most behavioral economists—who study the application of psychology to economics—did not predict the economic crisis either. We would put this somewhat differently: There were very few behavioral economists who made forceful public statements that a crisis may be imminent. That is because there are very few behavioral economists who even specialized in macroeconomics, and so virtually none was willing to take the risk of making any definitive forecast. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 735

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s thesis that the crisis was a constructed ‘thought experiment’ for economics — the field that claimed to explain irrationality had zero specialists willing to call the crash. — connects to: Behavioral economics has produced no empirical or theoretical payoff for macroeconomics — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 734