Postscript

Chapter 10 shows the commonality between other economic propositions and the two economic beliefs that are at the heart of this book, that U.S. markets are competitive and that the primary responsibility of corporations is to make money for its shareholders. Many people believe statements just because economists make them. Some people take these statements to be absolute truths, even though they are only opinions drawn from economic narratives disputed by many economists. Yet, despite this rejection, policymakers, members of the media, and laypeople still believe that they are true. John Quiggin and other economists refer to these views as “zombie economics” because they “still walk among us.” The chapter considers three of these: trickle-down tax policy, austerity, and privatization. No serious economist supports trickle-down tax policy, while the benefits of the other two propositions are disputed by a good number of economists. One of the lessons of this book is the need to question economic propositions put forth by policymakers as the absolute truth.

Examining the Influence of Efficacy Beliefs on Participation in a Residential Curbside Recycling Scheme: Implications for the Use of Persuasive Messaging to Promote Sustainable Behaviours

This thesis examines participation in a household curbside recycling scheme and the influence that beliefs around the consequences of this behaviour have on participation. Using the Fishbein and Ajzen’s (2010) Reasoned Action Approach to create a model of the factors influencing behaviour, quantitative data are collected examining a variety of beliefs around the advantages and disadvantages of participation. Economic beliefs negatively correlate with behaviour while beliefs about reducing waste to landfill and preserving natural resources positively correlate with behaviour. A discussion of Ontario’s current recycling framework is also included and suggestions on areas for improvement are put forward.

Examining the Influence of Efficacy Beliefs on Participation in a Residential Curbside Recycling Scheme: Implications for the Use of Persuasive Messaging to Promote Sustainable Behaviours

This thesis examines participation in a household curbside recycling scheme and the influence that beliefs around the consequences of this behaviour have on participation. Using the Fishbein and Ajzen’s (2010) Reasoned Action Approach to create a model of the factors influencing behaviour, quantitative data are collected examining a variety of beliefs around the advantages and disadvantages of participation. Economic beliefs negatively correlate with behaviour while beliefs about reducing waste to landfill and preserving natural resources positively correlate with behaviour. A discussion of Ontario’s current recycling framework is also included and suggestions on areas for improvement are put forward.

The Effects of Needs for Security and Certainty on Economic Beliefs: The Role of Political Engagement and the Welfare State Model

We suggest that the effects of needs for security and certainty (NSC) on economic beliefs result from potentially competing dispositional (political engagement) and contextual (the country-level political narrative around the welfare state) influences. An analysis of data from the 2016 European Social Survey ( N = 40,870) showed that at low levels of political engagement, NSC is associated with left-wing beliefs. However, at high levels of political engagement, the NSC effects are conditional on a country’s welfare state model: NSC is related to right-wing beliefs in Liberal, Continental, and Southern types, but the effects are nonsignificant in the Nordic type and the reverse under the Eastern type. Analysis of 2018 round of the same survey ( N = 45,575) corroborated the main findings (except the Southern type for which NSC effects were nonsignificant). This study advances knowledge on the psychological roots of economic beliefs and contributes to the understanding of people’s political choices.

The perceived threat of demographic shifts depends on how you think the economy works

Research shows that people exhibit a conservative shift in their politics when their majority group status is threatened. We reasoned that perceptions of threat posed by shifting demographics might depend on individuals’ folk economic beliefs. Across three experiments, White Americans read about projected demographic changes (“threat”) or changes in online dating (“control”) before expressing support for political policies. They also indicated whether they viewed the U.S. economy as a zero- or non-zero-sum system. Relative to controls, participants in the threat condition expressed more support for conservative policies, but only if they conceptualized the economy in zero-sum terms; those who conceptualized the economy in non-zero-sum terms actually endorsed slightly more liberal positions under “threat.” However, these effects obtained only when participants expressed their economic views before their political attitudes. This suggests folk economic beliefs shape how people respond to threats to their majority status, provided those beliefs are first made explicit.

Sense or non-sense? a critical discussion of a recent evolutionary–cognitive approach to “folk-economic beliefs”

Laypeople hold beliefs about economics and policy issues—so-called folk-economic beliefs (FEBs)—that are often wrong or misleading according to professional economists. Here, I critically discuss a recent evolutionary–cognitive approach to understanding folk-economic beliefs. According to this approach (Boyer & Petersen 2018a), some economic beliefs are more prevalent than others, because such beliefs (i.e., folk-economic beliefs) resonate with evolved features of the human mind. I refer to this as the “FEB hypothesis”. A central challenge to the FEB hypothesis, with its heavy reliance on universal cognitive features, is to explain individual and cultural differences in economic beliefs and behavior. This challenge is the starting point for the discussion. Overall, the conclusion of this paper is that the FEB hypothesis relies on unnecessarily strong and controversial theoretical assumptions (e.g., “massive modularity” and the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness”), and that it overlooks important findings from adjacent fields, but that the FEB hypothesis, following some modifications inspired by Dual Inheritance Theory, can be integrated with robust findings from the rest of the evolutionary, cognitive, and anthropological sciences, as well as standard political psychology. Based on this discussion, the paper ends with brief reflections on how to correct inaccurate folk-economic beliefs.

Openness and Self-enhancement are predictors of cultural and economic beliefs: an analysis of European countries across 15 years

In this study, we investigate the relationship between values and political beliefs and how it varies as a function of cultural context and time. In particular, we analyzed the effects of Conservation vs. Openness to change and Self-transcendence vs. Self-enhancement for cultural and economic political beliefs using data from nationally representative samples of citizens from 34 European countries from eight rounds of the European Social Survey (data spans the 2002–2016 period). We found that the effects of values on political beliefs are moderated by the Western vs. Eastern cultural context and that there is a modest round-to-round variation in the effects of values on beliefs. The relationship between Openness and cultural beliefs was negative and largely consistent across the Western and Eastern countries. Similarly, the effects of Self-enhancement were positive across these Western and Eastern countries. In contrast, the effects of Openness on economic beliefs were positive for the Eastern countries but largely weak and inconsistent for the Western countries. Finally, the effects of Self-enhancement on cultural beliefs are weak for both cultural contexts.

The Effects of Needs for Security and Certainty on Economic Beliefs: The Role of Political Engagement and the Welfare State model

We suggest that the effects of needs for security and certainty (NSC) on economic beliefs result from potentially competing dispositional (political engagement) and contextual (the country-level political narrative around the welfare state) influences. An analysis of data from the 2016 European Social Survey (N = 40,870) showed that at low levels of political engagement, NSC is associated with left-wing beliefs. However, at high levels of political engagement, the NSC effects are conditional on a country’s welfare state model: NSC is related to right-wing beliefs in Liberal, Continental, and Southern types, but the effects are non-significant in the Nordic type and the reverse under the Eastern type. Analysis of 2018 round of the same survey (N = 45,575) corroborated the main findings (except the Southern type for which NSC effects were non-significant). This study advances knowledge on the psychological roots of economic beliefs and contributes to understanding of people’s political choices.

People are intuitive economists under the right conditions

[Commentary on Boyer & Petersen. (2018). Folk-economic beliefs: An evolutionary cognitive model. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.] Boyer and Petersen argue that a "rudimentary exchange psychology" is responsible for many of people’s folk-economic beliefs that are at odds with the consensus views of economists. However, they focus primarily on macroeconomic beliefs. I argue that the same rudimentary exchange psychology could be expected to produce fairly accurate microeconomic intuitions. Existing evidence supports this prediction.