Closing remarks
Dear professor Richard Thaler, I am very happy to be the first to congratulate you with the honorary doctorate of Erasmus University.
As the Dean of RSM, professor Han van Dissel, and your promotor, professor Kees Koedijk, showed, you are an important intellectual leader in broadening the theory of economic behaviour. People are not in the classical sense economic maximizers; their behaviour is more complex
Since Herbert Simon introduced bounded rationality in 1957, we include in our thinking the notion that humans are not maximizers, but satisficers: enough is enough. But from the perspective of classical rational behaviour even worse was to come. You have shown us how Kahneman and Tversky introduced the idea of systematic bias. Not only our behaviour but also our beliefs are subject to bounded rationality, as well as our self-interest, our willpower and our arbitrage.
In your lecture you showed us how we can use this knowledge in leading people in the direction of behaviour that is profitable for them according to a classical economic view, but which behavior they would not choose without being guided in that direction, due to the boundaries in human behaviour.
It would be interesting to know whether and how these more modern views of how humans behave do in any way influence Dutch government. I have the impression that Dutch government has just discovered classical rational man as the ideal of the Dutch human. The way we are supposed to choose now for health insurance and lifetime options for work and leisure, as opposed to the situation until recently, seems to be very much starting from the classical ‘homo economicus’ as opposed to your more psychological perspective. I hope Kees Koedijk is able to communicate such findings to Dutch government. I also hope to experience the moment in which the bias of Dutch government will shift to a more modern view.
Your lecture was not only illuminating, but also sobering. Combined with the introduction by the rector magnificus, it made me rather gloomy about the human race. Yes, hormones are an important driver of humans, and we need to know much more about our brain processes to understand why we behave as we do. But as we well know, hormones and systematic biases do not only influence males, but also females. It is well known that there is a multitude of factors causing the glass ceiling, and lack of intelligence of women is not an overriding one. The Gaussian curve of intelligence is wider for males than for females. There are not only more superintelligent men, but also more at the other extreme of the continuum.
There are other factors influencing the glass ceiling, among which the obedient behavior of women, their wanting to be liked, and!!… a tendency to underrate themselves intellectually (very unlike males).
I agree with the rector that we should take care not to use selection mechanisms at university that may hamper the access to higher education of boys in their wild period of young manhood. But far more capital (human and intellectual) is wasted by the fact that so much female intellectual capital is spoiled. All over Erasmus University we only have 8.2 % female professors and associate professors. Of Dutch universities only two of the three technical universities have a lower score, according to the recent publication of Kennis in Kaart.
As we learned today, many factors influence human behavior. Much research is still to be conducted in that area. It is an area that comes close to our feeling of self. I sincerely hope that in that area the classical Mertonian value of disinterestedness will prevail when the object comes so close as to unravel less accepted aspects of our behavior.
At the end of my remarks, however, I wish to provide a more cheerful note:
In last week’s World University Rankings we rose from place 64 to 57. The downside is that Delft rose quicker: from 78 to 53.
