Category: Uncategorized

I began a three-year term as associate editor over at Food Policy at the beginning of November, which means that I handle submissions in my areas of expertise, deciding which manuscripts get reviewed and which ones get desk rejected, selecting reviewers for those manuscripts that do get reviewed, and so on.

Even after a little over month, serving as associate editor at Food Policy has given me new insights into the editorial process, which I might eventually blog about. For now, however, I simply wanted to feature a few articles from the latest issue of the journal. There is nothing special about those articles beyond the fact that I thought they would be of interest to readers of this blog.

According to Wiki, behavioral economics

stud[ies] the effects of social, cognitive, and emotional factors on the economic decisions of individuals and institutions and the consequences for market prices, returns, and the resource allocation. The field [is] primarily concerned with the bounds of rationality of economic agents.

In case you never took a class on the topic and would like to learn the basics, my friend and coauthor David Just’s Introduction to Behavioral Economics was just published by Wiley. You can buy it here for the relatively low price (for a textbook, that is) of $112.50.

A reader asks:

Stiglitz said “The heavy subsidization of corn, for instance, means that many unhealthful foods are relatively cheap. So grocery shopping on a tight budget often means choosing foods that are not nutritious.”

Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve been telling [people] that farm subsidies make food more expensive, not cheaper (sugar is a really good example).

If you ask an economist, you shouldn’t be surprised when the answer is “it depends.”