Despite the coldness of economics , in recent years , economists such as Kahnmann have begun to describe behavioural economics and how our whole idea of the rational consumer is wrong . Does this affect the connection between natural sciences and economics ?
One thing that is important to understand in science is how we deal with it at different levels . Kahnmann talks about rational decisions at the individual level , classic examples of their work would be : ‘ You go to a concert with a ticket that costs £ 100 and lose the ticket or you lose £ 100 at concert , would you rebuy the ticket in both cases ?’. That ’ s at the individual level . Our complex system model happens on a much larger scale . At macrolevel phenomena , individual decisions wash out . A lot of the work I do is learning about the collective scale . Something I ’ ve worked on is how to calculate the best places to enter areas of economic activity . Or , how would we measure the knowledge an economy has at a collective level , based on the activities people are able to do .