Essay: Our Brains Aren’t to Blame for Our Financial Woes

See on Scoop.it – Bounded Rationality and Beyond

Behavioral finance is a breakout star of the post-2008 economic world. A little-known academic discipline a mere decade ago, this combination of psychology and finance now serves as a catchall explanation for why we act against our own financial best interests time and time again.

In the view of many behavioral finance promoters, the fault for our many financial failures is not in our stars, or in a less-than-stable economy. It’s that we’re not rational. Even at the price of our long-term financial well-being, we simply can’t resist falling prey to anything from too-good-to-be-true housing bubbles to impulsive luxury purchases.

It’s a tempting explanation, this behavioral finance thing. Just about all of us can recall money frittered away on fripperies like frappuccinos that we could’ve, should’ve saved for that unexpected medical bill.

It’s our own fault, we think. We shop too much and we fall for housing and stock market bubbles. If only we’d had an automatic savings plan that could have saved us from ourselves! We’d be rich — or at least not in the desperate straits so many of us are in, lacking emergency funds and piling on more credit card debt than we have in savings accounts.

See on www.bloomberg.com