It started over 30 years ago. Steven Landsburg wrote the popular book The Armchair Economist in 1993. Through popular stories of economoc quandries and paradoxes, he challenges the long held premise of the rational agent.
Quite the opposite: Our working assumption is that whatever people do, they have excellent reasons for doing.
If we as economists can’t see their reasons, then it is we who have a new riddle to solve.
Since then the discipline has been flooded with sub-categories. There is behavioral economics, feminist economics, health economics, environment economics and so on. Perhaps there’s a thread that ties them together.
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