Behavioral economics - applied social science

Now, I think there are two usages for behavioural economics. One is to attack economics. I think this is useful not so much because economics deserves more attacking than any other discipline, but because economics has been more influential on policy and business. So if economics had stayed in academia and people had taught economics and it had never become the social science of choice for policy and business, I don't think we would have attacked economics. There would be no reason for that. The reason most people attack economics is not because we want to change economics. It's because we want to change the people who use economics for practical purposes. I love economics. Economics has lots of wonderful things. I want people to study economics as it is. I don't want everything to be behavioural economics. Economists should do what economists do, but when people use them for policy, for business, they should say: ‘Let's be careful about using it.’
The second type of behavioural economics, which I actually care more about, is really about applied social science. It's saying it's not just about economics or psychology or sociology or anthropology, it's really about creating a new world for ourselves. We keep on creating new things in it. Computer interfaces, technology, food, space travel. We're doing so many things. How do the things that we're doing fit with our own ability to make good and wrong decisions? Let's try and just figure it out. The nice thing about it, if you think about history, you just look back. The nice thing about social sciences, we're envisioning the future. So we can ask ourselves, if you're going to create a different version of Facebook, one that would actually increase productivity, what would it look like? If you created a new way for people to take medication, what would it look like? So we don't just ask questions about the past, we ask questions about the future. We ask questions about how would you engineer the world, how would you design the world in a way that you move it forward in a way that is more beneficial. So for me it's all about using social science in the experimental strategy as a tool to figure out where we are, what we do well and what kind of future we want to create for ourselves.