ABSTRACT
The term “armchair theorists” well captures the image of early-nineteenth-century economists operating in the classical tradition of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and later-nineteenthcentury economists operating in the marginalist tradition of Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall. By this interpretation of the development of economics, behavioral regularities were simple assumptions arrived at through casual reflection rather than through systematic observations in the field or in the laboratory. Assertions that people experienced diminishing marginal utility, that they were largely self-interested, and that they would avoid any activity whose cost exceeded its benefit were just commonsense generalizations arrived at based on simple introspection. It was not necessary to delve deeply into one’s own experiences to find support for such psychological descriptions. One merely had to skim the surface of lived experience. An early proponent of an enriched psychological component for economics, George Katona, detected the simplistic state of psychological economics with his observation that “‘economics with mechanistic psychology’ might . . . be a more accurate phrase than ‘economics without psychology’” (1951, 7).
