In recent debates, the application of behavioral insights to public policy appears mostly as a means to widen and strengthen the capacity for state regulation, sparking fears of manipulation and control. As the case of Günter Schmölders shows, however, behavioral economics, or socioeconomic behavioral research/empirical socioeconomics as Schmölders called it, is not necessarily at odds with a neoliberal project. The empirical analysis of economic behavior can serve both as a means to increase state intervention into areas of individual choice that had formerly been considered impenetrable in liberal democracies or as an attempt to define the limits of state intervention. Schmölders intended to empirically establish the principles of human behavior that could not be changed and, therefore, also not be the object of economic policy. In this approach, he was in line with the older German ordoliberals who did not believe in the abstraction of a homo economicus but rather held the view that competitive markets produced the best economic outcomes given the limitations of human knowledge and rationality. Thus, a behavioral approach to economics is politically polyvalent with appeal across the political spectrum, which is one of the major reasons for its recent success in political consulting.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 347