From global economic change to neuromolecular capitalism

This chapter examines the role that the fields of neuroeconomics and behavioural economics have played in providing brain-based and behaviourist explanations of economic decision-making within contemporary policy-making cultures. By developing a geographical critique of these disciplinary phenomena as they have emerged and evolved, the chapter interrogates how such economic knowledges actively produce the subjects, practices and spaces of ‘neuromolecular capitalism’. The chapter identifies the popularization of the figure of an irrational or ‘emorational’ actor at the centre of economic theory and indeed public policy making, drawing attention to the behavioural assumptions, biological determinism and geographical blind-spots of these new ways of envisaging human nature. Mobilising conceptual resources within the discipline of human geography, the chapter provides a critical account of the interrelations between a neurologically flawed economic actor and her global economic context.