De gustibus est disputandum: The role of agricultural and applied economists in an era of behavior change initiatives and endogenous preferences

Popular society increasingly questions preferences that drive many resource allocations and production decisions, with many groups actively seeking to alter those preferences to achieve changes to resource use. Agricultural and applied economists, who are already equipped with excellent technical skills to undertake consumer preference and valuation studies, must also be challenged to understand post‐Beckerian consumer theories that can help guide emerging requests placed upon economists as multi‐disciplinary collaborators as non‐academic groups press us to join in work involving interventions that work from the implicit assumption that preferences are malleable and potentially endogenous. I call association members to follow our best traditions of studying production dynamics and incorporating emerging theories drawn from or inspired by other disciplines so that we may better interact with the broader scientific community who, as many suggest, finds our insistence on stable and static preferences to limit the usefulness of economists in handling a raft of modern dilemmas. In addition to setting out the history of economists' reticence in considering endogenous preferences, I will outline several threads of emerging literature that can provide structure to professional inquiry in this domain and sketch some emergent cases with implications for the agricultural and resource sectors.