George Katona (6 November 1901, Budapest – 18 June 1981, West Berlin)[1] was a Hungarian-born American psychologist who was one of the first to advocate a rapprochement between economics and psychology.
Originally trained as a Gestalt psychologist working on problems of learning and memory, during the Second World War he became involved in American government attempts to use psychology to combat war-induced inflation.
These general ideas were taken up more fully in Europe than in the United States until the development, after his death, of modern behavioral economics.
[2] Katona developed macroeconomic generalizations and predictions from empirical, microeconomic consumer survey data, rather than theorizing from idealized models or assumptions of perfectly rational participants in an economy.
"Instead of assuming that prices, size of production, amount of purchases, etc., are set for us by impersonal factors, we shall seek to ascertain the forms, conditions, and limits of the human decisions that affect them.