I have no idea who wrote the headline for this piece—the title I borrow for this post—, but they didn’t read the article. I was wondering what educated person in the past 10 to 20 years still believes in the perfectly rational actor? The larger question is why educated people believe that humans are on balance more rational than not. It’s not particularly well-written, but, I am a sucker when it comes to articles about cognitive biases.
I have no idea who wrote the headline for this piece, but they didn’t read it. I was wondering what educated person in the past 10 to 20 years still believes in the perfectly rational actor? The larger question is why educated people believe that humans are on balance more rational than not. It’s not particularly well-written, but I am a sucker when it comes to articles about cognitive biases.
As with other concept nouns, rationality feels like it has weight, but it really doesn’t. If we so limit its definition, we can claim that the average person is rational on average, but that’s about it. Of course, almost everyone has ‘the quality of being endowed with the capacity for reason’, but that’s a bit too circular for my comfort.
Keynes understood the absence of rationality when he produced his macroeconomic opus and included a factor for animal spirits, yet adherents to classical and neo-classical economic theory continue to defend their models as good enough even in light of Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, who showed that the models needed to follow chaos theory insomuch as a tiny almost imperceptible variance in an input could yield difference in orders of magnitude or even direction, but that’s a horse of a different colour.
DISCLAIMER: I suppose I should have saved this as a draft and finished it later, but I’ve been so otherwise occupied as of late, it will have likely ended up in the bin with the other half-commenced posts, so here it is in its raw stream of consciousness form.
Philosophics 