Lakshmi wrote: > "The major irrationality is not in people's cognitive predispositions but in > our social arrangements. The turn inward in the struggle to root out > irrationality is decadent but really very prevalent at this point."
Joanna writes: > Ah. Very interesting. Can you say more? I can't speak for Lakshmi, but among economists, the emphasis on personal irrationality is not a simple matter of turning inward. (It's a continuation of the individualistic bias of economists, however.) Deviations from "economic rationality" are used as an explanation of why financial markets get into serious bubbles and crashes, for example. Marx, who never presumed that people were rational or irrational, knew that financial markets can easily become self-destructive. It's part of the nature of the "game." As Keynes pointed out, systematic uncertainty about the future means that individuals have no choice but to act in "irrational" ways. -- Jim Devine / "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." -- Albert Einstein _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
