There's a lot interesting in here, but a few real howlers. In particular: > Homo economicus, not only has it never existed, my contention is that if homo econ

There's a lot interesting in here, but a few real howlers. In particular: > Homo economicus, not only has it never existed, my contention is that if homo economicus evolved for some peculiar reason, it would die out very, very quickly or we would club it to death with sticks. It's not in our evolutionary interest to be rational optimizers, by the way. Any species that's rational also becomes highly predictable, and anybody who's highly predictable is rapidly dead because you can anticipate his behavior and game it. Sometimes being unpredictable is the best approach. There is no reason that rational behavior necessitates predicatability. The author mentions game theory but based on this paragraph you'd imagine he'd never studied it. Has he never heard of a mixed strategy? > In the commercial world it's not in the interests of consumers to be rational. If you imagine a world of rational consumers where they all bought cars based on some formula, which was fuel economy multiplied by acceleration divided by depreciation or whatever it may be, what they would end up with would be really, really terrible cars. Car manufacturers would immediately game their predictable and easily understanding preferences and produce cars, which met all the metrics laid down for a desirable car, but the cars would be ugly, uncomfortable, and generally ghastly, and no pleasure to own. Apparently "rational" to this author means "taking one's actual preferences, and then throwing them out and replacing them by an easier-to-specify set of preferences that aren't your real preferences". Either the formula is their real preferences or it is not. If it is indeed their real preferences, then there is no problem; to say that this is their real preferences means they are truly indifferent to the fact that the cars are "ugly, uncomfortable, and generally ghastly", and so the conclusion that they would be "no pleasure to own" would be incorrect. If it's not, then there's your problem right there -- the problem isn't that they attempted to be "rational", it's that they attempted to make explicit their own preferences and got it wrong. You can't "game" someone's real preferences! Now it's true that any attempt to explicitly write down your real preferences is almost certainly going to go wrong, and it's probably a bad idea to attempt it, but the problem here isn't "rationality", it's making the mistake of deciding to act according to preferences you've written down rather than by your real preferences. More generally: If you find yourself saying "it is not in your interest to be rational", something has gone wrong.