>The basic hypothesis is "people will act rationally in their own interest" This is, as we all know, true to the "first order" approximation. We know it in bus

>The basic hypothesis is "people will act rationally in their own interest" This is, as we all know, true to the "first order" approximation. We know it in business - you get what you incentivise - it's behind Goodhart's law (when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure). It is however, an incomplete description of human behaviour, again, as we all know. But since "second and higher" approximations of human behaviour are hard to model... they don't do it. And just so you know, it's just as easy to do bad, "left wing", Lysenkoist economics.