> One of the harder lessons stamped into me by the last few years in finance is just how wrong the myth of the rational consumer is, regardless of my liberal in

> One of the harder lessons stamped into me by the last few years in finance is just how wrong the myth of the rational consumer is, regardless of my liberal individualist world-view. The best of us make terrible decisions in almost everything we don't consciously analyse, i.e. almost everything. The rest busy ourselves with illustrating Murphy's Law in strings of bad decisions. That's also a pretty trivial truth in psychology. Those who claim that people are rational agents probably spend too much time interacting with computers, and then make unwarranted (and, I should say, spectacularly naive) generalizations.