4 ms·
You’re probably doing your household budget all wrong (2013)
- tlb 13y agoI once lived with someone who followed the envelope approach. Although it was obviously sub-optimal, it did have its comforts. You could blow your weekly entertainment envelope on whatever the hell you felt like and not feel guilty because your rent, food, and savings envelopes were still full. It saved mental effort and decision fatigue. A follower of Stoic philosophy might well trade off some optimality for mental tranquility. I'd love to have an app that figured it out for me. It would achieve some measure of optimality, while saving me from constantly having to make complex ill-defined tradeoffs every time I buy something.
- thatthatis 13y agoExactly. This article is written for "homo economicus" not homosapien. It assumes people are perfectly rational then argues that a technique built to overcome human limits on rationality and processing ability is suboptimal. Economics at its worst. It starts by assuming the cow is a sphere.