Neither rational nor irrational

[koganbot]

Say I want to understand human financial behavior. The behavior is actually complex, but if I make the following simplifying assumptions I can at least have a place to start, and can make some calculations, predictions, etc

Comments

[skyecaptain]

Your point is sort of at the heart of David Graeber's _Debt: The First 5000 Years_, which I will admit to getting bored of (not the book's fault, my attention was just pulled in other directions) less than halfway through.

But his basic point is that profit-maximalizing is a value with a very specific (and very recent) history in the history of financial relations between people (which themselves go back as far as any recorded history -- some of the earliest texts, he argues, were basically ledgers). And furthermore a lot of research in other disciplines outside of economics (including Kahneman who to my knowledge he doesn't cite by name) have questioned how "fundamental" this value is.

There are lots of other values in history -- Graeber talks about gift economies, moral obligation to "repay" the debt of simply existing, and (my favorite) *spite* as a perfectly accepted foundation for economic formation in lots of societies, particularly stateless ones. Worth a skim, but like I said I couldn't even get to 200 pages before being diverted elsewhere.

[koganbot]

Noticed a negative post today on Graeber by Brad DeLong, and it popped into my mind, "Oh yeah, DeLong has been taking shots at Graeber for well over a year now." E.g., this one:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-graeber-post.html

I don't think the animus is particularly ideological, though at this point it seems kind of personal, not to mention professional (that is, someone - DeLong - who thinks he does his own job well gets pissed at someone - Graeber - he thinks does a job poorly), but I wonder why DeLong is spending so much time on it.