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
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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
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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:
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.
th existence marketlostcosmonautOctober 22 2013, 16:12:48 UTC
my thinking on rational/irrational behaviour is aided by remembering that we are all animals, and that what we think of as rational thought is simply an adaptation that allowed more of us to survive relative to our less sophisticated genetic cousins. If irrational people were to fuck more often than rational people, and produce more healthy offspring that reach adulthood, then in evolution's eyes being irrational is better than being rational. It's more complex than that, but you see what I mean. It so happens that rational people developed and refined an economic system that rewards being rational, being intelligent -- most of our other assumptions about human economic behaviour proceed from there
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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.
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--mza.
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