Rational

I’m pretty sure I have never done a rational thing in my entire life. And probably neither has anyone else. “Rational”, as used by economists, seems to mean things which are optimal with respect to my current abilities. Consider the case of a 15th century person. It seems to me that the optimal thing to do is to quickly develop a germ theory of disease and then start a dang industrial revolution ASAP. Anything else, and you are pretty much just treading water.

What is the “rational” thing I should currently be doing?

Published 1 August 2011

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Bringing about the singularity as fast as possible.
Christopher Phan

I would guess that developing a germ theory of disease and starting an industrial revolution was not within the abilities of the vast majority of 15th century people.
http://home.manhattan.edu/~peter.boothe/ Peter Boothe

You and Nick Bostrom, eh?
http://home.manhattan.edu/~peter.boothe/ Peter Boothe

But the first, at least, would be within my grasp. u00a0And the second wouldn’t take too long, I don’t think. u00a0The separate condenser is the tricky thing. u00a0What tech or technique was a 15th century person lacking that an early-18th century person had?nnThe vast majority of those people were clearly doing non-optimal things…
Christopher Phan

I don’t think those things were in the abilities of the vast majority of 18th century people, either.nnFor the sake of argument, let’s limit our discussion to Europe. In either century, the average person wouldn’t have the time or resources to pursue an interest in biology or engineering. James Watt had time to wander around the Glasgow Green thinking up improvements to the steam engine. He was also lucky enough to have a job making instruments for the University of Glasgow. The vast majority of other Glaswegians had neither of these things.
http://home.manhattan.edu/~peter.boothe/ Peter Boothe

“Within the abilities” is exactly as slippery a concept as “rational” and “optimal”.
Christopher Phan

I guess we’re just proving your original point: that the assumption of “rationality” in economics has serious limitations (as one should expect from any model of human behavior).
Mark Huberty

I’m not sure that your definition of “rational” is quite on. It’s usually much more constrained: given a choice between some set of alternatives for which I have well-ordered preferences based on a utility function that meets certain criteria, I should always choose the one that maximizes my utility subject to all available information. So I could say that the 15th century person did most emphatically not have in his/her choice set “discover germ theory of disease”; or, if they did, then I could say that subject to very incomplete information or severe uncertainty, they inaccurately assessed the utility of developing said theory versus, say, making war on the next village over.u00a0

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