Just the other day I was posting about Vernon Smith and ecological rationality as it related to voting (Brad DeLong shared the Smith paper as well). Coincidentally, toay we have Peter Boettke with thoughts on the topic and Gerd Gigerenzer.
I agree with a lot of the points - of course how can one disagree with the relevance of situational context to these issues? - but I think some of the critiques that are extrapolated from that point can be excessive. I had made this point in response to a previous talk by Girgerenzer that Boettke had shared when I pointed out that precisely when Girgerenzer claimed people were using heuristics, they were still optimizing, and quite blatantly at that!
If you want to think about situational context of decision making, like I did about voting or Girgenzer and Smith do about ecological rationality, that is excellent. Please do.
If it leads you to tossing out modern mainstream economics you've probably messed something up along the way.
Friday, October 5, 2012
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Speaking of the environment and the ecology...
ReplyDeleteWhat is your opinion of the precautionary principle, Daniel Kuehn?
As for Gigerenzer, his works are interesting, but decision-making under uncertainty had been already dealt with by John Maynard Keynes's A Treatise on Probability and his conventional coefficient of risk and weight.