So for example. I can imagine that if I was a Sumo wrestler I’d be constantly worried about injuries, so I’d be disinclined to put much effort into matches that don’t matter. Is this what happens? I don’t know, and neither does Levitt. Maybe its a social convention of the sport? Maybe its a collection of complex and interrelated things. Now if I was a real researcher, rather than an economist, I might do some research and find out.

The stuff on baby names. I mean that might be why people do it, but think back to when you picked baby names. Does it still seem plausible? Hang around a poorer neighbourhood and listen to people discuss possible names. Still convinced?

As for rationality. People don’t make decisions rationally, or for that matter irrationally. Just not how we’re wired.

I hear ya.

Still, all of this would make brilliant reading for next year’s Foucault seminars (provided they happen). People not as individuals but as populations and all that. I still say that you are talking complete sense. I like my rationalism as much as the next man, thanks. Give me one Ben Goldacre over a rabble of prayer-mumbling homeopaths anyday!

Fight the good fight!

I read your post and I agreed, of course, but, if you don’t mind me asking, can I agree with Falvery as well? Not for all the right reasons, but my usual poles of influence are pulling me in all sorts of ‘yeah but’s….

There’s the Foucault angle, I think, which I think your post and Falvery’s together cover. The assumptions in this book are hopelessly embroiled to a particular conception of human nature (i.e. rationalist), that can be oppressive, damaging, limiting (Falvery) but also and simultaneously can be productive and, really, not such a bad thing, when the alternative is to succumb to the irrationality that is still all too prevalent in the world (which is a gross oversimplification of what you’re saying?).

And for me you are also right, implicitly, on the score that, regardless of how we like to see ourselves, these are the beings that we have made ourselves into. If we want to be something different, a more fundamental change is needed.

Then there’s the (more comical) Freudian side of me, that wants to ask: but really, are we so rational? Surely such formulas are only attempts to impose reason on chaos, to control and quantify the irrationality that is human decision making?

(Which, of course, is what Freud was trying to do himself in the first place…)