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To: Publius Valerius
Not of your examples are irrational behavior. Look up the following: “Rational Ignorance”,”Risk Aversion/Risk Lover”.

Rational means a person weighs the benefits and costs in their own mind and acts accordingly.

Being bad at math, committing mass murder, giving your life to save another, giving to charity, gambling with the odds against you, assaulting a spouse: none of these things are inconsistent with ‘rationality’ as defined in economics.

52 posted on 11/28/2007 10:04:46 AM PST by On the Road to Serfdom
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To: On the Road to Serfdom
Rational means a person weighs the benefits and costs in their own mind and acts accordingly.

I agree, but it isn't the act of weighing; it is the choice of an objectively better outcome that makes the choice rational. A rational person seeks to maximize an objective value, like, say, utility. So they'll typically assume that given a set of fixed alternatives with known probabilities of outcomes, a person will behave in the manner that will result in highest utility.

Choosing suboptimal outcomes is simply irrational. That's all there is to it.

58 posted on 11/28/2007 10:41:58 AM PST by Publius Valerius
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