Category: Ethnographic Methods

The End of Rational Economics – HBR.org .

According to the latest issue of HBR in 2008,  Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve once hailed as “the greatest banker who ever lived,” confessed to Congress that he was “shocked” that the markets did not operate according to his lifelong expectations. He had “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.” We are now painfully blinking awake to the falsity of standard economic theory—that human beings are capable of always making rational decisions and that markets and institutions, in the aggregate, are healthily self-regulating. If assumptions about the way things are supposed to work have failed us in the hyperrational world of Wall Street, what damage have they done in other institutions and organizations that are also made up of fallible, less-than-logical people? And where do corporate managers, schooled in rational assumptions but who run messy, often unpredictable businesses, go from here? We are finally beginning to understand that irrationality is the real invisible hand that drives human decision making.  Armed with the knowledge that human beings are motivated by cognitive biases of which they are largely unaware (a true invisible hand if there ever was one), businesses can start to better defend against foolishness and waste. The emerging field of behavioral economics offers a radically different view of how people and organizations operate.

Related articles

• We are all mostly Irrational! (ecodig.wordpress.com)
• 10 Behavioral Economics/Psychology Books for Investors (ritholtz.com)
• “Economics” & rationality (stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com)
• Young Economists on the Future of Economics (freakonomics.com)
• Mainstream Economics is a Cult (ritholtz.com)
• Capitalist Theology on the CBC (activehistory.ca)
• Mainstream Economics is a Cult (washingtonsblog.com)
• Sweatshops, Bastiat, and (Potential) Misapplications of Economic Theory (c4ss.org)
• “The Invisible Hand” on CBC radio (worthwhile.typepad.com)
• “Value-free economics?” (economistsview.typepad.com)