Gary Mongiovi said: > It seems to me that as a scientific category, > <rationality> leaves much to be desired; it is > little more than a normative label that economists > assign to behaviour that validates their > propositions and withhold from behavior that does > not. It's really not very useful for explaining what > people actually do. Actually I think it's highly useful and quite realistic, provided that you avoid some of the pitfalls of Neoclassical economics. People have ends and seek the best means to satisfy those ends. It's quite simple as far as I'm concerned- If I'm hungry I buy food not an umbrella (and at the lowest price). If I need a bridge built I hire engineers not musicians(and at the best wage)- who would deny that people seek effective means to satisfy ends? Of course people do not equate costs and benefits at infinitesimal margins given convex twice differentiable utility functions, but does that mean that we are irrational? and if we are irrational then isn't economics just a waste of time? After all, if the members of society are all just irrational what sense is there in trying to make sense out of society? Without some notion of imperfect, bounded, or partial rationality there isnt much for us to say, apart from noting that nothing really makes sense. As far as I am concerned this is as wrong and uninteresting as fully deterministic neoclassical economics. Doug Mackenzie