Doug Mackenzie said: >Actually I think it's highly useful and quite >realistic, provided that you avoid some of the >pitfalls of Neoclassical economics. I don't think Doug Mackenzie and I are very far apart. I agree with most of what he says after the first seven words of his post. In particular I agree that people have objectives and usually act in ways that they believe will bring those ends about. I certainly DON'T think that people are irrational. But if all that rationality means is that people generally behave in ways that are intended to bring about desired ends, it's a pretty weak device for explaining anything, precisely because it's rather trivial. People behave in complicated ways. We should try to understand why they behave the way they do. But as I say, trying to link that up with some concept economists call rationality doesn't seem to have got us very far, and is sometimes misleading (as Doug implies when he says we need to ditch some mainstream pitfalls). This is not to say that optimization models aren't useful in some contexts. Gary Mongiovi