Economics: Psychology vs. Rational Self-Interest

That's like saying teams don't win or lose, they are just venues for individual players to do the winning and losing.

The term market in economics is generally used as a descriptor for an agglomeration of interrelated marketplaces. Markets do act, they also react, panic, crash, boom, freak out, and exhibit numerous other sorts of behaviour. Market behavioural terms are used to describe the aggregate result of activity in the various marketplaces that make up a market. Marketplaces are venues of individual activity, not markets.

In answer to your question, the first thing to do would be to reach some sort of consensus on what exactly "rational" means and what it definitely does not mean.

 

Hasn't Madison Avenue understood this forever? I mean, they make bug spray seem sexy.

 

Can we talk about the brilliance of the Austrians yet or are we waiting for a gotcha moment?

 

Brilliant Austrians yes, they beat Sweden 4-1 yesterday.

 

I thought we were talking about psychology v. Adam Smith.

 

Psychology=Austrians

 

Long ago discarded mistaken assumptions about human behaviour= Austrians

 

Yet the other schools have adopted Austrian ideas, changed the nomenclature, and claim them as their own.

 

There is some extremely long threads around here specifically about Austrian economics, you should look them up, or you can start a new one and we can discuss it in as much detail as you care to.
But this thread is not really about the Austrians, related as their hair brained ideas are to the decrepit conception of rational action as the basis of all human activity.

 

Doesn't change that Austrians have cornered the market on economic psychology which, as it turns out, is what this thread is about. If you want to start a thread about "decrepit conception" feel free.

 

The psychological underpinnings of Austrian economics are based on some entirely made up19th century conjecture and innuendo about human behaviour that has since been entirely discarded by the vast amount of actual science reported by those who have undertaken studies to determine how humans actually behave in the real world.

The Austrians have by no means "cornered the market on economic psychology". They are not even the leading proponents of rational self interest but merely a sideshow of economic rationale for libertarianism, which is the big tent of the rational self interest crowd.