<DIV>Btw, my response, which Barkley was so nice about, is not an economist's response; on the contrary. It's a cognitive science response based on empirical research into cognitive processing. (I studied this stuff with Bob Nesbitt and Paul Thagard at Michigan, became a convert.)  If prospect theory (as one version of it is called) were incorporated systematically into economic theory, as Daniel Kahneman (last year's Noberl winner) and Aaron Tversky argued that it shoud be, it would rip the guts out of neoclassical economics, upend all its theorems, and make the whole thing an empirical science. Scary, huh? Cass Sunstein has started to do some owrk onalong these lines in his behavioral law and economics project.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>jks Barkley Rosser <rosserjb@jmu.edu> wrote:</DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">Well, jks has already made a pretty reasonable response, but I'll add a bit, although I shall not follow up as my experience is that if someone denounces all of econ as "drivel" with a silly argument, they are not about to be convinced of the contrary by anything that anybody else says, especially somebody advertising themself to be a "technical economist" (and I am, very much so). Anyway, to be more specific, Bill, I was summarizing a huge array of studies, initially from surveys, then from experiments, and now from carefully studied real world cases. Each of these was very specific and in a specific context, so it would take hundreds of pages to describe all of them for you with their particular contexts, etc. blah blah. But their volume is now overwhelming and the results are now incontrovertible, although the exact ratio depends on details, circumstances, etc. I gave this list a kind of ball park typical figure, and indeed it was studying environmental issues where this was first observed, although it has now been studied to death in many other contexts. I think Carrol Cox's example about his inherited piano is a very good example.</BLOCKQUOTE><hr SIZE=1> Do you Yahoo!? Free <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/tag/*http://calendar.yahoo.com">online calendar</a> with sync to Outlook(TM).