>One cannot understand a population except on the premise that (with
>demographically insignificant exceptions) that popoulace makes its
>decisions on rational grounds. The appearance of irrationality is a
>measure of the observer's ignorance of the conditions under which the
>decisions are made.
You don't know much about financial markets then, do you? To quote Joseph Stiglitz at the top of the dot.com boom, "Why do people buy those stocks?" Stiglitz, who still has (or had) a foot in the neoclassical camp, couldn't accept that people do anything irrational - that's part of the point of the information asymmetry theories that won him his Nobel. People don't do silly stuff, they're just differently informed!
This is a really touching faith in rationality, which isn't surprising coming from someone so hostile to psychoanalysis. But I really wonder how you can believe that people are rational in their day to day lives. (I'm *not* excepting myself from irrationality, by the way.) This position is even odder coming from a retired professor of literature. Was Milton's Satan rational?
Doug