What is really strange is the contrast between the strength of the arguments against conventional economics, and difficulties involved in teaching common sense. It is like someone who has been convinced that day is night, and great effort is involved in pointing out the sun to him. I sometimes give the following example.
Look at that old lady purchasing tomatoes. You know what she is doing? She is differentiating a multivariate utility function and setting up a simultaneous equations system of first order conditions. Now she is solving the nonlinear system. Fantastic, she just solved it to find the utility maximizing purchase under budget constraints is exactly 12.8 oz of tomatoes. Alas, she cannot slice them with such precision, and does not know the integer programming techniques required to solve the more complex optimization problems. OOPS, she miscounted the money she paid, and did not notice the change in the budget constraint when the greengrocer shortchanged her.
While this is usually good for a few laughs, especially from deeply indoctrinated students, because we are poking fun at the sacred principle of utility maximization, there is a serious point involved. Our personal experience, observations of others behavior, and general knowledge of how markets and shopping works, provide overwhelming evidence against microeconomic theory of consumer behavior. Yet we set it all aside when we read Samuelson. If a Nobel prize winner said so, it must be right.Real-World Economics Review Blog
Asad Zaman
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