No terms in neoclassical economics are more sacrosanct than rational choice and rationality.Everyone identities with these words, because everyone wants to think of themselves as rational.But few people realize that economists give these words an ultra eccentric meaning.Neoclassical economics begins with an a priori conception of markets and economies as determinate systems that by the action of individual agents alone tend toward an efficient and market-clearing equilibrium.This requires that the individual agents, like the bodies in Newton’s system, behave in a prescribed manner.Neoclassicalists have deduced the particular pattern of behaviour that would make their imagined world logically possible, then named it “rational choice” or “rationality” and then declared that that is the way real people behave.But thankfully they don’t.Everyday economic actors do many things that by the neoclassical meaning of “rational” are “irrational”. Looking to the choices of other consumers as guides to what one might buy; buying a stock because you believe other people will be buying it and so increase its value, spending your money in a spirit of spontaneity rather than stopping to calculate the consequences and alternatives up to the limits of your cognitive powers; a taste for change, that is, buying something because you did not previously prefer it; these common consumer behaviours are all prohibited under the neoclassical notions of rational choice and rationality and so outside its scope of analysis.

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