Rethinking the Economy

Now that I’ve used Getting Green Done to flesh out part of my argument, here’s the latest version of my framework.
The conventional economic framework, a.k.a. Econ 101, says the economy can be broken into 3 layers:

People are calculators: they rationally pursue their self-interest given near perfect information about the world
Organizations are calculators
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Recently NPR ran a piece about the impact behavioral economists — the folks who argue that people aren’t calculators — are having on the Obama administration. NPR gave a sample of the dizzying amount of hard empirical research backing up behavioral economics, then asked, “So why would economists assume that human beings are so hyper-rational?” [...]

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There’s one thing Democrats and Republican politicians agree on when it comes to healthcare reform: digitizing healthcare records could be a godsend. When it works, it can improve patient care, reduce medical errors, and save billions of dollars a year — a crucial consideration given the threat that skyrocketing healthcare costs pose to our economic [...]

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Most economists start from the same assumption about organizations that they make about people: they are rational and make well-informed, calculated decisions based on their self-interest.
You might ask, did these economists ever have a real job? If so, were they taking Acid or Ecstasy most of the time? How did they get the idea that [...]

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