When I was in school, I was the “class brain.” (sigh, I had a hard time with it, but after I became a Christian, I won people over by offering homework help for free) I even have this glow-in-the-dark rubber brain that my senior class awarded me.
But it’s not worth that much. There are many other character attributes desirable to society aside from being smart. As a little kid, I was a guinea pig for many of the educational theories they tried to test on me, and I survived them. Not sure what good they got out of it.
In my adulthood, I learned to appreciate the abilities of others who may be less smart, but they have gifts — empathy, mechanic, insightful into people, technical specialties… everyone has something to give, IF they will give.
Economists have a fixation on rationality, and this article is a partial expression of that. My answer to the article is the people are limitedly rational. That’s vague, and won’t fit into mathematical theories, but it is accurate. It explains why people act rationally in some situations, and why they could be more rational in other situations, assuming that economists really know what is rational. More goods is better is not an adequate explanation of rational.
A view like mine would make it very difficult for economists to create simple mathematical models of reality. They would rather live in their fake world, where they can publish nonsense to peers, and keep their cushy jobs.
