>But talk to just one individual who’s gotten stuck (or even chosen to stay) in an expensive home they couldn’t afford, and all that Econ 101 vocabulary starts to fall short. Or at least, you’ll find fairly quickly that no one’s housing decisions are governed neatly by the laws of supply and demand in the housing market alone. And that's because all of us — as consumers and as human beings — are part of infinite markets with infinite feedback loops, not all of which are easily predictable.

I struggle to understand why people who argue for rationality, i.e., people who I know are very very smart and extremely rational, turn around and expect rationality from populations.

I've talked to highly intelligent bankers who are surprised when a market turns volatile/irrational, doctors who can't comprehend why their patients make irrational/poor health decisions, teachers who have difficulty accepting the disconnected nature of students whose very future depends on them doing well in a given class. Politicians who have this expectation that people will not break the law, or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or whatever other things that require rigid rationality.

Maybe it's a problem with empathy? Of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes?" Maybe it's not even possible for extremely intelligent, relatively rational people, to adopt the mindset of people who (by choice, culture, or means well outside their control) live more emotional, instinctual lives. Even more insidious is when these exact people fail to recognize the irrationality present in themselves, inherent to the fact that they're human.

When I studied Anthropology, I'd even come across professors that didn't necessarily believe that human culture is irrational / arbitrary. There may be traits that continue to exist because natural selection promoted them (a religion that resisted the eating of pork and promoted evangalising happens to survive through dark ages because nobody is getting stomach parasites and because it replicates), but there's nothing inherently rational about that.

TLDR my big word-salad rant -> I strongly believe, and have horded anthropological evidence to support this belief, that humans at scale are completely irrational, and to expect otherwise is foolish and irrational. One should plan for irrationality.

Obviously moving away when rent is too high is the "right" choice, the "rational" choice, but being human is just too messy for something as simple as that. Like the article says, there are just so many reasons that get all tripped up, some rational, some not, all just as powerful an influence on a human "decision tree" (again, too logical a structure to describe human choice-making).

I made such a dumb long post because I want to be challenged on this. If you take the time to reply with why you disagree with me I will be very grateful.