Why You Can't Affect the Outcome of an Election

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People do it, and you just gave a sort of a justification for why they do it, but the people themselves aren't necessarily good at giving that justification. I mean, there's an unarticulated notion of social rationality, but it's so sophisticated that you can't give it as a reason. But i swear to god, it took me five years before i understood it. And by the way, some audiences never, i talked about this a lot in some audiences, they simply do not understand what you mean when you you can't affect the outcome of election. They immediately go to saint welf. Which is true, but esite evry least of the deep issues that come

How human beings behave is, for fairly evident reasons, a topic of intense interest to human beings. And yet, not only is there much we don’t understand about human behavior, different academic disciplines seem to have developed completely incompatible models to try to explain it. And as today’s guest Herb Gintis complains, they don’t put nearly enough effort into talking to each other to try to reconcile their views. So that what he’s here to do. Using game theory and a model of rational behavior — with an expanded notion of “rationality” that includes social as well as personally selfish interests — he thinks that we can come to an understanding that includes ideas from biology, economics, psychology, and sociology, to more accurately account for how people actually behave.

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Herbert Gintis received his PhD in economics from Harvard University. After a long career as professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, he is currently a professor at Central European University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His book Schooling in Capitalist America, written with frequent collaborator Samuel Bowles, is considered a classic in educational reform. He has published books and papers on economics, game theory, sociology, evolution, and numerous other topics.

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