This post is for the departed Nowdy, a true student of human behavior as I thought of her when I read this post by NMC on a book by author Daniel Kahneman’s, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman is a behavioral economist and it just so happens we’re littered with practical applications of the marriage of human psychology to economics and the law right here on Slabbed using it to explain not only why people confess to crimes they do not commit but also how insurers managed to institutionalize fraudulent claims handling practices in the aftermath of hurricanes.
What Kahneman describes is known as heuristics and that concept underpins the legal profession and our justice system. Evidently Kahneman explains how it leads to arbitrary and/or plain silly outcomes in the courtroom to where even the insurance defense bar can understand it.
The bottom line folks is “rational” economists are dinosaurs walking.
sop