From: Sent: To: Cc: Subject: Attachments: Joi It Thursday, January 2, 2014 5:57 PM Re: signature.asc Thanks Jeffrey. Jeffrey was talking about you in the context of Bounded =ationality which relates to an ongoing conversation I've been having =ith him. I was digging through old email and I found the following. Now that I'm at MIT, I'd love to reconnect and see how your thoughts =ave evolved in the last decade and share some of my thoughts. - Joi On Mar 23, 2004, at 9:53 PM, rote: > Dear Joi, • Unsurprisingly, it has taken me a long time to try to construct a > more precise model of tradeoffs between money, energy, information, > love, etc. (Unfortunately, I have lots of work to do for my day job.) > Here you go, though. Much of this will be impressionistic. I'll flag > with a * the things that are mathematically precise or can be made so > (I won't put in any math, though!). > I would like to make more precise the part of our conversation that > had to do with narrative. You made the point that classical economics > is based on a rather bald and unconvincing narrative (to paraphrase > Bertie Wooster) that the only thing that is good is money, and the > only thing better than money is more money. > Only a very few obsessed people operate with this principle as the > =ole basis for their narrative, however. Most folks construct a > narrative =n which to base their behavior out of a variety of > different principles =nd 'sub-narratives.' (Mind you, I'm a little > uncomfortable with the word 'narrative' itself: I may have mentioned > to you during our =onversation that I was negatively impressed with a > remark that Edward Said once =ade to the effect that The problem of > the Palestinian people is that they don't have a narrative.' Perhaps > more to the point, they don't have food or land or schools.) • But the stories we tell ourselves do form the basis for the decisions > we make: this is where classical economists fall down i