To: ississ ail.com] Cc: Fran: of to Sent: Thur 1/2/2014 5:57:08 PM Subject: Re: signature asc Thanks Jeffrey. Jeffrey was talking about you in the context of Bounded Rationality which relates to an ongoing conversation I've been having with 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 have evolved in the last decade and share some of my thoughts. - Joi On Mar 23, 2O04, at 9:53 PM, wrote: > 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 sole > basis for their narrative, however. Most folks construct a narrative on > which to base their behavior out of a variety of different principles and > 'sub-narratives.' (Mind you, I'm a little uncomfortable with the word > 'narrative' itself: I may have mentioned to you during our conversation > that I was negatively impressed with a remark that Edward Said once made > 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 in > think