decisions, decisions

unrelated photo of my niece in the Florida Keys, shot through my Blu-Blockers

"Over the past generation, economists have paid increasing attention to the importance of norms and rules in economic life.  Ronald Heiner pointed out that as rational human beings we simply cannot make rational decisions at every point in day-to-day life.  Were we to do so, our behavior would be both unpredictable and subject to paralysis as we perpetually calculated whether we should tip the waiter, stiff the cab driver of his fare, or put away a different amount of your paycheck every month in your retirement account.  In fact, it is rational for people to impose simplifying rules on their own behavior, even if these rules do not always yield correct decisions in every circumstance because decisionmaking is in itself costly and often requires information that is unavailable or faulty." ("Social Capital" by Francis Fukuyama in Culture Matters)

My Global Perspectives professor gives his definition of culture as the thing that filters out 99% of the random data we encounter on a daily basis, so that we can make active decisions on the last 1%.