Ben McKenzie

My dad is a lawyer.

It was talked about.

So I was like, I'll just study things I'm interested in that could plausibly prepare me for law school.

Okay, so potentially you were in a law school.

Maybe.

So that's the irony is I think a lot of people think of economics as this sort of dry mathematical science.

It certainly has a mathematical side to it.

But of course, if economics is the study of how people behave in an economy and interact with each other on an individual level and also on a collective level in group settings and societal settings, it is really in some senses the study of human behavior.

Everything's a market.

But also, I was always interested in the behavioral economics, which is the study of how human beings actually interact.

Because there's a couple of schools of thought and there's a sort of a more traditional economics that basically takes this huge presumption that everyone is a rational actor.

They are maximizing their utility, which is this wonderfully vague phrase.

And then you ask, what's the utility?

It's like, well, it's...

whatever they did, that's rational.

It's sort of like a- Non-falsifiable.

Yeah, it sort of like circles back on itself.

And behavioral economists poke holes in that all the time.

Yes.

Because we do all sorts of things that aren't quote unquote rational.