&quot;My god the rational agent model is so bloody stupid but it makes calculations feasible, that&#x27;s literally the only reason we use it nowadays ...&quot;<p>I find myself surprisingly often having to remind people that a world in which 64GB of RAM, 16 cores, a dozen terabytes of storage, and programming environments that let people harness all of these things, can all come out to a budget within reach of a middle-class individual who really wants it, is a VERY recent development, one still sinking in to the rest of the world. Rational agents have really always been known to be false, but good luck in 1980 getting an economist to write any sort of simulation of 100 million agents doing something slightly irrational to see what happens. They&#x27;re going to face some pretty stiff competition for the supercomputer time that would represent... and the supercomputer in question would still be grossly underpowered compared to modern systems, so it would take some <i>clever</i> programming too.<p>Even as clock speeds may have frozen, even in the last 5 years there has been a noticeable drop in the price of computing power.<p>Beating up past economists for using the rational agent model is like getting beaten by people 50 years in our future for not just using AIs to solve problems, just because the phone in their pocket is populated by a couple dozen human-intelligent entities running locally, to say nothing of the civilization in &quot;the cloud&quot;.