The rationality described by Austrian economists is not only radically different from the way that humans actually act - in my opinion, anyway, it's not even all that rational. The "homo economicus" behaves more like a badly programmed robot than any complex biological animal, humans included. It certainly behaves nothing like a healthy human, who is capable of the evolutionarily-developed capacity for empathy, and whose actions are profoundly embedded in the context of a culture with a history. Homo economicus behaves a bit like a sociopath, though even a sociopath is more human and more rational than this strange, cold, alien, artificial intelligence.
Perhaps the aspect that is most gallingly inappropriate and bizarre - indeed, unrealistic - about homo economicus as a model for human behavior is this notion of "revealed preference". The desires of homo economicus are completely on the surface, completely unambiguous. Unlike real humans, they have no interior world, no conflicting emotions. Everything is quantified: your actions reveal that you want one thing "more" than another.
What the Austrian model fails to understand is that outward behavior typically is not identical to our deepest, most important longings, but usually only reflects conformity to outward, superficial societal expectations.
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