Second Thoughts on Economics Rules

When I was a graduate student at Princeton I used to hang out with a group of fellow students who were economic theorists. They were good at both thinking hard and drinking hard! After a couple of beers, I would start bugging them about the models we were being taught. Why do we focus so much on the perfectly rational individual even though real people do not seem to behave quite that way? (This was before the behavioral revolution obviously.) Shouldn’t we be paying a wee bit more attention to disequilibrium, in addition to equilibrium? Why do our models exclude social and institutional features without which markets could not work? Why do we emphasize math so much and disregard things that cannot be easily quantified?