What can reason (or more broadly, thinking) do for us and what can't it do? This is the question examined by Herbert A. Simon, who received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering work on decision-making processes in economic organizations." The ability to apply reason to...

Economics, which has traditionally been concerned with what decisions are made rather than with how they are made, has more and more reason to interest itself in the procedural aspects of decision, especially to deal with uncertainty, and more generally, with nonequilibrium phenomena. A number...