Critics often argue that government poverty programs perversely make the poor worse off by encouraging unemployment, out-of-wedlock births, and other 'social pathologies.' However, basic microeconomic theory tells us that you cannot make an agent worse off by expanding his choice set. The...

The paper presents a model of "rational irrationality," to explain why political and religious beliefs are marked not only by low information (as the notion of rational ignorance highlights), but also by systematic bias and high certainty. Being irrational--i.e. deviating from rational...