The Social Security number game is a trick called "anchoring manipulation" that's borrowed from experimental psychology, and for some reason it makes otherwise rational people do irrational things. For no logical reason, students with Social Security digits higher than 50 said they would pay nearly twice as much as those with digits less than 50, even when reminded that this pricing system was completely arbitrary.

When presented with what was described as a higher-rated, "rare" bottle of wine, however, they still valued it much higher than the average bottle. Loewenstein and company called this combination of sensible relative prices built up from arbitrary valuations "coherent arbitrariness."

This is a long way of saying that people don't price things according to some inherent value set down by natural law, but instead on that object's relative value. Unless they've done their research before walking into a store, most people don't really know a product's exact worth. But they do respond quickly -- "robustly," writes Loewenstein -- if it's brought to their attention that they're getting an awfully good deal.

My wife may have known that these wines were ridiculously cheap, but she admitted later that she didn't really know how much they were inherently worth. And even though she went in expecting to save only 30 percent on a single case of wine, she found herself caught up in a frenzy to save 20 percent more by buying an additional two cases. Such is the uncommonly strong power of a good sale. At least we can live with the comfort that our irrationally free-spending lives are logical in the eyes of economic behaviorists.

But there is a bigger picture to my story of impulsive behavior. Consumer spending drives two-thirds of the U.S. economy. That's a whole lot of irrational decisions driving the fate of the stock market, the retail economy and the future of our jobs. And retailers and marketers are ruthless about exploiting this illogic through pricing tricks that drive people to buy. It's just that we aren't savvy about what they're doing psychologically. And the behaviorists have shown that even when we're shown how the tricks work, we continue to fall for them again and again.

We are not the completely rational beings that traditional economics tells us we are. Believing that we -- the economy at large, and the stock market in particular -- are supremely rational puts too much faith in our abilities to make the right choices. For example, some behaviorists argue that important economic decisions like 401K investing should become automatic deductions by default for new employees rather than opt-in decisions, precisely because people logically and all too predictably procrastinate or fail to sign up for the programs, even when it's in their own long-term self-interest.

Imagine a not-so-distant future of a nation of procrastinators turned into penniless retirees under Bush's plan to privatize Social Security and leave pensions to the whims of stock-market investing. And now thanks to Enron, there's the added lesson that even if you do manage to sock money away in your company's 401K account, your good deeds can still be trumped by your top executives' desire for instant gratification -- aka greed.

But in truth, the long-term future is an awfully abstract concept, and buying wine is a tangible short-term vote for living life in the present. It's a balm for our fragile recessionary sanity that the behaviorists have come along to say that we aren't supremely rational beings, and we shouldn't expect ourselves to be. Because after all, "In the long run we are all dead," wrote economist John Maynard Keynes.

I'll drink to that.

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