Debra Goldman's Postscript: For Whom the Sell Tolls Imagine the consumer as amnesiac. Every time a purchase is made, it's like the first time. No values or hopes or previous history shapes her choices. Instead, she wanders the aisles, a monad making ratio

Ridiculous, of course. Yet for two centuries, that’s exactly how economists envisioned consumers when they thought about them at all. The problem? They did not know how to account for consumer taste, which was deemed too irrational to quantify. Then along came Gary S. Becker and his University of Chicago colleagues.