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PONTIFICIAE ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARVM SCRIPTA VARIA -

Here, once more, traditional theory has taken up only a limited
case to study. It has always assumed that individuals know
their preferences perfectly and behave rationally. There is of
course a justification for such an approach in a static environment,
 but no longer in a dynamic world. We do positively
know that human beings are not omniscient, and that the way
in which they come to know new situations is through experience.
 They may know reasonably well the problems faced
already in the past; for they have had the opportunity of
trying and experimenting with different solutions. But if a
new situation arises, they have first to learn how to deal with
it, and the decisions they make the first time may not be the
best ones — they are tentative decisions in order to learn.
Now, if real per-capita income is continually rising, each consumer
 enjoys an extra amount of income to spend in each
successive period, which indeed puts him in a new situation.
Especially when incomes become high, to pretend the consumer
 makes the best decision — according to his preferences —
about the extra income he has just obtained is unreasonable.
He does not know his preferences at that high level of income,
because he never experienced them before — he has to learn
them. This is not all. As time goes on, the quality of old
goods may change, and the price structure may also change;
while old needs may be satisfied with better (superior) goods.
This means that the consumers’ learning activity is a process
required over the whole range of his preferences. As a conclusion,
 I should like to propose here to enlarge our views of
consumers’ behaviour and to complete the traditional postulate
« the consumer is a rational being » with the more general one
« the consumer is a learning being ». The latter is more general
 because it can be regarded as including the former as a
particular case: the case of a stationary economic system. (In
such a system technology and income have, by hypothesis,
always been constant through time, which means that all learning
 activity has been completed already in the past. Since

T10] Pasinetti - pag. 64