Mainstream economists everywhere exhibit an "irrational passion for dispassionate rationality." Behavioral economists, and long-time critic of mainstream economics suggests that people in mainstrean economic models "can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM#s Big Blue, and exercise the will power of Mahatma Gandhi," with a view that economists# view of homo sapiens is simply wrongheaded. Indeed, Thaler and other behavioral economists and psychology have documented a variety of ways in which real-world people fall far short of mainstream economists' idealized economic actor, perfectly rational homo economicus. Behavioral economist Daniel Ariely has concluded that real- world people not only exhibit an array of decision-making frailties and biases, they are "predictably irrational," a position now shared by so many behavioral economists, psychologists, sociologists, and evolutionary biologists that a defense of the core rationality premise of modedrn economics is demanded. In Predictably Rational? In Search of Defenses of Rational Behavior in Economics, Richard McKenzie, a professor of economics and management at the University of California, Irvine, takes up the challenge to defend mainstream economics# core premise, but in unexpected ways. He first takes readers through a review of the intellectual history of the motivational premise undergirding economics from Adam Smith through to Alfred Marshall to Frank Knight, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Gary becker. Professor McKenzie finds ample criticisms of the rationality premise within the intellectual history of the discipline. He also surveys the relevant literature in evolutionary biology and neurobiology and neujroeconomics, which fortifies the behavioralists# criticisms that "perfect rationality" is not tenable. Nonetheless, in spite of the evidence and arguments, Professor Mckenzie mounts defenses of continued use of the rationality premise on count