Rationality and entropic forces

An anonymous commenter hit upon what may be a key point in a unifying picture of human behavior and market forces. Entropic forces would be indistinguishable from some plausible set of human decisions. You could say that atoms experience an entropic force to diffuse into a volume or you could say that the atoms want to diffuse into the volume (they derive utility from expanding into the volume, but it is a diminishing marginal utility that reaches equilibrium when the atoms are uniformly distributed across it).

For atoms, that seems silly. For humans, it doesn't. It gives us a sense of agency when we are being led (individually) by forces beyond our control, at least in the information theory picture.

Scott Sumner says that people underestimate rationality of economic agents:

Economists and non-economists also underestimate just how rational people really are, at least in aggregate. How much they understand about the world. And how efficiently markets aggregate information. And they do so because people don't seem very smart, or very rational. As always in economics, appearances can be deceiving.

However, we can interpret this as people's irrationality being irrelevant (the core common sense is right -- people don't seem hyper-rational), and their apparent rationality with respect to economic theory as being the result of information-theoretic entropic forces beyond their control.

We appear rational in economic theory only because we are adrift and carried along by the rational invisible hand.