The purpose of the paper is to explore, from an assessment
viewpoint, the following ideas. Economics, as a social science,
has always considered sets of individuals with assumed characteristics
(namely, the level of knowledge), although in an implicit
way, in most of the cases. In this sense, an influential
approach in economics assumed that society, as a global
set of individuals, was characterized by a certain level
of knowledge, that, indeed, could be associated with one
of its representative agents. In fact, an attentive recall
of the evolution of these matters in economics will immediately
recognize that, since the very first economic models of
the government, it was assumed that the level of knowledge
of society, represented by a set of voters, was not the
same as one of the agents elected, i.e., the government.
The irrelevance of the difference in the level of knowledge
of economic agents was soon abandoned after some seminal
works of Hayek and Friedman. More recently, the viewpoint
of economics has changed, by focusing on the characteristics
(e.g., knowledge) of individuals, who may interact in the
subsets of the society. Given the close connection with
the assumed level of knowledge, it is clearly relevant from
this point of view, to distinguish adaptive behavior from
the rational one by people, as well as the full rational
from the bounded rationality behavior. Quite recent developments
in the economics of knowledge, i.e., the so-called learning
models, have been considered as more realistic approaches
to model the process by which individuals acquire knowledge,
for instance, from other individuals who are, themselves,
acquiring knowledge.
Economics, as a social science, has always considered sets
of individuals with assumed characteristics, namely, the
level of knowledge, although in an implicit way in most
of the cases. In this sense, an influential approach in
economics assumed that society, as a global set of individuals,
was characterized by a certain level of knowledge that,
indeed, could be associated with one of its representative
agents. In fact, an attentive recall of the evolution of
these matters in economics will immediately recognize that,
since the very first economic model of the government, it
was assumed that the level of knowledge of society, represented
by a set of voters, was not the same as one of the agents
elected, i.e., the government—this fact being evident,
for instance, at the time horizon under consideration. These
questions are subject to a succinct analysis later in this
paper.
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