Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your conclusion is absolutely correct. The explanation is that Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape. In the modern environment, it's easy to forget that our brains did not actually evolve to deal with money, let alone the high-tech infrastructure of a modern corporation. They evolved to dominate other apes on the African savanna. But evolution does not document…
Lately I have the vague opinion that half-baked scientific reasoning and the tendency to come up with evolutionary just so stories is a horrible detriment to modern society. Humanity has come up with a reasonable way to interpret human behavior by human standards through the humanities. I feel content to evaluate other humans by human standards rather than speculating on how he’s actually highly adapted for the Afric…
There are myriad ways that humans tend to make bad decisions in the course of modern life. Psychology and evolutionary biology currently provide the best answer to "why".
If you want to understand yourself well enough to be able to avoid having marketers and advertisers make your most important life choices for you, or want to raise your children to think critically about statements they hear even when it means overcoming confirmation bias, or want to think about how to help society escape detrimental Nash equilibria that lead catastrophic global warming, a deep and accurate understanding of human behavior seems to me to be clearly better than simply operating under the wildly simplistic assumption that people always behave rationally in the pursuit of well defined goals.