Two of the major assumptions in economic theory are that people seek their own self-interest and that they are rational actors. Neither of those assumptions are true for most people.
The other issue that is missed with those above assumptions is we anchor our perception of the near future based on the recent past (pro-cyclical bias in both directions) AND our behavior is path dependent. A bank with a million loans on their books can have some of them go bad & still be fine, but if at any point an individual family is bankrupt they don't get an easy way to work their way around it as part of a portfolio or such. And they don't get the bailouts the big banks got.
And then there is the sanctity of contracts, and an attempt at (reasonably) enforcing justice equally which have both went in the trash.
The federal government requiring AIG to not sue Goldman Sachs for their fraud to receive a bailout that would in part flow through to Goldman Sachs at 100 cents on the dollar.
The Eric Holder memo about the impracticality of going after large criminal racketeers in the finance market guaranteed high finance learned nothing other than the wonders of socializing losses from the global recession they caused & were made whole on at the expense of the rest of society.
Even as recent as the past few years Wells Fargo was making millions of fake customer accounts, charging fees against them, and then sending people to collections for non-activity fees on an account the customer never even wanted, opened, or knew about until they started getting collections notices in the mail.
The shifting of the capital structure on the GM bailout where senior bondholders at the loss while some inferior positions on the capital structure were made whole.
The ever-changing online terms of service, forced bundling, offshoring coupled with non-competes for domestic employees & gag clauses in layoffs, etc.
There's basically no transparency in healthcare pricing.
