Virtually all of the assumptions built into it about human beings and the world are false:

• It assumes that people are self-interested. Well, yes and no.
• It assumes that there is a common scale of value on which everything can be compared. There isn’t.
• It assumes that we can attach meaningful probabilities to outcomes. Sometimes we can, but life is not a roulette wheel or a series of coin flips, in which probabilities are well defined.

If we are to move toward societies of greater opportunity and justice, we need a more expansive notion of what it means to be rational than we will ever get from economics.

via Barry Schwartz.