CONCEPT
Rational Addiction (Becker-Murphy)
Becker and Kevin Murphy's 1988 theory that addicts are rational — forward-looking agents whose current consumption reflects an internally consistent calculation that discounts future costs too heavily relative to present returns. The model that explains productive addiction with clinical precision.
Becker and Kevin Murphy's 1988 paper in the Journal of Political Economy argued that addicts are rational in the precise economic sense: forward-looking agents whose current consumption decisions reflect an assessment, however distorted, of future costs and benefits. The heroin addict injecting today is not failing to consider tomorrow — he is considering tomorrow and discounting it, weighting present benefit more heavily than future cost, in a calculation that is internally consistent even when its outcome is self-destructive. The mechanism is adjacent complementarity: current consumption increases the marginal utility of future consumption. Each cigarette makes the next more desirable. Each drink raises the baseline from which the next is evaluated. The agent does not drift into addiction. The agent optimizes into it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The model identifies the failure mode with clinical precision. The rational addict discounts future costs too heavily relative to present returns. The