Thinking like an economist: assume a can opener.

Checking the Wikipedia article on the Gricean maxims, I find the interesting comment that:

“Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit.” (Bach 2005).

The maxims can thus be seen as an application of the economic approach to understanding behavior—the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to choose the best way of achieving them. The objective is communication, the maxims describe how best to do it, and a listener dealing with potential ambiguity in speech—for example ambiguity in the meaning of “most”—can sometimes resolve it by assuming that the speaker is using the word with a meaning that achieves that objective. Where what is relevant is which candidate won an election, “most” is likely to mean a majority or even a plurality: “The party that got most votes was …”. Where what is relevant is whether there is a substantial minority for whom a statement is not true, “most” is likely to mean an overwhelming majority: “Most of my students understand English, so there is no need to provide translations of the readings into other languages.”

It gets more complicated when competing objectives are considered.

One can carry the argument one step further. If, instead of offering the norm violator an easy out, I loudly upbraid him, he will be less likely to quietly concede his error . But, since I will have raised the cost to him of cutting into line, he may be less likely to do it again. If my objective were the general good rather than my own private good, that might be the sensible choice, deterring future offenses against other people at some cost in current unpleasantness. In my friend’s view, the reason to be courteous was the benevolent desire to maintain social harmony. But courtesy, at least in this case, causes me to sacrifice the general good for my private good—precisely the behavior that economics predicts.

Sometimes I'm for others, sometimes I'm for myself, timing matters. It seems to me that the economic way of thinking fails to deal with the complex trade-offs each person makes on nearly every decision. A person doesn't make the same decision every time even when the situations seem identical since the person's state of mind is in constant flux. This isn't an argument that economic thinking is wrong or useless, just that it has limitations. It may help explain why something happened but isn't very useful for predicting futures. It's a hindsight scope that blurs and glitches when used for foresight.