ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we reconstruct the farmers’ behaviours as rational on the basis characteristically different from the usual expected-utilitarian perspective. Borrowing from Daniel Kahneman and other behavioural economists and cognitive psychologists, the chapter explains that the farmers have established the base for their action on its immediate consequences and on the tangible and intangible gains such actions have accumulated. That short-term-consequence-based action formula is a product of having survived the constant changes in their living environment where long-term policy goals have rarely seen their completion. It is a formula which liberates the farmers from the burden of uncertainties that having a long-term goal generates. With such an action formula, the farmers have the cost-benefit calculation of an action distinctly different from one by the professionals of narrowly defined expertise. Having more than one disabled child is attributable not to the AO families’ ignorance but to their calculation where having even a disabled child may be more valuable than not having tried to have any at all. This short-term-consequence-based action leaves a minimal margin for encouraging action by promoting the action’s ultimate goal, which may lie in an unforeseeable future.