Working out or working in: the choice between wage labor and cash cropping in rural Belize

Convinced that economic choices in real life seldom approximate optimality, an increasing number of anthropologists have been studying the cognitive processes of individuals making decisions. This paper discusses and illustrates the advantages of an alternative "statistical behavior" approach to the investigation of economic decision making. Statistical analysis of how men in two Belizean villages allocate their labor-time between wage labor and cash cropping provides information that cannot be discovered via elicitation of "rules" governing choice. [economics, decision making, Belize]