"I Wish I Were Rich and Dumb": Involuntary Deal Calculation and the Willingness to Pay for Everyday Ignorance

Rational inattention theories say people should stop paying attention to small savings once money is cheap enough compared to the cost of thinking about them. But some people can't stop. They notice the better deal, work out the unit price, and keep replaying the money they could have saved, long after a trivial purchase is over. I propose a simple model in which noticing everyday deals is partly involuntary. Noticing has a fixed mental cost, made up of effort plus rumination, and its benefit is a small saving valued at the marginal utility of money. If noticing can't be switched off, people above a certain wealth level lose from their own attentiveness. They should therefore be willing to pay to be rid of it, which I test with a hypothetical "ignorance pill" that removes the habit for good. The model gives five propositions. Ignoring small deals becomes optimal above a wealth threshold. Above that threshold, involuntary noticing is a net loss, which I call the calculator's curse. Willingness to pay for ignorance rises with calculating tendency and with wealth. These two are complements, so the wish to be "dumb" is strongest among calculators who can afford it. Below the threshold, nobody wants the pill, which makes ignorance a luxury good. The paper carries the deliberate-ignorance and information-avoidance literatures from big decisions into small, everyday ones, and links them to research on maximizing. I end with a preregistrable experiment to test the propositions. Turkish version included (Türkçe sürüm ektedir): Balcilar-2026-Rich-and-Dumb-TR.pdf