The core concept of rational choice is what each undergraduate of economics is introduced to in one of the first sessions of their economics course at university. So was I. My fellow students and I sat in one of those large lecture halls in Heidelberg, enthusiastic toward that which was about to come. The teacher enters, starts the class with telling us about consumer demand, a theory grounded in the idea that people’s choices can be modeled via indifference curves. After studying the properties of those curves for several weeks, we concluded that thinking about behavior in this way had up until then been the most puzzling thing we had ever heard of. In German high school, the subject of economics is usually absent. When I began my degree program in economics at the university, I was excited to hopefully be able to critically engage one day in the public and political discourse about economics and the economy by making use of tools provided by the field. My idealistic self was convinced (and potentially still is) that one could only change the system from within, ideally using the language that a system and its proponents use themselves. Yet, I quickly felt that I might fail with economics. The technical language to model behavior in terms of consistent choices, rational preferences, and indifference curves was counterintuitive and so different from everyday discourse that I had a hard time translating. During my first semesters, I did not see any way to connect the two and almost gave up on the subject entirely. Understanding the basics in my first microeconomics class as an undergraduate has been a concern of mine ever since. This book is the result of finding one way to take this puzzlement as a starting point for making a serious attempt to better understand what economists are up to.