Yes, that's what I would say. In fact I'd go much further than that (who could have guessed?) I think that human beings are hard-wired six ways from Sunday. Virtually all of our decisions have large unconscious, emotion-based components that come up from our evolved neural circuits (our hard-wiring) and implant themselves into our thought patterns before our consciousness even sees them. Most of the time our consciousness will not see them at all - it can't, because the mental patterns seem to be just part of our natural internal landscape.
This unconsciousness has implications well beyond the steep risk discount rates you refer to. Similar wiring also drives things like mate selection to social status seeking, and governs the expression of our beliefs as actions. There are, as far as I can tell, virtually no aspects of human thought or behavior that are free of this hard-wired input. And that emphatically includes purchasing decisions, which are largely based on the status content of the item being purchased. Advertisers know this, and manipulate our social status/self-esteem circuitry through the use of images, which bypass our rational minds and speak directly to our wiring. The motive of the sellers is, of course, to increase their own status by getting us to buy their products.
I don't think "market solutions" will work because of that. Sellers and buyers both want to maximize their status - the sellers by selling, the buyers by buying, and the more transactions take place the more status is enhanced on both sides. Everybody wins except those purchasers who can't afford what's on sale. That hits their self-esteem and diminishes their perceived social status, and their brains are wired to remove that distress by finding a way to obtain the status-fetish.
This is one of the reasons the concept of the growth economy is seen as good, natural and inevitable - the impulse for growth is buried deep in our unconscious, at the level of social status and self-esteem. Markets sell goods and services, but as far as our brains are concerned, they sell status. The general human desire for increased status is essentially a bottomless pit - we will take as much of it as we can buy or steal.
It all goes a long way toward explaining the behavior of "low-status" developing nations when they rub up against high-status industrial markets. I don't think we can short-circuit this impulse as long as markets exist - it's simply evolutionary psychology at work. IMO anyone who thinks we can tinker this Hydra into submission doesn't understand how the human brain works.
An introduction into the evolutionary psychology of social status:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201008/two-routes-social-status
And a scientific paper on the limited role of consciousness:
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00478/full
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