

RAND, Cold Warriors and the Failure of 'Rational Choice Philosophy' - bchjam
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/the-failure-of-rational-choice/?hp

======
dto1138
I'll tell you what's wrong with this article. McCumber tells us that
Americans' traditional demand for autonomy is really just a government
conspiracy cooked up by RAND. Okay all you NYT commenters nodding in agreement
---really, the clamor of the present-day Ugly American to repeal Obamacare and
reduce the tax burden and rein in the EPA and the Federal Reserve and
decriminalize marijuana---all these Americans groaning about the financial and
regulatory weight of the federal government and its increasing impingements on
our freedom---is actually also a GOVERNMENT conspiracy?

Folks, here we have a university professor who, may he delve into Hegel, Marx,
or Quine, rather unsurprisingly comes up with the same standard NYT lecture---
you know, the one about why Americans do not really WANT what they want (and
don't deserve it, anyway, because they're too self absorbed.) Oh, and besides,
W.V.O Quine criticized Rational Choice Theory. Now, WVO Quine was one of the
top ten minds of the 20th century, so it might seem portentous to cite his
authority here, however he seems to have been against many things that would
be dear to most readers of this paper, including public education. Here's a
wikipedia link:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Van_Orman_Quine#Politic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Van_Orman_Quine#Political_beliefs)

------
archgoon
Ayn Rand's ideas come from a propaganda campaign launched eight years after
she published the Fountainhead? No wonder rational choice theory is at odds
with quantum mechanics!

I'm sorry, but I cannot make heads nor tails out of what the author means by
"Rational Choice Philosophy" (which is apparently prescriptive) and how
exactly it is different from using rational choice theory (which is completely
descriptive) to model interactions of agents (rational or otherwise). I
certainly have no idea how to make sense of his claim that quantum mechanics
has some relation to the whole affair.

~~~
jgroch
"Ayn Rand's ideas come from a propaganda campaign launched eight years after
she published the Fountainhead?"

Yes, I have to wonder how much of "Rational Choice Theory/Philosophy"
originated at RAND. And I wonder even more, how much (that is little) of
modern individualism originated with Rational Choice Theory - contrary to the
main point of the article.

------
gaius
This is why people who are experts in field A should not get too carried away
pontificating in field B. Specifically, the opinion of a professor of Germanic
languages is no more nor less valid than any layperson, in the field of
economics.

------
iwwr
How does this

 _Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social
reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices._

connect to this

 _Wars have been and are still being fought to bring such freedom to Koreans,
Vietnamese, Iraqis, Grenadans, and now Libyans, with more nations surely to
come._

?

------
CamperBob
"The neat causality of rational choice ontology, always at odds with quantum
physics, was further jumbled by the environmental crisis, exposed by Rachel
Carson’s 1962 book “The Silent Spring,” which revealed that the causal effects
of human actions were much more complex, and so less predicable, than
previously thought."

Shades of the great postmodern philosopher Alan Sokal (
<http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/> ).

