CoCos, Spinning a riff off of the "What Would Jesus Do?" campaign: What Would a Rational Actor Do? Here's where rational actor theory breaks down: When observers think they are in a better position than the actual actor to define that actor's acts as either "rational" or "irrational". The more rational view is that whatever an actor does is by definition rational, i.e. the result of myriad real-world cause-and-effect or stimulus-response arcs, and to the extent an observer finds an actor’s acts irrational the observer is in fact reporting only on the observer’s ignorance of some portion of those myriad real-world cause-and-effect, stimulus-response arcs. Most discussions of rational action seem to put the cart before the horse, begging the question of what is rational, illegitimately privileging the dominant competition narrative rather than trying to actually understand the forces that drive us to do what we do. Tangentially, I think the reason folks can get away with this confusion as to the actual subject of rational actor theory comes in turn from a conflation of money with utiles. Both are abstractions (save that we use paper or coins or credit, physical manifestations, to represent money) but they do not abstract the same things, as evidenced by the Lennon/McCartney lyric, "Money can't buy me Utiles". (Hm, something lost in the translation there.) rl --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CooperationCommons" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CooperationCommons?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
