Anyone who likes my blog should at least check out Australian economist John Quiggin of Crooked Timber fame. Often, I find his posts contain well-phrased gems of things I’ve spent years not finding the right words for. Today’s brief CT post on economic imperialism (i.e. the rational choice craze in Political Science and Sociology) has an excellent example:

First, most rational actor models assume that “rationality” can be represented as “maximization of self-interest”. This assumption is either false or vacuous. Those committed to egoistic rationality tend, when challenged, to oscillate between the two definitions, in much the manner of the function sin (1/x) as x approaches zero.

Oh, snap!