Which I guess is your point in a way a la “as-if”, I’m just saying I found these chapters interesting wrt to this discussion.

Yeah I guess I’m saying it’s fuzzy how much is “substantively” rational choice-esque and how much is just a choice amongst a set of basically isomorphic models which we chose the most “rational choice looking” one.

Yes, I think the advantage is when you change assumptions in the most limited way possible, it’s easier to see “where the bodies are buried” wrt key assumptions. But as Spiegler says their could’ve been a more ambitious reinvention of the econ theory paradigm we’ve overlooked. Tradeoffs.

Reskeets are not endorsements, I have no skin in this! Ex post it seems to be the way we’ve decided to do things, for better or worse.

the link appears broken if I try to share it but the pdf is freely accessible if you google the title+”pdf” :)

Also check out Rani Spiegler’s discussion of this in chapter 4 & especially 5 of his recent book “The Curious Culture of Economic Theory”, in a rather frank discussion of how the field chose to shoehorn non-rational phenomenon into maximization frameworks.