MAPSS Lecture Notes: Rational Choice

What Rational Choice Isn't:

There are four major criticisms, or at least frequent ones, levied at the rational choice perspective by other social science disciplines: It is empirically implausible, that is it is not a thinly accurate prediction of how people behave. Rational choice cannot avoid charges of being so simplistic as it is little more than psychological reductivism. Some of the loudest proponents of rational choice happen to be free market champions, drawing suspicion in some quarters. And, finally, the same old crowd looking for ethnocentrism everywhere finds another witch to burn here.

The Roots of Rational Choice:

Rational choice took up the Enlightenment's challenge to try and understand the world around us. The social behaviors, structures, and phenomena existing around us arose from reasons comprehensible to human thought. Agentic understanding of the world where individual decisions of individual men and women create the world we inhabit. If the historical narrative is to shows a mirror to the past and representd the complexity of what we see, then rational choice uses a magnifying glass to see past myths and macronarratives to illuminate the altering microdynamics among men and women and how they order their incentives. Inspired by Newtonian motion, rational choicers erected a positivist model of social behavior that sought laws explaining behaviors that provided observers a form of predictive control. People are individually complex, but an informed observer can gauge their actions because institutions shape the choices available for their behavior. The goal of rational choice is to describe facts to allow a greater deal of individual freedom.

Rational choice is not laissez-faire, but many of its proponents can convincingly argue that men are smart enough to beat any regulatory regime. If one can incentivize properly and provide the right kind of information, then one can create a framework to aid people in making descisons.

A Rational View of Society:

Rational agents employ instrumental reasoning to select the best means for attaining their ends. Individual behavior, then, is purposeful or goal-oriented. It does not necessarily follow that people will pursue rational ends, only that the processes they follow for attaining them will be rational. Means are determined by a rational cost/benefit calculus. Agents always possess limited information and imperfect rationality. Rationalisty applied to the means to an end means an agent to is living in such a way, to the best of his knowledge, that is using the least possible input of his scarce resources per unit of valued output. We are not the mindless automatons of caricacature nor omniscient beings. Rational choice focuses on men and women forced to act with limited information and imperfect ratioanlity and an imperfect capacity to see the consequences of their actions.

Individuals are rational in that they are constrained utility seekers and logical and self-correcting in the means they employ are sensitive to changing incentives and constraints or improved information. To measure behavior, rational choicers have to exaggerate certain elements that provide traction as empircally numbered or accurate descriptions. In this sense, it is a generalizing, abstract, and stipulating perspective. Alterations in individual behavior are understood as reactions to evolving incentives and constraints, improved information and millions of other decisions.

Methodological Assumptions:

Rational choicers assign individuals agency in decision-making. The choices available exist only in contexts and any examination of the past requires serious historical work. Supra-individualism, that is groups, are combinational bodies or fictious entities reificated by privileged individuals to compel others to limit the choices available for action. Units of analysis, of course, can be larger than the individual and usually are for any ambitious scholar. One can gain predictive control by treating supra-individual actors as is if they were individual agents giving purposeful action to aims.

Postivie Implications:

There exists a methodology to allow one to create a world to maximize opportunities for rational cooperation through the use of intelligently-designed institutional schemes where private vices lead to public benefits and the aggregate welfare is improved as if by an invisible hand. It follows that thinkers can identify and remove any political, social, or economic impediments that make utility-promoting behaviors more difficult to pursue.

Negative Implications:

We are better positions to recognize where rationality breaks down and point out schemes where even the best designed institutional schemes will not lead to the best outcomes. Rational choice helps overcome issues like freerinding on public goods by devising rational institutions to secure the best outcome for all. It also helps understand the nature of collective action better, that is, why groups do not spontaneously appear.

Inventives and Constraints:

We can think of social problems through inventives and constraints, for instance, we can use the Leviathan model of a new sovereign authority to implement institutions. Or we can leave a small footprint through bottom up methodsm such as enhancing private liabilities so as to remedy destructive social behavior. You can create a new institutional scheme to solve political disputes or create new laws or tax breaks to easier secure justice. Informal sanctioning and norms can also be better understood as the product of rational action.

Methodological Preferences:

Emperical as well as formal, that is the use of mathematics to test abstract models. Its databases include quantifiable data .