Thinking about 'aggregate rational behaviour'

I realize that I'm tetchy about the phrase. I see 'rational' as situationally defined, as variable and involved in (1) perceived information about individual choices, and (2) shared cultural understanding and categories —the available repertoire of discourse. I don't find the idea of &objective rationality congenial, and prefer a subjective view that recognizes multiple rationalities.

Here's how Duck Duck Go summarizes:

Aggregate rational behavior refers to the collective decision-making processes of individuals in an economy, where their choices are assumed to maximize utility based on available information. This concept is central to rational choice theory, which posits that individuals act in their own best interest, influencing overall economic outcomes.

Aggregate behavior, which locates it within the discipline of Economics, intellectual territory I've avoided and tended to disdain. That attitude is surely worth examining for its origins and reach, which would take us deep into the weeds of my notion of Anthropology.

"...individuals act in their own best interest" seems an oversimplification of the vast complexity of human motivation, something we'll encounter under 'Boasian cultural particularism' as fingered by Marvin Harris in The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968), a book with which I've had a fraught relationship.

Here's what I wrote on 3vii26:

...I've been ignoring Homo economics for too long, indeed disdaining its frameworks and uses, and finding my pleasures in Ecologies and Systems views, in spacetime and in /lexicon, where I've spent years gathering nuts while I may, often avoiding the 'rational' in favor of the symbolic and the surreal, and pretty much always considering the not-'objective' in favor of the subjective and the various. From the perspective of 'aggregate rationality', mine is a frivolous enterprise, a butterfly collecting activity rather than serious theorizing, indeed, mostly eschewing the serious.

And on 5vii26:

...the anthropologist in me quibbles that 'rationality' can't be objectively measured, that there's not ONE rationality, but many, and they are entangled with Culture, in ways that only an anthropologist would presume to study.

6vii26

The frameworks and ideas and paradigms I'm most interested in as armature for my World Model don't include 'rationality' in either the individual or the aggregate formation. I've been less concerned with why people do what they do individually and collectively than with the space-and-time patterns that doing produces

1vii26

"aggregate rationality" links collected