I still haven't yet finished that old paper by Gary Becker, but I hope to get back to it soon, and see whether or not I treated his ideas fairly in The Social Atom. In the paper, he's trying to argue that economists can make much weaker assumptions about the rationality of people, and still derive some of the key theorems of economic theory. I have my doubts, but I'm not quite ready yet to lay out why in detail.

One of the problems, I suspect, may hinge on the notion of fixed preferences. Economi