Yuri Tulupenko wrote:  
We economists tend to understand choice as "rational choice", but  
consider the following definition by S.T.Coleridge: "...empirical  
phenomenon of the will, CHOICE". Now, St. Augustine considered the  
will to be superior to reason (and thus free). Augustinian economics  
(or anti-economics?) would have been a theory of choice, too, but how  
different from the rational-choice theory!   
  
  
  
I would like more explication.  I don't see the difference, only that   
Augustine has a broader understanding of human action that   
conventional economics.  "Rational Choice" theory has no rationality;   
it is a presumption that whatever people do (their behavior) is   
rational within some context.  Thus it simply takes an ex post   
perspective: whatever an individual does is "rational"--why else   
would they do it?  To then the calculus is simply to construct a set   
of "prices" or incentives, values, and resources so any similarly   
situated individual would act (behave, choose) in the same.    
Augustine was invoking an ex ante perspective, something internal to   
an individual, and invoking the capacity of individuals to choose, to   
exercise will, with reasoned or not.  But it seems to me that   
Augustinian economics thus subsumes conventional economics--it has a   
larger, more nuanced, more complex way of understanding and   
interpreting behavior.  
  
Fred Carstensen