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