This is a great short article on the essential failing of rational choice philosophy, tracing it back, paradoxically, to a government funded program and the RAND Corporation. Who said that culture is not mutable?
Opinionator, NYT, June 19, 2011, John Mccumber
This form of individualism [rational] did not arise by chance. Alex Abella’s “Soldiers of Reason” (2008) and S. M. Amadae’s “Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy” (2003) trace it to the RAND Corporation, the hyperinfluential Santa Monica, Calif., think tank, where it was born in 1951 as “rational choice theory.