This portmanteau utility function raised an objection that had long been a subject of discussion in the methodology literature: Wasn’t “irrationality” in the neoclassical lexicon an oxymoron, since the moment one formalized it in the utility function, didn’t it effectively get subsumed under some perverse version of meta-rationality? Richard Posner, an especially perceptive critic from the right, pushed this point home in a review of Animal Spirits.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 732