i don't think objectivists would deny the prevalence of behavior patterns inconsistent with any utility valuation (not that mathematicizing it is their style), they'd just label them as evil, anti-life, etc.
I almost put in a disclaimer saying that for all I know Atlas Shrugged deals with human nature outside of marginal utility, cause I ain't read no Rand.
It was the "economics is the basis for all human interaction" bit that got me.
Actually, (and Beardo almost definitely doesn't realize this), he's kind of repeating an academic meme, where economists influenced by the Chicago school apply their rational actor models to all sorts of non-traditional subjects. Freakonomics, for example.
There's probably some potential value in doing that, but I get the impression that it's 90% sloppy intellectual poaching.
"Nice field of study you have there. I bet I could do it better. Just give me some indefensible base assumptions and a calculator, and presto! Now that's sociology!"
edit: Ha! Found a Paul Krugman post I was looking for.
Nordhaus, among other things, wrote a hostile review of Jay Forrester’s World Dynamics, which led to the later Limits to Growth. The essential story there was one of hard-science arrogance: Forrester, an eminent professor of engineering, decided to try his hand at economics, and basically said, “I’m going to do economics with equations! And run them on a computer! I’m sure those stupid economists have never thought of that!” And he didn’t walk over to the east side of campus to ask whether, in fact, any economists ever had thought of that, and what they had learned. (Economists tend to do the same thing to sociologists and political scientists. The general rule to remember is that if some discipline seems less developed than your own, it’s probably not because the researchers aren’t as smart as you are, it’s because the subject is harder.)
As a result, the study was a classic case of garbage-in-garbage-out: Forrester didn’t know anything about the empirical evidence on economic growth or the history of past modeling efforts, and it showed. The insistence of his acolytes that the work must be scientific, because it came out of a computer, only made things worse.
