Now, it is interesting that this article starts off crediting the 'work', of "Nobel Prize winner", for his, supposedly ground-breaking work entitled "A Theory of Dating", to wit:

"Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker laid the foundations back in 1973 with his two-part article "A Theory of Marriage." Becker imagined society as an immense cocktail party with rational-minded daters searching for the most desirable partner who would have them."

At first I thought he was talking about John Rawls' seminal book, published in 1971 -- two years before Mr. Becker had a remarkably similar idea -- entitled "A Theory of Justice". Mr. Rawls' book was such a tour de force when it was published that anyone in ANY field of academics would have had to been stone cold deaf and dumb not to have known about it.

In his book, Mr. Rawls, first, came up with the concept of what he called the "Original Position" (not that kind of position) in which purely rational beings, temporarily stepping behind what Rawls, in a stroke of genius, called the "veil of ignorance", would, based purely on unbiased principles of rationality, without no knowledge of, and no regard for, their own individual preferences (those preferences and predilections they would have once the "veil" were lifted), choose the principles of law and justice to govern their social, political and moral intercourse.

Now, I've not read Mr. Becker's "A Theory of Dating". So, perhaps he does give all the credit for the idea behind and title of his work, to Mr. Rawls.

I'd be interested whether anyone had read both Mr. Rawls' and Mr. Becker's work can comment.

i have indeed read both and i think you're applying it to different fields of work.

rawls did indeed have the veil of ignorance idea. but he applied to to legislation and public policies. rawls was not interested in why people date one another, but in what laws are just.

becker went the opposite route with his dating piece. he wasn't concerned with politics in the usual sense (surprisingly), but with the everyday lives of people.

to be absolutely clear, you're quite right that they're both "rational choice" theorists. but rational choice was not an idea original to either man.