Predicting behavior from rational self-interest offers firmer ground than assuming ideological irrationality.

Evidence

Many market economists have long asserted that eventually the people of the Eastern nations would give up on communist command economics. Interests must eventually trump an ideology that runs counter to interests. Market economists and rabid anti-Communists agreed that the ideology was counter to interests. But the economists had better (more generally applicable) grounds for understanding citizens of communist states than did the American far right because their conclusions were grounded in expectations of rationality, not expectations of irrationality. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 533

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘interests trump ideology’ prediction anticipates the reader’s Blindness arc: material self-preservation overwhelms the ideological veneer of cooperative order once monitoring collapses. — connects to: Modern avarice consists of stinginess toward others masked as rational self-interest; Empirical research can expose ideology by confronting subjective motives with objective economic facts — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1931; Central bank independence doctrine advanced economists’ professional self-interest as much as monetary policy — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 477 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angles toward an essay on why institutional-analysis frameworks beat moral-condemnation ones for forecasting regime collapse — the economist-vs-far-right contrast as a case study in predictive epistemology.