One thing that's surprised me about econ grad school is how unimportant the rationality assumption of econ seems. It's such a fun thing to attack if you're some kind of nerd and want to show everyone how annoyingly nerdy you are (aren't we all?), but once you get down to business, there really are bigger fish to fry. Complete markets, homogeneity of agents, symmetric information, all seem to have profound consequences when one relaxes them, and one can see these consequences in stylized models.
Anyway, I've thought of a nice one-liner for showing how much more annoyingly nerdy I am than any other annoyingly nerdy nerd and I thought I should jot it down here for everyone including myself to ignore:
Everyone knows Newton's laws are wrong. That doesn't mean that using them to model a ballistic missile is silly.
Ok, I gotta polish that up a bit.
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